Here are a few shots with PMDG NGX and London area, F/R are pretty good, but I had some auto-gen popup's flying around at 4000 feet.

What about airports? Do they look like paywares or just some minor improvements?

I take it that's "Autumn"? My immediate thought is that it's not green enough. We're not short of rain in the UK and even when the trees have shed their leaves the grass is usually very green. The trees look too dark too. Looking around at the moment they're more gold than brown.

 

London looks good and is recognisable straight away from that altitude but some lower shots would make it easier to see how the non high rise buildings look. At first glance the non tower block inner city areas look to have too low and too small buildings?

 

Geoff

DME steps down the 08 ILS back-course into 26L.

 

Nice shots Mike.

 

Why didn't you just use the ILS on 26L? Or were you doing it for fun?

To be honest im not impressed with theses, colours look all wrong to me.

Wow the Eden project is included! I had a little flight earlier out of London city and then down the M4 to Newbury and then up to Oxford. Must say I'm quite impressed with the scenery.

Hm, those last screenshots almost hurt my eyes... Maybe they are zoomed in too much? Looks blurred, low res and that autogen sticks out way too much... And the London shots don't look good either: very FS9-like with those obvious sticking out building... But maybe that's due to a low autogen setting...

 

I am thinking about buying England because it's nice being able to fly a bit more near home, but these shots almost make me decide to wait for a while and check out if it's really this bad...

 

EDIT

Had a look at some of the community shots on the Orbx forum. I'm going to buy England NOW. ^_^

Well my initial thoughts are that it's like the curate's egg.

 

I know amongst the excitement and enthusiasm that might seem a bit of a blight but bear with me and I'll explain. BTW the spin on the curates egg if you Google it is that "it was bad but called good out of politeness". Not how I've ever understood the saying! To me it means good in parts, bad in parts.

 

Firstly I DID READ the manual. I then ignored it (except for the Mesh setting) and ran it as I've been running other stuff. The results were pretty poor frame rates (unsurprisingly) but I persevered until it beat my set-up and crashed. Entirely my fault not the scenery.

 

Back to square one and I copied the recommended settings to the letter (more or less, always keep aircraft shadows on ground as landing hands on from an exterior view is difficult without it) and saw a doubling of frame rates.

 

However I can't say I saw anywhere near the level of autogen buildings in some of the screenshots posted around. I took some screenshots which I'll try and sort out later. The first trip was obviously going to be round my home town so I started from my old "home" when I flew for real at Denham and set off to overfly Heathrow, and then back to Kew gardens and on into London. Down to London City and North from the Woolwich Ferry to land at Stapleford.

 

Some good bits first. The mesh is excellent. Those who've written England off as flat may be interested to know that the land around Denham whilst hardly being alpine is far from flat. In fact Denham sits on a level plateau surrounded by valleys and rolling fields and all of this is spot on. To be totally realistic you should read the denham approach and circuit details (find them online) as it sits within the Heathrow CTR and is overflown by a standard departure route from nearby Northolt (1500') so circuits are flown at 750'. But of course this is a sim so I set off illegally to overhead Heathrow central area. The lakes on Denhams approach are pretty accurtate but sadly the trees that make Denham 26 approaches occasionally challenging are just shown as ground cover bushes.

 

The next issue I have is that I have all UK2000 VFR airfields (except Denham which I have the Real Scenery version of) and I'd made no adjustments to the scenery library before/after selecting EUROPE in the usual FTX region selector. Obviously FTX was over this as the scenery was not my usual. However when I approached Heathrow and looked left at Northolt I began to think I was looking at UK2000 versions. I need to check this and report back. The next good bit is that the roads are instantly recognisable to those who know here they are so VFR Mk1 eyeball navigation was possible for all of my trip with only a glance at the map to set a heading from Woolwich to Stapleford.

 

So what's bad? Well the ground cover initially didn't seem too bad but some classic landmarks were missing. I know it's not photoreal but one thing every military pilot and Denham pilot knows is that in the valley SW of 26 as you climb out is the Martin Baker factory! BTW are there any FSX models with ejector seats that work?!

 

Heading for Kew it was recognisable even at 1500' from a good way off and the row of Tower Blocks that are North of the Thames opposite Kew are spot on. Alas not much else of the 3D scenery was present and the ground cover whilst being reasonable in some places way way out in others. Obviously I don't expect a 3D virtual home town but there are dozens of high rise office blocks along the start of the M4 and A4 so at least a ground cover more representative would help. If you fly tubes and ride the ILS on autoland you probably don't care but a visual approach to 27L or R at Heathrow has some obvious landmarks. As you fly East up the Thames the landmarks are excellent and convincing although some of the placements in the ground cover look a bit odd. The Natural History Museum is well modelled but looks "odd" and none of the other buildings between it and the Albert Hall are there. When I got to Tower Bridge I noticed that St Katherines dock lacked any significant buildings and this made The Tower look too prominent. Pressing on towards London City and the Dome the first obvious ommision (even as a flat representation) was the Thames barrier which is a major landmark. Heading North to Stapleford I was able to recognise Barkingside, Hainault and Tomswood Hill by the road and railway layout and the groundcover here is reasonably representative but I feel that the suburban type landcover goes far too far into London. There seems little between Tower Blocks and Semi's?

 

Next I decided to head for the Coast and the Bournemouth and Poole areas that I know well. Setting off from Hurn frame rates were imediately higher than the urban area but the 3D content seemed lacking. Maybe I need to play with those sliders again. Again the Mesh was excellent, Landscape and textures not bad with the heathland pretty well placed and textured. However Bournemouth and Poole Town Centres seemed not to exist at all? NOW this might be a slider issue. I'll report back. However Unlike many Seaside Towns in the UK Bournemouth and Poole both have a very obvious centre with high rise and large buildings. As I saw it they looked more like Bexhill, a sprawl of bungalows. The marinas were where they should be in the harbour BUT the Ferry terminal for Cherbourg was totally missing, replaced instead bya marina and where the car and truck loading area should be there was the wrong lanclass. I pressed on toward Wareham and sure enough Ridge was where it should be and Wareham was more or less right given the textures. I headed for Corfe. No castle! Probably the most famous landmark on the purbecks and it was just a hill with some bad texture. Corfe itself was in the wrong place and there seemed too much built up texture on the way down to Swanage. A case of "less is more"? Swanage wasn't bad but extended too far south perhaps and I headed back to Hurn. The second most famous landmark in the region "Old Harry Rocks" was also missing and Studland bay lacked the training reef too. The Studland ferry was missing too and as this is almost exactly like the one modelled already that seemed poor. Sandbanks which is heavily built up was mostly green and towards Bornemouth roads and buildings seemed to tumble into the sea!

 

Both Swanage and Bournemouth piers were just coloured shapes on the water with no 3D at all and the area of Bournemouth where the pier and conference centre stand were totally unbelievable.

 

Before I get trashed let me emphasise that a lot of this is good. Some excellent. Other parts need a lot more work and some are really bad.

 

Of course it was going to be a test for the technique as all of us Brits knew just how diverse and complex our landscape is. It doesn't have as much geographic complexity as some previous areas but texture wise it's probaly one of the most complex.

 

This was a first try and I need to go back and tweak a few settings to see if I can get better. The download took me two hours (3.2Gb) so DVD might suit some better.

 

I'll not post screenshots until I know I've got things set as well as possible. I own all the FTX landclass series so please bear that in mind when reading my comments.

 

Geoff

Hi Geof,

 

1) When you install Orbx England, you have to switch off NA and on ENG and go back and forth? What If I install England but leave it as NA. What happens flying in England?

 

2) How does night look approaching Heathrow coming in from the East over London city?

 

Manny

 

I'll not post screenshots until I know I've got things set as well as possible. I own all the FTX landclass series so please bear that in mind when reading my comments.

 

Geoff

Amazing views but It gives me the impression that you get low frame rates Bigsky. I like your screens Mickel

OK Take 2.

 

As I said I wasn't happy with the performance on my box at first so I applied the settings in the manual.

 

Then I put Real Airfields Denham top of the totem pole and UK2000 VFR airfields Vol1 (wasn't going to move them all until I'd tried them out) and ignored the manual and set autogen all the way to the right. Set off again from Denham in the A2A Cub and flew past Northolt to Heathrow.

 

The Real Airfields Denham (by far the best IMHO) sits perfectly and the textures seemed fine with the FTX ones. I guess the UK2000 VFR airfields are a matter of taste. I like them and they seem to work well. How the textures will work with seasonal changes etc. I'll report back on when I get a chance.

 

With the Autogen maxed the package looks much more convincing to me. Of course there is a performance hit but my AMD 4 core 3.4Ghz machine isn't overclocked and my ATI 5800 series card with 754mb of ram is a bit long in the tooth now even so the compromise between detail and smoothness suits me. Of course all this discussion of frame rates is pretty vague stuff anyway because the same area viewed from different cams gives different rates? I'm much happier with London than my initial trial but there are still some issues that jar a little. With "by the book" settings I was getting no stations and that seemed really naff? Maxed the stations are all there but as very unrecognisable "generic" blocks. I know this isn't VFR London but I'd have thought that at least a curved glass roofed block (even if they were all the same) would be a better representation on many UK main line termini?

 

I've taken loads of screenshots but resizing them and converting them whilst keeping a degree of quality is time consuming. IrfanView does batch conversions but even at "best" settings the .jpgs lose too much detail.

 

I'm off to look again at Dorset to see if the new settings have improved that. I'll report back.

 

BTW obviously it's tricky for FTX to know what to recommend as basic settings because an old sim like FSX is being used on many different machines. I'm sure NGX drivers on the ILS to Heathrow would not see an issue at their speed and height but at 60knots in a cub there's a bit more time to be critical :lol:

 

When I've had more of an explore I'll try "switching out" some of the UK VFR fields to see how the FTX compare.

 

"I'll be baach" :ph34r: and hopefully with at least a couple of helpful screenshots.

 

Geoff

I'm with lateagain with his curate's egg "bad in parts, good in others" analogy and, as a seasoned FS9/FSX UK photoscenery flyer, I am, as expected, finding it difficult to adjust to often having to accept autogen in place of, albeit flat, completely accurate representations of exactly what's "down there". The overall geography/topography is far better than photoscenery, but I still think I prefer the landmark accuracy of my UK VFR packages, supported by Treescapes. If I could single out one area for Orbx's immediate attention, it would be coastlines. Very, very familiar with the East Coast and the placement of buildings, grass etc right on the coast, where there should be beaches etc. is something I don't like at all - looks like coastal erosion on steroids. Some roads that I know to be winding, wafer thin affairs appear to have been drawn to the scale of a motorway and I would also question the number of tiled, pitched roofs in cityscapes like Central London

 

Having said all that, it's still a remarkable piece of work for a launch version, taken as a whole, and I think we only have to look at how Orbx tirelessly works with its regions to see how much they all improve in time. It's also very likely, I would have said, that missing landmarks, like some very poorly modeled generic seaside piers, will be addressed by enthusiasts, if not by Orbx themselves, in much the same way as has happened with uk photoscenery - a sort of UK version of Return to Misty Moorings.

 

Going into this purchase, and recognizing the enormity of their task, I kind of expected the shortcomings that are in there, but Orbx are such amazing craftsmen that they deserve our continued support for moving the whole science of regional scenery production to a new level and it's clear that many elements of what's in the England package are simply incredible and the value for money is off the scale. Almost subconsciously, though, I sense I'm planning my next PFJ flight.

 

But my UK photoscenery ain't dead in the water yet and in a way it's frustrating that I like elements of both approaches. Will have to fly around the English skies some more and see if my views change, but I doubt it at present.

 

Excellent that we still have this forum to be able to post less than sycophantic comments, by the way. I'm sure there's going to be plenty of varying and stimulating opinions on this important release.

I was skeptic about this England release. To a foreigner England is not the most attractive landscape to fly in (might be lack of knowledge about english scenery). Alot of the preview screenshots was also quite underwhelming for me. But being very happy with what i got from ORBX before, I did buy this like I knew I would. And I'm pleasantly surprised! It does look and feel better in use than it does on the preview screens I've seen until now.

 

For now though I'm stuck at flying summer, as it's by far the most convincing to me.

 

At what, 40$ AUD, it's very good value.

For now though I'm stuck at flying summer, as it's by far the most convincing to me.

 

Same here! I think I will also fly during hard winter every now and then. Spring and autumn however look er... a bit awful actually, mainly due to the trees.

 

 

I know now that I will not give up this representation of the UK for the ORBX package

To each his own. ^_^ I also own GenX and used it from time to time but I like to fly very low and I just can't get used to those flat building that only look good from one side... I also think the quality of GenX isn't very consistent and the colors don't appeal to me... I did love Wales though: no flat building in those mountains. ^_^

 

It's nice to have options, isn't it!?

J van E makes a very good point about flying very low with UK photoscenery. It does get ugly very quickly at the lowest FL's. I think I'll probably go with UK photoscenery for the NGX flying and maybe the Orbx for extremely low-level VFR work, at least until they've made the sort of modifications I'd like to see.