FTX Central , will it ever work properly?

[Bobsk8 12,682]

Everytime I buy scenery from Orbx, like today, when I got North and South Germany on sale for 50% off, I always read that they "strongly recommend " using FTX Central to install the scenery. I always think, well it has been awhile since I have use FTX central, maybe they have finally fixed it, so I start the download.  Come back to the PC around 1 1/2 hours later, and the clock on the right says it has downloaded .77 GB, and it has 3 hours to go, and downloading at 800 kbs, but the download amount is stuck and not moving at all. Come back an hour later, same thing, and download amount is still stuck at the same spot, but the clock for the time till it is finished is still counting down like everything is normal. . Today I actually went to work, came home 7 hours later, and it was stuck at 2.3 GB with 5 GB to go. What the heck is wrong with this company  that they can find a decent way for the customer to download their products> At this rate, to get all of Germany, it will probably take me 3 days. 

Edited August 7, 2018 by Bobsk8

[Matthew Kane 1,343]

They will be updating FTX Central to use a torrent server instead of everyone downloading from a single server. They've said you can op out of the torrent and it will only work when FTX Central is running, this is similar to other gaming servers so nothing new but it will speed things up having the ORBX Community sharing the load. They will be releasing more True Earth scenery so this will be the reason for going this direction as True Earth are much larger files, they need to eliminate the bottle neck.

Whenever they have a sale or a new release the server gets bogged down so this is nothing new, in a few days the demands on the server will drop

Edited August 7, 2018 by Matthew Kane

[DavidP 1,410]

50 minutes ago, Matthew Kane said:

as True Earth are much larger files, they need to eliminate the bottle neck

This is the reason that I don't buy Orbx much these days. I live in a major Australian city and can only get about 300kb/s on a good day on ADSL2+ (yes, that's true). They don't offer any sort of DVD service, so these types of products are out of my reach, as it would literally take weeks to download. Sometimes I might hot spot using my cell phone, but for my existing products I downloaded manually using this method and install via FTX Central. This might improve when I finally get our so-called "high speed" internet, which has been delayed 14 months at my residence but I am not too confident of that!

[Gridley 257]

I know this doesn't help your situation, but I haven't had an issue lately.  Currently downloading between 5-6 MB/s.  

[Matthew Kane 1,343]

yes I didn't have any issues either, I live in New Zealand so this can vary from region to region, I am having decent access to the server currently just over 10 MB/s downloading True Earth Netherlands

Edited August 7, 2018 by Matthew Kane

[Tokitaumelie 164]

There's always the manual download Bob. 

You will have to log onto the purchase page for the product on your account and select the "View Order Details" for the product that you wish to download and there's a Manual Download option toward the bottom (Blue Background).

Then use FTX Central (:-)) option to install, select the first option and browse to your download location.

Being on limited data, this option works best for me

 

Kind regards

Edited August 7, 2018 by Tokitaumelie

[Greggy_D 935]

2 hours ago, Matthew Kane said:

instead of everyone downloading from a single server.

I thought they moved to a distributed AWS model a couple of years ago.

[Matthew Kane 1,343]

17 minutes ago, Greggy_D said:

I thought they moved to a distributed AWS model a couple of years ago.

They are on CDN servers currently

Edited August 7, 2018 by Matthew Kane

[Dave_YVR 972]

I've never once had any issues with FTX Central or it's download speeds. 

[W2DR 1,860]

The troublesome thing to me is that the CDN arrangement has never been truly effective and now they want to use valuable customer bandwidth via torrent to solve the problem of massive downloads associated with the TrueEarth product line. All I can say is that I will NEVER give anyone access to my computer (as in torrent seeding) nor will I use my bandwidth to distribute a product which I have already paid for. Bandwidth isn't free and if ORBX wants to solve the problem all they have to do is sell the product on physical media. It seems that the real ORBX business objective is to avoid the bandwidth costs associated with product distribution and rely on the customer base to do the job for them.....Doug

Edited August 8, 2018 by W2DR
edditted becuase i kant spel

[Matthew Kane 1,343]

I don't have a problem with Torrent, I have about 80% of what they have sold and I don't have limits on my bandwidth, therefore I could just leave FTX Central running all the time for store credit due to my library size, the bigger your library the more people will access and that converts to store credit, works for me

If you opt out then it just uses the current CDN servers so little will change other then less demand on those servers due to Torrent, so you may get better speeds there too.

Edited August 8, 2018 by Matthew Kane

[Bobsk8 12,682]

3 hours ago, Tokitaumelie said:

There's always the manual download Bob. 

You will have to log onto the purchase page for the product on your account and select the "View Order Details" for the product that you wish to download and there's a Manual Download option toward the bottom (Blue Background).

Then use FTX Central (:-)) option to install, select the first option and browse to your download location.

Being on limited data, this option works best for me

 

Kind regards

Hi,

This FTX Central is totally confusing to me. Tonight, after spending an entire day waiting for Germany North to finally get installed, I decided to try to download Germany South. Got about 3 Gigs downloaded, and then went downstairs for a couple of hours to watch TV. Came back up and looked at computer, and FTX had crashed and the program had shut down. I rested FTX Central, set it up to download again, and it started from the beginning.  So I stopped it, and now I am downloading with the manual download ( from the beginning with that too)

 

Now my question is, when I open FTX central, am I suppose to see any kind of option to install Germany South from the zip file in FTX Central, because I don't see anything like that or any mention of Germany South on any of my FTX Central screens. . All I see is the scenery that I have already installed, or do I have to wait until the Zip file is completely downloaded and then that option is suddenly going to appear in FTX Central ..

 

Edited August 8, 2018 by Bobsk8

[GHarrall 494]

2 hours ago, Dave_YVR said:

I've never once had any issues with FTX Central or it's download speeds. 

 I used to have loads of issues when they first went to ftx direct. Slow, interupts etc. 

The last 12 months or so it has been great. 

[Braniff002 5]

19 minutes ago, Bobsk8 said:

Now my question is, when I open FTX central, am I suppose to see any kind of option to install Germany South from the zip file in FTX Central, because I don't see anything like that or any mention of Germany South on any of my FTX Central screens. . All I see is the scenery that I have already installed, or do I have to wait until the Zip file is completely downloaded and then that option is suddenly going to appear in FTX Central ..

On the install screen you should have a version number, underneath that in yellow "installation options" Click on that and you should be presented with 3 options, the first of which is to install from a manually downloaded zip

 

Also make sure you do not have "only show products I have installed" ticked in settings

Edited August 8, 2018 by 53graham

[Bobsk8 12,682]

6 minutes ago, 53graham said:

On the install screen you should have a version number, underneath that in yellow "installation options" Click on that and you should be presented with 3 options, the first of which is to install from a manually downloaded zip

When I open FTX Central;. it has my account on the top left , then under that Categories for the different Regions, Global, Europe, North America, etc.   and on the bottom Settings.  Don't see any mention of an install screen  I have FTX Central 3.2.5.9  Do I have to have the manual install zip fully downloaded before I see an Install screen?

 

Edited August 8, 2018 by Bobsk8