Well one of the things that's most impressive is that I can run ENG with full autogen. Indeed I notice that's feasible with other Orbx regions these days too.

 

As a "sketch" of England, it is actually really, really good. The airports they have upgraded are super, too. I'm doing a lot of short hops all over the place in the Realair Lanc. Absolutely super.

 

There will come a time, however, and I expect it will be soon, when I retreat to photoscenery, which I particularly enjoy when flying the NGX.

 

All in all, it's nice to have a variety of options and, in doing so, I havent broken the bank either, as no-one could accuse Mr Venema of over-pricing his regions.

It's another great region if you love flying VFR/Low & slow.

 

I don't enable FTX sceneries when I fly a complex jet using IFR flights. FTX regions were not designed for that.

I think what it needs is some TLC and the adding of some nice ORBX Airports (I know they aren't doing any International hubs) and it wil be a hit once again.

Isn't the central issue that this is the first time a lot of Orbx customers very familiar with their own turf have been able to comment on the accuracy of a region?

 

I'm sure there's a bit of that, though as noted earlier there were certainly discussions about missing towns, bridges etc in relation to the NA regions when they were newer.

 

What I think is also operating here is the simple fact that major landmarks in the NA regions tend to be biased more towards natural ones, while in the UK there are far more that are man made. If a small settlement is missing, incomplete or mis-placed between Missoula and Helena MT, it's easier to ignore because the things that make the area look familiar are mountain, river and canyon anyway. But if a familiar town is missing or misplaced in England it's far more noticeable and troublesome.

 

Scott

<br />Well, that's simply impossible and not true. The scenery is landclass based and Orbx can NOT place every farm on the right location even if they wanted too, let alone the apartment of your sister. If you found some of these things to be in the right place then that is purely coincidence. Putting it like you do makes it sound as if this can be expected while even Orbx says this is NOT the case. So don't give people false hopes. '95% of the stuff is NOT there' would be a better thing to say and even that is stretching things... <br />

 

I live in Chilliwack in the PNW and as far as landclass is concerned this area is extremely accurate right from the first release and I am quite sure it is no coincidence. What I have noticed with the FTX releases that I do own is that much of the landclass is placed according to vectors rather the usual 1 square kilometer grid. For example the boundary between farms and residential areas along the edge of our town are precise. Of course Holger was also closely involved in the development of these regions and his reputation for producing top notch scenery is second to none. I do not own FTX England (yet), but it sounds like this 'handplaced' vector based landclass placement was not used to the same extent as in previous FTX regions and thus the disappointment for some. Another factor that may affect the sense of immersion is that main roads in NA often follow a north-south/east-west grid and it is therefore easier to align them with the roads and houses on the textures representing the landclass. This is not the case in the UK where roads cross the landscape at every angle, resulting in vector roads cutting across textures in an unrealistic manner and that is indeed a limitation of landclass.

Having never been to England I certainly can not compare what FTX has presented with the real thing. One thing is clear however, ORBX will improve this scenery as they get more experience on how to reproduce this kind of population dense environment.

 

All in all, it's nice to have a variety of options and, in doing so, I havent broken the bank either, as no-one could accuse Mr Venema of over-pricing his regions.

 

Absolutely!

 

I bought it, think it's a good start and expect that an SP or two will make all the difference in the world.

 

Kind regards,

I have a question re. FTX England, in FTXCentral is it still possible to revert to "default" FSX and not have all the extra folders/files load ? I feel this is important especially if FTX Australia/North America/New Zealand are also installed.

There is also a request for feedback on issues. The devs cannot possibly be expected to have local knowledge and often available satellite imagery itself is missing detail at certain levels. I don't understand why the process of updating and patching, which is comon in just about ALL products as well as software seems to uniquely cause such hostile debate with sim software.

 

Thanks for that. I was going to mention a certain piece of popular PC software that cost twice as much as this that has now been patched 4 times since release a month ago.

 

So yes, its not unusual in this day and age to see software undergo numerous patches during its lifecycle.

 

I think its great that ORBX invite us to show them the errors and offer feedback so they can eventually patch it up and give us an even more outstanding scenery package.

 

Sometimes you've got to use a bit of self control and not scream "bloody murder" as soon as you spot a fault. I've seen people sending screen shots of areas that aren't showing up correctly even before posting in the support areas of ORBX???? Only to find out that it was an issue with their scenery layers. Everyone's just needs to cool down IMO.

 

 

I'm still enjoying flying the Legacy over ENG. Just not looking too closely at the minutiae, which I think is sort of how Orbx scenery works, isn't it!

 

Exactly what I'm doing. What a beautiful sight from the air. Glad to hear you're enjoying it. I'm happy as a pig in ...... well...... shyte......

 

Jas

I've posted some favourable first impressions, above, so won't repeat them here.

 

I've spent £1000's on this hobby, including PC upgrades I wouldn't have made but for FSX.

 

For £26 I am pretty bloody happy with FTX England. I had fish and chips and a few pints of Guinness in Kings Cross the other day, for the same price.

 

Time to get a grip. Twenty quid for the whole of England, with autogen. I know UTX does similar - I tried it, it looks crap. FTX looks like England, to me, and since I live here, I'm entitled to a view. Let's make some sensible and constructive suggestions about how to improve it, rather than attacking it for failing to be the professional bit of software we were never going to get for less than the price of an 8 hour XBox fps nasty. Good grief.

The article in my post # 145 is spot on, like it or not it's because of us if developers (not all of them) are getting away with a 1/2 *** finished products, not only that but it's also because of us if they (not all of them) are threating us the way they do if we raise what we think is a valid point and they don't like it.

 

We are not talking about a small bug here and there to be ironed out but complete town missing or misplaced, streams not showing +++ and no I did not buy it, I was on the phone with a friend of mine from Italy flying a lot over the UK and that's what he told me....the day all customers will wait to buy a finished product developers will sell a finished product, simple as that, you are all becoming beta tester on your own dime, I guess Paul is right, paying twenty quid to be a beta tester is pretty cheap.

I've posted some favourable first impressions, above, so won't repeat them here.

 

I've spent £1000's on this hobby, including PC upgrades I wouldn't have made but for FSX.

 

For £26 I am pretty bloody happy with FTX England. I had fish and chips and a few pints of Guinness in Kings Cross the other day, for the same price.

 

Time to get a grip. Twenty quid for the whole of England, with autogen. I know UTX does similar - I tried it, it looks crap. FTX looks like England, to me, and since I live here, I'm entitled to a view. Let's make some sensible and constructive suggestions about how to improve it, rather than attacking it for failing to be the professional bit of software we were never going to get for less than the price of an 8 hour XBox fps nasty. Good grief. Anyone would think we'd sold our souls and were being short-changed. TWENTY QUID! I spent more having a couple of pints after work tonight.

 

Hey Paul!! Cheers to that mate!!! +1

 

Jas

Well this is an interesting thread. When Orbx first announced that they were doing the UK I thought to myself "this will be something different for them" as it is an area that has well established photoreal scenery how are they going to come up with landclass based scenery that will compete? As noted by others in this thread, all the other Orbx sceneries get much of their wow factor by the way the natural world is displayed but, in the UK, it is the man made world that provides much of the wow and is thus ideally suited to photoreal scenery. On the one hand I can understand why they tackled the UK being about the same size as NZ which they did very well but on the other hand it may be a bridge too far for their type of scenery due to the inherent limitations of landclass compared to photoreal.

 

Bruceb

I have some mixed feelings about the product. Let me be clear - I'm fully aware of the limitations involved in this type of scenery design and was not expecting to see my house or some kind of photoreal equivalent. I also think that where its good its very very good, but as some other posters have pointed out, it does have it's issues.

 

There's one area that doesn't seem to have been picked up on in this thread. Over on the ORBX forums there's a thread introducing the Hampshire based development team that produced the product. See the quote below - it's my underlining.

 

"The ladies and gentlemen you see here are responsible for about 75% of the content in FTX England and this was their first ever Orbx product to be worked on, along with EGHR Goodwood Airport. Orbx sent staff from Australia and Canada to deliver the core training and the rest of the training was delivered by Skype, VSee and email exchanges. The other 25% of the content was produced by the Orbx regions developers you're already familiar with from other projects like PNW and NZ such as Holger, Neil and Eddy. Finally, contributing the geodata processing was Sascha Normann of Limesim (AntarticaX, LAX) fame.

 

From my perspective this team have done a truly remarkable job to create the core content for an entire FTX region in only ten months starting from ground zero with no previous FS development experience in the team."

 

It may explain why in some folks eyes, this may lack the polish of some of the previous ORBX releases. I am sure that what is already a very good product will continue to be improved, and when you take into account the above, I think the team has done a fine job.

 

Have faith and stick with it. I'm sure ORBX's collective experience will smooth out the rough edges that some of us have noted.

 

Well, that's simply impossible and not true. The scenery is landclass based and Orbx can NOT place every farm on the right location even if they wanted too, let alone the apartment of your sister. If you found some of these things to be in the right place then that is purely coincidence. Putting it like you do makes it sound as if this can be expected while even Orbx says this is NOT the case. So don't give people false hopes. ^_^ '95% of the stuff is NOT there' would be a better thing to say and even that is stretching things...

 

I think we got confused here.

 

What I mean is Orbx made the city of Calgary look like the city of Calgary. What I mean is that if you follow highway two past the river and turn left the correct roads are there. Orbx seem to have gotten the placement I things much better in NRM from what I can tell

 

I wasn't giving false hopes

 

Lee

Speaking as a neutral potential buyer of Orbx England someday, I'm reading the thread hoping to hear how it is, and I had sort of expected some of the reactions I am reading from this release, those of us who live in the other regions modeled by Orbx in the past (PNW for myself) know that while it gives you a good feel for what the area is like and the bigger towns and roads etc, it is not especially accurate when it comes to specific buildings, woods, even shoreline and beaches etc, and it isn't until something is specifically modeled in the individual airports add-ons and surrounding areas that the accuracy is increased. Still Orbx beats FSX default, UTX and photo scenery for those PNW areas IMHO.

 

Anyhow, the interesting thing to me will be to see how Orbx patches/improves the product based on reports from customers via the support forums, what I saw posted from JV above before he locked the thread, while not ideal, was much more restrained and open to feedback than some of his responses in the past, so hopefully the product will get the eventual improvement and service packs that PNW has had.

 

Hopefully this thread will keep focusing on the quality/issues/support of Orbx England and not deteriorate too much into the general Orbx JV frustration that rehashes all the old events mixed in, otherwise it will just be hard to follow for those of us focusing on the product and no longer shocked or interested in how JV manages customer relationships.