Thanks all for your words of support and things you would like improved or changed. Like i said before I cant promise everything will be done as you ask, but i do promise every issue and concern will be raised with my fellow devs first thing in the morning.

 

I will not get involved in any forum politics whatsoever as my focus and dedication is 100% aimed to provide you and other simmers a great flying experiences as is the rest of the team working on the EU regions.

 

I Appreciate all comments and all will be looked into.

 

Thanks

Keith (UK DEV TEAM)

Keith

 

Whilst I wish some of the towns (especially in the south-west) were better defined, I think what you and the team have achieved is a great step forward for UK flight simming.

 

Now about Wales.....

 

Many thanks. Your work is appreciated.

 

Peter

Hi all. Thanks for your time and effort to discuss issues and gripes that you may or may not have with EU ENG. Please Please Please, if there is something you feel is "just not right" with "your" Areas i would urge you to post a screenie of so called issue or missing town, we are working so hard to improve what we have created so far. There WILL be a patch (Cant give timeframe on that sorry) ((but it is being worked on as we speak) and the more feedback with screenshots, the more we can try to make it even better for you. I only found this post by scanning the net for issues not being posted on the Orbx forums. We Know how much it means to you to have an enjoyable and exciting experience whilst flying, I do too. I cant promise every issue will be resolved, but i can promise that we are working our socks off, and will continue to do so to try and get things as best and accurate as we can within the limitations of FSX.

 

Keep smiling, keep flying and keep us informed of things you would like to see. We do listen

 

Keith Lewis (UK DEV TEAM)

 

Okay Ive tried all I know but after installing and re-installing the new scenery Ive lost ALL the buildings in London (probably elswhere too but not checked as ive lost the will to live now lol)

 

As you can see I only have what appears to be autogen. When I switch back to default using FTX Central I still only have autogen.

 

London did exist before I installed FTX EU England!

 

Any ideas you may have would be welcome.

 

 

https://skydrive.live.com/embed?cid=5D9E788DD9BB64D7&resid=5D9E788DD9BB64D7%21183&authkey=AFosF6GDYs0Fhy8

I'm very happy with it, is my first impression.

 

I flew out of EGNM and immediately I knew where I was. I'll post pics later but if you know the skyline from the M621 coming into leeds from the M62, or the M62/M1 interchange, or the way the canal and the railways converge, you'll have a sense of where you are and although the buildings and minor roads of course aren't what and where they should be, I still get a better impression of the city of Leeds than I ever did flying Horizon's Genx v2 product (which I still recommend heartily for photoscenery fans). A nice view of Emley Moor mast in the distance, too, as it should be.

 

Having established I can find my way around (I want to follow the M62 over the tops to EGCC later) I thought I'd try eye candy.

 

The Lakes are lovely. I was sure I'd be disappointed, since they are the highlight of GenX for me - but no, the autogen makes up for the fact that we miss the real deal in terms of the up hill and down dale, and the textures are not as good. But it's a nice place to fly. I came up via Blackpool and was pleased to see the Tower is modelled.

 

Next I headed off East to the North Yorkshire Moors. Very nice too - the colours and topology are well captured. Some lovely animated wind farms (are they in PNW? I must have missed 'em before). Finally managed to crash at what I think was EGNT but I was in the Spit so no GPS to tell me exactly where I was. I am pretty sure I flew over Newcastle given the bridges over the Tyne.

 

So: the North, so far, is good. I need to test now how e.g. my UK2000 EGCC looks/fits.

 

I had to disable GenX in the Scenery Library to see FTX.

 

Framerates are great in the country - 80+ unlocked - but there is a hit in e.g. Leeds, as you'd expect with high settings - similar performance to PNW I'd guess. More time needed to tell.

 

I'll try post some pics.

 

These are very much first impressions, but I am not disappointed at all so far.

Im about half way through producing a short video which i hope to upload to youtube in the next few days, will post here when all done.

 

Glad to hear Orbx is reading our coments, i think everyones coments should be regarded as constructive as im sure they are. Not sure how this was beta tested, if it was me id break it into areas and have testers test each area crossed ref'd with maps/charts to get a more 'closer to life' landclass product. I know some people have said its not ment to be photo scenery but whats the point of producing a scenery of an area if its not close to the real thing. I thought it was ment to be a close to realality scenery product and not a 'sort of real' scenery. If you dont know the England its close enough, if you do its just a bit to far off at the moment but hopefully with everyones help Orbx can get it closer for all of us.

 

I'm posting a few screenshots into the ORBX s/s thread pinned above. I'm no great picture-snapper, but you get what you pay for, and I ain't charging

Seeing as they closed the thread on the official forum I thought I would post how disappointed I am with EU ENG here. Didn't realise ORBX had a reputation for such behaviour.

 

This was in a thread about innacurate autogen placement. See in my part of the country there are hundreds of square miles where the autogen landclass for the towns/villages is misplaced - ie it's usually a good distance from the roads from the same places. It's pretty shoddy and should have been caught in development.

 

Crikey just been sent this because of my reasonable points I linked to:

 

"You have been given a warning by John Venema.

Reason: Abusive Behaviour

----------------------------------------------------------------------

You should know better. Don't argue with the management. Our house our rules."

 

That's the last penny they get from me then. How awfully childish of them. Still, will make for some good copy.

That's the reason I have not and never will buy anything from them. Complete idiots when it comes to customer service.

I wouldn't expect Orbx to improve this all a lot. This is how it is and this is how it (sort of) always has been. This region is NOT rushed, it's one of their best. You are simply expecting WAY (WAY WAY WAY) too much... ^_^

 

While I wouldn't know if this is one of their best, I only fly PNW and Alaska, you are absolutley right. Seems to me that there are many ignorant flight simmers around with littte understanding of how complex and time consuming scenery creation is. For the price I am sure this scenery is more than good enough. You just can't expect such a generic product to be anywhere near Earth Simulation scenery in terms of realism and accuracy.

 

As for the ORBX UK Team I just want to say that I very much appreciate you showing up here in these forums! That is what I call excellent customer interaction.

I hadn't realised this Swolford. I've bought five of their products previously - all four Australian regions and Pacific North West. All of those I was very happy with. And I thought it would be fine to discuss problems with the new England scenery. Because it really does have lots of problems. My input in several threads had been welcomed as I posted screenshots of problems.

 

But not only did John Venema misrepresent and insult customers' points of view, he then locked the topic and to add insult to injury made some wild (and very wrong assumptions) about my attitude and put words into my mouth. Then he sent me the childish little message you see above.

 

I'm only sad I knew they were such a poor company to deal with before I spent any money. Well, no more.

 

The truth is that EU ENG is pretty ropey in places. Some awful landclass placement and the road construction, with mismatched surfaces and poor joins that are really below the company's usual standards. Just trying to silence people in the forum is counter productive as folks will talk elsewhere and perhaps to larger audiences.

 

While I wouldn't know if this is one of their best, I only fly PNW and Alaska, you are absolutley right. Seems to me that there are many ignorant flight simmers around with littte understanding of how complex and time consuming scenery creation is. For the price I am sure this scenery is more than good enough. You just can't expect such a generic product to be anywhere near Earth Simulation scenery in terms of realism and accuracy.

 

You are assuming

 

(1) These are problems with the flight simulator itself, not some poor work. If this was true then other rival products wouldn't have already been more accurate in the same locations.

 

(2) That no one criticising hasn't had some experience of flight sim scenery development or understand the real limitations of the sim.

 

Please don't make the same mistake as ORBX as making straw man arguments against critics.

Didn't realise ORBX had a reputation for such behaviour.

 

Crikey just been sent this because of my reasonable points I linked to:

 

"You have been given a warning by John Venema.

Reason: Abusive Behaviour

----------------------------------------------------------------------

You should know better. Don't argue with the management. Our house our rules."

 

That's the last penny they get from me then. How awfully childish of them. Still, will make for some good copy.

 

welcome to the dark side.. brilliant scenery,,, pathetic customer relations..! and it will never change..

It's so odd Bob (BTW just changed my username) that they have folks posting there who blindly follow the faith. Actually following the same line - "critics are just expecting photoscenery level detail" - flipping heck it's just some DLC for a videogame, not Scientology.

Jeroen, you have to acknowledge that the latter can't exist without the former.

 

Acknowledged... again... ^_^ :

 

Crikey just been sent this because of my reasonable points I linked to:

 

"You have been given a warning by John Venema.

Reason: Abusive Behaviour

----------------------------------------------------------------------

You should know better. Don't argue with the management. Our house our rules."

 

That's the last penny they get from me then. How awfully childish of them. Still, will make for some good copy.

 

Still... I like PNW and now England. And the guys who actually worked on those products are generally good guys... ^_^

Arethe ftx forums completely invisible to the public? I do not like it when developers do that. It's like they have something to hide.

Arethe ftx forums completely invisible to the public? I do not like it when developers do that. It's like they have something to hide.

 

I completely forgot about that when I linked. Yes the forums are private. Here's the cut and paste of the post I made there which resulted in the childish "warning".

 

It starts with me quoting the boss.

 

 

"John Venema, on 18 November 2012 - 03:08 PM, said:

What we are witnessing here is simply a parochial desire from UK customers to see their local "right" and they are getting the rude awakening about a landclass-based scenery product - you'll never ever see your house in the sim, your local pub, supermarket, industrial estate etc - simply because landclass tiles are 1km x 1km squares and as a result it is impossible to get it as accurate as a fully-photoreal product."

 

I was quite sad to see this response John. Yours is a straw man argument. I haven't noticed any posts here complaining that our "house in the sim, your local pub, supermarket, industrial estate" isn't in the scenery. Trying to deflect people with this kind of comment really isn't fair to your customers. I see plenty of posts saying that there are major errors in landclass placement - a genuine problem with this release. Choosing to argue with an issue no one has raised does no one any favours. not least ORBX.

 

Again as I've said elsewhere referring to the FSX default scenery to compare this release to is spurious. You aren't competing with the default scenery for customers' money. They already have Flight Simulator installed already. ORBX is competing with products such as Ultimate Terrain. That is who you have to do better than, not the original developer of Flight Simulator X.

 

Ultimate Terrain may not have as much granular details as ORBX usually offers in its products. Certainly in the hundreds of square miles around where I live there are villages not featured due to their small size that ORBX has decided to feature. However the difference is that in the Ultimate Terrain scenery the villages and towns that are included ARE IN THE RIGHT PLACE and match the location of the UTX own vector roadways. This is not a "limitation of the simulation" as keeps being bandied around here. Ultimate Terrain right now, despite covering a much larger area has the towns, villages, roads and railways located more accurately than EU ENG. It may not be as pretty - unless one invests in a texture product such as Ground Environment X - but it is more accurate. And that's something many of us didn't expect at all. I'm sure there are a few UTX customers here that bought EU ENG precisely because we've been WOWED by THE BRILLIANCE of your other products John and expected EU to be a quantum leap over the UT product. Certainly in the case of PNW it is miles better than Ultimate Terrain.

 

I've been a professional (in that I get paid for it rather than any judgement of my ability) videogames journalist for the last 14 years and I've seen plenty of software that's failed to live up to expectation in that time. I've seen promises broken. I also have a fair handle on the abilities and limits of software and technology.

 

I'm sorry to say that EU ENG doesn't live up to the promise and has some glaring errors that I wonder how they got through development and testing. Anyone with a map to hand could have flown around southern and south west England and seen that the roads and towns/villages don't match and that it's the latter that are in the wrong place. And then there are the variant road colours and road junctions that don't even match each other.

 

Again I've seen some folks here say you can't expect your own street to be right, but despite your post no one is asking for that. What I would like is that someone at ORBX checked, cared, whatever that the towns and villages in many places are placed in the wrong location and not in the same place as the roads. It's not a limitation of the sim, they are in the wrong place.

 

And it makes me sad. Sad that people try to explain this as a limitation of FSX, sad that ORBX products - of which I've invested over £100 in - are usually better than this, sad that no-one spotted this in development, sad that no one spotted it in testing, or sad that in the end someone spotted it and didn't care enough to fix it. If it didn't matter where these things really are then you could have recreated the map of Mordor and sold it to people around the world as a fair representation of a place they have never visited. But did you not think some Brits would buy it? And was not your aim to actually get these things right? I expect you did. You have in your other scenery. You've set very high standards. Award winning standards. And rightly so. But not so here.

 

Now I don't expect my road to be in the game (the vector road past my house actually is). And anyway I've no vested interested in this place. I'm from hundreds of miles north and have only lived here six months. But I've lived long enough to know hundreds of square miles of this area in EU Eng is just plain wrong. And for all I know the whole country suffers from similar problems. Though I've seen fewer such problems in the north west. The reason i raise them about this area of Dorset and Somerset is because I've driven enough around here recently to have a good memory of the place. But honestly, all it takes is a map and an aerial view in FSX to spot all this stuff - didn't anyone do this in testing? It's so obvious when you see little roads networks of villages and meanwhile the village is a mile away up a hillside.

 

Now I've paid my money. I don't want a refund. I'm happy to wait for the software to be completed - though in the meantime I'll be using a rival product. But what I'm not happy about is being deflected with nonsense about this being the fault of FSX, or unrealistic expectations of customers, or being told I'm moaning because my local pub isn't in the software. It is plain insulting. One might expect it from loyal fans of the products, but not from the developer.

 

Now I've been nice and shown screenshots and pointed out errors - errors over hundreds of square miles that frankly really shouldn't have made it through the beta - I want to help, I want the product to get better. But if we're being told we're just moaners wanting our "local supermarket" in the sim, ie being completely misrepresented and insulted, then I'm happy for this to be my last post. I'll discuss these issues in my day job instead and wait eagerly for the patches that hopefully fix what increasingly (the more I fly the more I see) unfinished and sadly shoddy product.

 

Good luck with it John, I honestly am rooting for it to get fixed. (though not in the Aussie sense)