Terramax for X-Plane - First Impressions

[rdtv91 73]

Flown first 2 flights with it and here are my observations:

 

-The long pause is an absolute killer; tbh I've had to set it manual and then not change it again during the flight as it takes so long (I've got a decent i7, SSD and 1080TI and still takes a while/ freezes the sim if I click or do anything)

-Missing Spring - I read what you wrote above but I feel if its an addon advertising 'seasons' then it should be in there; also not all winter is snow so should also have a winter with darker textures, barren trees and so on.  Just look at what ORBX have done for P3D/FSX series; I was expecting something along the lines of proper season representation; especially for $40....

 

Overall it's okay but I don't really feel it's worth the price tag; the textures are ok but not stand out and only massive difference is if you're using hard winter/ snow - Maybe with some updates/ patches to improve loading speed and add more season variety then it'll become worth it but at the moment I feel personally that it falls short a bit.

[mjrhealth 820]

well for australia , the grass is green in winter and we might get snow on our minuscule mountains, but most of it is desert so quiet irrelevant for us.

[MarioDonick 752]

1 hour ago, rdtv91 said:

Maybe with some updates/ patches to improve loading speed

Have you only tested the initial loading when you switch manually the season, or did you also test the "on the fly" change while flying from one region to another? (I've so far also only tested the manual switching, which to me seems that simply a whole scenery reload is made after the texture switch, like you'd do in the X-Plane developer's menu). I'd expect the "on the fly" changes to be faster, but could not test this yet.

Edited March 18, 2018 by MarioDonick

[Treetops45 1,081]

Within a Terramaxx guide, or the usage commands, does it refer to "Winter, Spring, "Summer" & "Autumn"?

From what I could tell from looking at the promo shots it was more a 2 season application - Summer & Winter.

If it does run to 4 seasons, are the changes in the trees consistent with the seasons?

T45

[rdtv91 73]

From what I have it has Summer, Autumn and 2x Winter options - the trees do in fact change with the season difference but god the loading time when you select it and if you click when its loading then bang the sim locks up for me  :/

 

Not tried the 'auto' change mode yet @MarioDonick going to try it this afternoon, here's hoping...

[avgaskoolaid 292]

1 hour ago, rdtv91 said:

From what I have it has Summer, Autumn and 2x Winter options - the trees do in fact change with the season difference but god the loading time when you select it and if you click when its loading then bang the sim locks up for me  :/

 

Not tried the 'auto' change mode yet @MarioDonick going to try it this afternoon, here's hoping...

How long is the pause? For me, as much as 5 seconds would be tolerable, but anything more would get annoying very fast. 

[rdtv91 73]

37 minutes ago, hamoody said:

How long is the pause? For me, as much as 5 seconds would be tolerable, but anything more would get annoying very fast. 

Quite a bit longer than that I'm afraid at least when selecting them manually - going to try the auto function but having the whole of Europe 'white' because they define now as Winter isn't too realistic; really needs a Spring and Winter-non-snow texture set.

[dmarques69 316]

5 hours ago, rdtv91 said:

Flown first 2 flights with it and here are my observations:

 

-The long pause is an absolute killer; tbh I've had to set it manual and then not change it again during the flight as it takes so long (I've got a decent i7, SSD and 1080TI and still takes a while/ freezes the sim if I click or do anything)

-Missing Spring - I read what you wrote above but I feel if its an addon advertising 'seasons' then it should be in there; also not all winter is snow so should also have a winter with darker textures, barren trees and so on.  Just look at what ORBX have done for P3D/FSX series; I was expecting something along the lines of proper season representation; especially for $40....

 

Overall it's okay but I don't really feel it's worth the price tag; the textures are ok but not stand out and only massive difference is if you're using hard winter/ snow - Maybe with some updates/ patches to improve loading speed and add more season variety then it'll become worth it but at the moment I feel personally that it falls short a bit.

Read somewhere that doenst work with orthos, can you confirm this?

 

[MarioDonick 752]

29 minutes ago, dmarques69 said:

Read somewhere that doenst work with orthos, can you confirm this?

You can read this even in the official product description ;)

Basically, TerraMaxx is a kind of texture replacement. It replaces X-Plane's default textures with colored ones (two variants for winter, one for autumn) and optionally adds a MaxxFX-like filter on the whole display.

That's why they can't replace orthophotos, because how should they know which orthophotos you have installed? Color-adjusting them on the fly would not be very fast.

The alternative approach is what Laminar wants to do in the (far?) future: Do seasons shader based, without the need for special textures.

 

[signmanbob 592]

13 hours ago, hamoody said:

How long is the pause? For me, as much as 5 seconds would be tolerable, but anything more would get annoying very fast. 

Try about 5 minutes at least.  I got tired of waiting and shut down X-Plane through the Task Manager.  I'll be shutting TerraMaxx off completely until they get some updates. I can't stand pausing indefinitely.

[signmanbob 592]

12 hours ago, rdtv91 said:

Quite a bit longer than that I'm afraid at least when selecting them manually - going to try the auto function but having the whole of Europe 'white' because they define now as Winter isn't too realistic; really needs a Spring and Winter-non-snow texture set.

Don't try the "Auto" function.  That's what I had it on.

[CarlosF 1,234]

In my point of view, 1 sec of pause is 1 sec too long, kills immersion.

I'll wait and see what the future holds in this regard.

 

 

[Lenny777 299]

When it finally is in place looks pretty nice. But that wait......I would set it to hard winter until Spring, then change over manually before you fly next time for summer. The process of inserting textures on the fly is slow and painful. I would, however, prefer this than anything else out there. This whole thing is not ideal though. Flying FSX/P3D for years X-plane's history in this respect of changing textures/seasons has been miserable.

[bgpearce01 36]

Another overpriced addon from x aviation that will hopefully be replaced by something better. 

[MarioDonick 752]

12 minutes ago, bgpearce01 said:

Another overpriced addon from x aviation that will hopefully be replaced by something better. 

 

3 hours ago, Lenny777 said:

But that wait....

 

4 hours ago, CarlosF said:

1 sec of pause is 1 sec too long

To all of you who complain about the loading time: Think a second about how X-Plane's scenery system works.

You will then see that ANY texture-based seasons addon will have such loading times. Why? Because for seeing a change, X-Plane needs to reload the scenery. And this scenery reload is what takes such a long time.

You can compare for yourself: Use the "reload scenery" menu command from the X-Plane menu ("developer" section). It takes also that long.

There are only two possibilities to change this behavior: Either Laminar changes how scenery is loaded (maybe in a way that not always the full amount of tiles is loaded, but maybe just the textures in next to your position, and the rest gets loaded in the background; similiar to the background load when you fly from one tile to another). Or Laminar finally introduces shader-based seasons (but I doubt this will come before X-Plane 12).