Orbx England released this weekend...

[MDF86 123]

I'm seriously excited about this, 90% of my flights start or end at one of the UK2000 Extreme Airports.

 

So as soon as it's confirmed that this works well with those products, I'll be buying it for my first Orbx experience!

[lateagain 45]

Frame rates, aaah, frame rates. What did we do before they invented frame rates?

Well Ron you and a few others here of our generation will remember when the only real technology in the home was Hi-Fi? The same folk who crave the latest M'board, CPU, GPUetc.etc. and monitor the frame rates are the same folk (different generation) as those who used to argue about the reproduction of X amp and Y speaker of frequency levels that (and they could have read up on this from things called books and magazines ...PC's being yet to come) ...anyway about frequency levels that were actually inaudible to the human ear :rolleyes: .

 

Instead of listening to music (the whole point of Hi-Fi) they'd have been happy as pigs in muck with just a few test generators to prove how well the sounds they couldn't hear were being reproduced :LMAO:

 

More to the point there is some belated constructive criticism over on the FTX official forums but lets hope that any glitches can be fixed with a patch or two?

 

Lets also hope there's some constructive feedback on the forum AFTER the release. FTX isn't going to suit everyone any more than the photoreal sceneries have but even then both will have pluses AND minuses?

 

So far FTX products AND UK2000 products have been reviewed as having better frame rates than Aerosoft. If you like and can run Aerosoft stuff without a problem that's fine but the fact that others may prefer or find other's work better on their systems is just fact? It's not a criticism of your choice! :huh:

 

As a Brit my criticism of FTX England is going to be harsher than it is of other regions but I have to ask myself why? It's landclass with 3D environments. Photoreal with 3D environments is a far bigger and processor demanding deal according to reviews so even if that was available for the entire UK would anyones system cope with it? No one has to buy add-ons? If you spend your money you're entitled to know what you'll get for it but I would point out that FTX have offered free trial regions for their software for other regions so you can try before you buy and this ones bound to be reviewed? By this time next week most of the questions raised will have an answer. Go figure what you should do? B)

 

Geoff

[MrSpeaker 122]

Will this work with uk2000 and or aerosoft scenery airports in that area.

[Ron Attwood 3,466]

Will this work with uk2000 and or aerosoft scenery airports in that area.

 

Anyone want to answer this one? :lol:

[Kaly 22]

Anyone want to answer this one? :lol:

Hi Ron!

 

I think what they are saying is,that they should work just fine,especially with the UK2000 airports,via layering rearrangement in the scenery configuration.(post#19)

http://www.orbxsyste...ional-airports/

 

And here:

http://www.orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/50277-ftx-eng-with-uk2000-airports/

 

Regards

[PDX Flyer 111]

I will look forward to some user pictures of this product on the AVSIM Screen Shot Forum.

[lateagain 45]

Well it's released and I'm downloading as I type. At 3.2Gb and just under £27 (approx) it's going to take 2 hours on my connection so I'll not be looking at it for a while. I'll try and get some shots up later but checking out such a large area will start obviously from my own location and move on to areas I know well. I've got the UK2000 VFR airfields already but I want to see what FTX have done before I check those out.

 

Geoff

[MDF86 123]

Well it's released and I'm downloading as I type. At 3.2Gb and just under £27 (approx) it's going to take 2 hours on my connection so I'll not be looking at it for a while. I'll try and get some shots up later but checking out such a large area will start obviously from my own location and move on to areas I know well. I've got the UK2000 VFR airfields already but I want to see what FTX have done before I check those out.

 

Geoff

 

Look forward to hearing your impressions Geoff. I've spent so much money on add ons recently (only last night extending my NGS to include the 600/700 variants!) so think this one might have to wait a couple of weeks!

[Holclo 3]

Would also love to hear your comments especially with regard to any FPS hit. I would love to be able to run this scenery with complex planes. Credit card at the ready!!

Bill

[RCITGuy 35]

Hey guys...

 

I hope I can say this here, as the most suitable thread for this was locked...

 

I really, really wish I could be bragging and boasting about how great ORBX ENG is....... But...

 

I downloaded & installed it, tried it, tweaked it, then tried it loads more, and all I can say is, maybe I shouldn't have...

I already have GEX and UTX, and with this installed, the only notable improvement is the tree's, and some nicer default airports..

 

I now have non-stop stutters, runway/taxi lights that are 3ft off the ground, roads that don't line up at all with what's on the ground(Duplicated roads that go in different directions), buildings that are totally not to scale, huge parks/open spaces are either covered with houses, or nothing but a cluster of trees, and road traffic that does an instant U turn at every bridge, airports that are not where the 737MFD shows they are (Heathrow now is far off to the right when flying along the Thames, on the MFD screen, even thought the view out the window shows its right in front of me)

 

I'm not talking about anywhere remote either, I'm talking about South London...

Try flying over Clapham Common as just 1 of many examples, if you can find it... Look it up on Google maps, then go fly over it and see the few HUGE houses that in its place.. Scale seems to be a problem with this scenery, big time. I live on the outskirts, in Croydon, and am surrounded by Green fields, but you wouldn't know it to fly ORBX ENG..

 

Roads that I know are miles long, are really short, and roads off in the distance are all green, not grey.. The whole things feels very disappointing..

 

So far I've tried 15 flights, short ones around South London/London city/Heathrow and the only thing that made go "WOW" were the trees. The tree's look amazing! My settings are already on there recommended settings for 4GHz and above..

 

I Read, then re-read their manual several times, just to make sure I had done it by the book too.

 

Soon as I disabled the FTX in my scenery library, everything went back to smooth, no stutters, roads that line up, lights at runway level, cars that DO cross bridges, oh, and Airports on the 737MFD that actually are where they say they are. Think I will stick to GEX and UTX.

[lateagain 45]

Hi Richard,

I have to say that living as I do some 6 miles East of LHR (EGLL) I too am very disappointed in the depiction of Greater London. There seems to be a huge difference between what I see there with what I see in screenshots of other parts of the country. HUH?! No I don’t mean green fields v 3D buildings ....I’m talking about detail. In some recent screenshots on the FTX site by one of the Beta Testers there are for instance 3D bridges. Most of what I see in the London Area has a “Salvador Dali” melted look with bridges melting into rivers or other roads they cross . :wacko: The Autogen for both the suburbs and the inner city areas is totally wrong for both the style and density of buildings.

 

I’ll say AGAIN at this point to underline the fact. I know its land class AND I know it’s not photoreal. However there are many styles of 3d models in the autogen and those used in much of London are just wrong. I agree with your comments on the Roads and the railways seem far less clear than in the NA series ....or is that just in certain areas? I think the poster that suggested in now locked threads that entire areas had their towns displaced may have been on to something? Certainly many towns I know that are built around roads seem to be represented as if bypassed by the very roads that run through them?

 

Obviously living where we do the first areas we’ll look at are those we know. Moving further afield, the wider countryside looks better than the land class in GEX/UTX and a flight “over the ORBX border in Wales gives a good impression of the differences. However neither has done the wide variety of coastal land class in the UK much justice and many costal landmarks, white cliffs, sandy beaches, piers, harbours, are either wrong, badly done or just missing. No big deal for PMDG jockeys but glaringly obvious in my A2A cub ...or the ubiquitous 172?

 

As a VFR GA/Bush (when I fly where there’s “bush” ) pilot I don’t like the flatness of photoreal but the fact is that FTX ENG looks best at the altitudes that Photoreal comes into its own. :huh:

 

Whilst looking at comparison videos of FSX and P3D I stumbled across this the other day. A picture is worth a thousand words.... B)

Even though the poster admits his recording settings aren’t optimal the poor depiction of Dover Harbour as a bunch of prefab industrial units on the edge of a grassy inlet occupied by models of river crossing ferries is very poor. Any SE UK RW pilot making a cross channel crossing will look to Dover’s unmissable port as a landmark and its considerable size and the 30000ton ferries can be seen for miles. :unsure:

 

They’ve done so much in one chunk that there are areas I’ve not had a chance to explore but I’ve cherry picked those I know well or have flown over.

 

Everyone cries “It’s just because you know this area and didn’t know the ones they did previously” There is some truth in that BUT there is also a fundamental difference between England and most of Europe that is VERY different to the areas ORBX has done so far. Europe is old and its landmass and cities have developed over centuries. If Europe was as young as Oz or the US “we wouldn’t have built it like that?” Or would we? We’re more densely populated, have smaller denser housing, roads and railways that don’t run in straight lines or on grid systems for good reasons.

 

I’m not a scenery designer but it strikes me that if land class with autogen can be made convincingly for the newer lands it can be done for Europe but it obviously needs to be different?

 

It strikes me that what we’ve bought is an above average Beta, that still needs months of honing to be on a par with ORBX’s best areas?

 

I do hope they’ll work on improving what they’ve released before they proceed with any other region because I think that some of the issues are fundamental to the rest of the UK and Europe.

 

Best bit about my purchase is that it made me look at UK2000 VFR airfields but until the basic scenery is improved my home field still won’t be my area of choice.

[RCITGuy 35]

Hi Geoff

 

Not far from each other then mate... Should hook up sometime to compare notes/fly/drink beer lol

 

Funny because despite the problems with ORBX ENG, the VFR stuff looks 10x worse I think, and that youtube vid is a perfect example of that... Down low and slow looks awful on what is probably most average PC's..

 

If ORBX ever make an update/service pack then I might try it again, but for now, its £27 out the window, as its going to get uninstalled.

Next is to try the UK2000 VFR series I bought a few weeks ago...

 

EDIT: What WAS I thinking, silly me, there is NO un-install for ORBX! Nothing shows in the control panel add/remove and it doesn't have its own uninstaller either!

Seems once its installed, that's it, or you remove it the hard way!

Edited December 15, 2012 by RCITGuy

[HiFlyer 9,362]

Just set the FTX selector to normal FSX?

[lateagain 45]

Just set the FTX selector to normal FSX?

Yes don't be too quick to remove it unless it's absolutely necessary Richard. I'm hoping there'll be a patch or two.

 

The UK2000 Airfields work fine with FTX and for all it's faults it has a good number of plusses that the Photoreal stuff hasn't and 5 seasons are pretty much up there in that list?

 

Geoff

[RCITGuy 35]

That is indeed all I can do, its the only option as there IS no uninstall. I cant believe this thing has no uninstaller, and doesn't show up in the control panel installed programs list.