Orbx has taken to their community forums to share their development roadmap for 20201. The roadmap covers products such as landmarks city packs, aircraft and true earth packages for X-Plane, Microsoft Flight Simulator as well as P3D.

Orbx has been following many other developers who are shifting the majority of their development focuses to Microsoft Flight Simulator. As a result of this, simulators such as X-Plane and P3D rarely make an appearance on the roadmap.

Landmarks City Packs

The roadmap was opened with an extensive list of all the landmarks city packs in production for Microsoft Flight Simulator. The packs stretch from each side of the earth with packs in the sunny Melbourne and Cape Town to the Irish city of Dublin.

Below is a full list of landmarks city pack announced in the roadmap:

• Auckland, New Zealand
• Cape Town, South Africa
• Cairo, Egypt
• Dubai, UAE
• Dublin, Ireland
• Frankfurt, Germany
• Honolulu, Oahu, USA
• Melbourne, Australia
• Mumbai, India
• Panama Canal and Panama City
• Yokohama, Japan

Also touched upon in this section of the announcement were new Regional Packs, again for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Although no detail has been given on these new packs, it is assumable that they will be comparable to True Earth packages without orthoimagery, due to Microsoft Flight Sim already featuring live-streamed ortho, removing the need for True Earth-like packages.

Below are the Regional Packs announced:

• Canary Islands
• Northern England
• Scotland

True Earth

A single new True Earth region for X-Plane was announced, this being “TrueEarth Southern Spain”. No previews nor details of the True Earth Region were provided so far.

Also announced was True Earth Eastern Alps for Prepar3D 4+ only, a preview of which can be seen below.

Airports

A hoast of new airports were announced in the roadmap. Again, these announcements mostly focussed on Microsoft Flight Simulator, although, three new conversions were announced for X-Plane.

Airports announced, being done by in-house teams are as follows:

• KBOI Boise International (P3D)
• KBUR Hollywood Burbank (XPL)
• KCRW Chuck Yeager (MSFS)
• KPBI Palm Beach (P3D & MSFS)
• LDSP Split Airport (P3D & MSFS)
• LIEO Olbia (XPL)
• LKPR Prague (P3D & MSFS)

Also announced were projects being done by Orbx Indie developers:

• KAVX Catalina for MSFS (Ken & Tim)
• KVNY Van Nuys for P3D & MSFS (Matteo)
• LIPH Treviso for MSFS (Matteo)
• SBSP São Paulo for MSFS (Matteo)
• ESSB Stockholm Bromma for MSFS & P3D (Marcus)

Also announced was Essendon Airport (YMEN) for X-Plane, Microsoft Flight Simulator and Prepar3D. The airport is the home to Orbx and is celebrating 100 years of operation this year. Orbx stated that they are working with the management team of the airport to “bring you this airport in its full glory”.

Orbx Aircraft

Finishing off the roadmap was a new aircraft from Orbx. The aircraft is a slightly more abstract one, being the Edgley Optica.

The aircraft features an extremely unique bubble canopy which “provides an amazing 270 degrees panoramic vision and almost vertical downward vision”.

A low total of 22 have been manufactured over the years with some still being operated across the globe.

Orbx says their rendition has been “lovingly crafted with a high attention to detail and will come with some representation of real world skins including some of our own favourite custom designs”

The full Orbx 2021 Roadmap can be read on the Orbx Forums.

Threshold will be sure to keep you up-to-date with all developments on Orbx Projects.