About

The story behind XEarthLayer and the people who made it possible.

The Project

XEarthLayer was created to solve a fundamental problem in flight simulation: the trade-off between visual fidelity and storage requirements. Traditional ortho photo scenery requires downloading terabytes of satellite imagery before you can fly, and you end up storing data for places you may never visit.

XEarthLayer takes a different approach. It streams satellite imagery on demand, when and where you need it.

The Author

XEarthLayer was created by Sam de Freyssinet in 2025. Sam has been a flight simulator enthusiast for much of his life, ever since his first encounter with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2.0.

Sam returned to flight simulation in 2013 following an extended hiatus, spent a couple of years in the Prepar3D ecosystem, then migrated to X-Plane at the tail end of version 10.

Since rediscovering his passion for flying virtually, Sam started flight training for his real private pilot’s license in 2016.

When not piloting virtual or real aircraft, Sam works as a Software Engineering Director at a well-known tech company in the San Francisco Bay Area. He likes to snowboard with his children, cycle, and travel.

Motivation

In the summer of 2025, after many years of running his flight simulator on Microsoft Windows, Sam decided to migrate to Linux. Many factors drove this decision, but the catalyst was Windows 11 corrupting his main system NVMe drive after a routine update.

With the simulator rebuilt on Linux and X-Plane 12 installed, Sam was disappointed to find that the tools he had previously used for streaming orthophoto scenery into X-Plane were not available on the platform. One only supported Windows, while the other, AutoOrtho, was no longer maintained.

Given the situation, Sam decided to try and fix AutoOrtho on his own system but did not make much progress. Taking a step back, he asked the fateful question: how hard would it be to port AutoOrtho to Rust? As it turns out, quite hard, but not impossible.

XEarthLayer shares no code with AutoOrtho, and there have been many design decisions that resulted in significant changes to how scenery tiles are managed internally. With that said, it would be a disservice not to credit AutoOrtho as the inspiration for this project.

Once work was under way, Sam discovered that AutoOrtho had been forked by the community into AutoOrtho Continued. Definitely check that out if XEarthLayer is not for you.

Five months later, XEarthLayer was ready for its first public release.

Acknowledgments

XEarthLayer wouldn’t be possible without the contributions and support of many people.

Special Thanks

  • kubilus1 for creating AutoOrtho, the original inspiration for this project
  • xjs36uk for their testing and feedback on low specification systems that significantly improved the performance of XEarthLayer on memory constrained systems
  • mmaechtel for sustained testing, for finding and fixing bugs across many releases, and for consistently excellent feedback

Technologies

XEarthLayer is built with:

  • Rust, the systems programming language it is written in
  • Claude Code for AI assisted pair programming and documentation
  • GitHub for source code hosting, CI/CD and releases
  • Ortho4XP, Shred86 fork used to create regional scenery packages

Imagery Providers

Satellite imagery is sourced from various providers including:

  • Apple Maps
  • ArcGIS
  • Bing Maps
  • Google Maps
  • MapBox
  • USGS

Contact

License

XEarthLayer is released under the MIT License.