Installing Ortho4XP on macOS

Programming

Orthotopic scenery for X-Plane 12 can be a definite improvement over generated scenery; and if you’re on Windows there’s no problem. On macOS, neither AutoOrtho nor Ortho4XP installs easily on macOS. This post is just to get the word out about a successful approach to installing the latter on macOS running on the Apple Silicon processors. The credit goes to ZackPlonk is a post on the X-Plane.org forums. This is just to get the word out about this successful approach.

You can run run the commands sequentially as he outlined in the post, or you can run the following script to automate the process. If you don’t want to run this as a shell script, see the list of commands below.

#!/bin/bash

# Ortho4XP Setup Script for macOS (Apple Silicon)
# Installs Python 3.10 and dependencies for Ortho4XP

set -euo pipefail

log() {
  echo "[*] $1"
}

fail() {
  echo "[!] $1" >&2
  exit 1
}

# Clone Ortho4XP
cd "$HOME/Documents"
if [ ! -d Ortho4XP ]; then
  log "Cloning Ortho4XP repository..."
  git clone https://github.com/oscarpilote/Ortho4XP.git || fail "Git clone failed"
else
  log "Ortho4XP directory already exists"
fi

cd Ortho4XP

# Check for Homebrew
if ! command -v brew >/dev/null; then
  log "Installing Homebrew..."
  NONINTERACTIVE=1 /bin/bash -c "$(
    curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh
  )" || fail "Homebrew failed"
else
  log "Homebrew found"
fi

# Install required packages
log "Installing Homebrew packages..."
brew install \
  [email protected] \
  [email protected] \
  gdal \
  spatialindex \
  p7zip \
  proj || fail "brew install failed"

# Check for pip3.10
if ! command -v pip3.10 >/dev/null; then
  fail "pip3.10 not found"
fi

# Install Python packages
log "Installing Python dependencies..."
pip3.10 install --upgrade pip || fail "pip upgrade failed"
pip3.10 install pyproj || fail "pyproj failed"
pip3.10 install \
  GDAL \
  numpy \
  Shapely==1.7.1 \
  Rtree==0.9.7 \
  pillow \
  requests || fail "pip deps failed"
pip3.10 install scikit-fmm || fail "scikit-fmm failed"

log "Setup complete."
echo
echo "Run Ortho4XP with:"
echo "  cd Ortho4XP"
echo "  python3.10 Ortho4XP.py"

Manual installation

  1. Launch Terminal from /Applications/Utilities.
  2. If you do not have the package manager Homebrew installed, you will need to install it.
  3. Ensure that you have the version control tool git installed. Run which git from the Terminal. If that command returns something like /usr/bin/git then it is installed. Otherwise, run brew install git.
  4. Navigate to Documents (or other suitable location) with cd ~/Documents and clone the Ortho4XP repository: git clone https://github.com/oscarpilote/Ortho4XP. Now go into the Ortho4XP directory: cd Ortho4XP.
  5. Install dependencies contained in the install_mac.sh file: brew install python gdal spatialindex p7zip proj python-tk.
  6. Install Python version 3.10 and the python-tk bindings with brew install [email protected] [email protected].
  7. Install the following packages:
  • pip3.10 install pyproj
  • pip3.10 install GDAL numpy Shapely==1.7.1 Rtree==0.9.7 pillow requests
  • pip3.10 install scikit-fmm
  1. Now you can run Ortho4XP from the terminal: python3.10 Ortho4XP.py.