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XRoads

XRoads is a scenery library for X-Plane 11 & 12 that hides standard road polygons in Ortho4XP orthophotos, making the actual roads from satellite images visible.

Background

Features

  • Transparent roads: Hides road polygons from OSM databases, particularly for ZL17+ orthophotos
  • Selective display: Bridges, highways, expressways, and railway tracks remain visible
  • AI vehicle speed: Reduced to 70% (adjustable via the -v parameter) for more realistic traffic conditions
  • Automatic library.txt: Enables targeted control of transparent roads
  • Autogen fallback: In areas without ortho tiles, standard roads remain visible

Value in Flight Simulation

With ortho scenery at zoom level 17 or higher, the roads in the satellite imagery are detailed enough that the autogen road polygons overlaid by X-Plane become distracting — they often sit slightly offset from the real roads. XRoads solves this by making the overlaid polygons transparent. Bridges and highways are preserved, as they are often hard to distinguish in satellite imagery.

Installation

Download: XRoads

Compiling on Linux

XRoads is distributed as source code and needs to be compiled on Linux. Prerequisites are make and a C compiler:

sudo apt install build-essential

Then in the XRoads directory:

make xroads

The compiled binary is copied into the X-Plane base directory and executed there — it changes into its own directory and scans for scenery folders starting with zOrtho, zPhoto, zVstates or z_. It creates Custom Scenery/Xroads with the modified roads.net files and the generated library.txt. This folder has to stay at the top of scenery_packs.ini.

Sources