What's the deal with ORBX vector?

[bosflo 53]

Lately I have been reading lots of posts that people are having numerous problems with sunken runways, elevated airports, mesh problems and more. They seem to be related to orbx aec tool. I myself am having problems with sunken airports and the "fix" is to run the aec tool. It doesn't work for me and it seems like it's not working for other people. Did orbx change something lately that is causing all these situations? thanks

[DaveCT2003 1,820]

Works fine for me, no issues with it whatsoever.  Often times people have a third party addons for AI Traffic which installs it's own AFCADs (airport layouts) or have scenery prioritization wrong.

Best wishes.

[Dave_YVR 971]

 Similar to Dave's reply, but most commonly it's user error where they've added scenery and not removed conflicting airport files or followed/searched for compatibility threads about those addons. 

 

[PWJT8D 446]

Some issues I have come accross with it is I will have airports that need an AEC correction but don't show up in either of the lists. And doing the Makerunways fix thing does not help either.

[exeodus 78]

2 hours ago, bosflo said:

Lately I have been reading lots of posts that people are having numerous problems with sunken runways, elevated airports, mesh problems and more. They seem to be related to orbx aec tool. I myself am having problems with sunken airports and the "fix" is to run the aec tool. It doesn't work for me and it seems like it's not working for other people. Did orbx change something lately that is causing all these situations? thanks

Keep in mind that the auto configuration portion of the tool only works for scenery that uses the old scenery.cfg install method.  I will not work with sceneries that use the new xml method.  You can manually disable AEC in the boxes at the bottom of the page, and it works just fine.

[mpw8679 428]

Have had elevation issues since day one.  Many of the airports effected are default as well.

[Indy511 686]

Run the Lorby Addon Organizer to export entire scenery library to a temporary scenery.cfg to be read by the Orbx AEC tool. In other words all sceneries using the xml method are added to a temporary scenery.cfg. Same for the MakeRwys tool.

Edited October 11, 2018 by Bills511

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

4 minutes ago, Bills511 said:

 

Run the Lorby Addon Organizer

 

That's an excellent idea, which I'm going to try. But the fact that Vector doesn't recognize the add-on.xml method just emphasizes how out of date that Vector is.  I mean when is the "frozen water" bug going to be fixed?

[Indy511 686]

10 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

But the fact that Vector doesn't recognize the add-on.xml method just emphasizes how out of date that Vector is.  I mean when is the "frozen water" bug going to be fixed?

Agree 100%

[SpiritFlyer 987]

What's the problem?

I ran the Vector elevation tool, applied it when it was done, restarted P3D v4.3, and elevation problems solved. I own thousands of dollars of ORBX sceneries and have not had a serious problem yet (except a correspondingly lowered bank account).

Love the snow banks, although there was not enough there that would need snow tires and chains on my truck. Looked pretty light being from New Brunswick and all. However I imagine it looks daunting and scary for an Australian used to only dust storms!

Kind regards,

Spirit Flyer Stephen

[Michael Moe 495]

1 hour ago, SpiritFlyer said:

What's the problem?

I ran the Vector elevation tool, applied it when it was done, restarted P3D v4.3, and elevation problems solved. I own thousands of dollars of ORBX sceneries and have not had a serious problem yet (except a correspondingly lowered bank account).

Love the snow banks, although there was not enough there that would need snow tires and chains on my truck. Looked pretty light being from New Brunswick and all. However I imagine it looks daunting and scary for an Australian used to only dust storms!

Kind regards,

Spirit Flyer Stephen

The problem is right above. Lots of airports which is not supported by Vector given problems and manual work .

One of the reason i have it disabled in scenery.cfg. I have just come to a point where no auto updated add-ons is a no-go.

Hopefully developers will look at how PMDG ,Oldprop etc are looking into the future . 

Thanks Michael Moe 

[G-RFRY 1,709]

To be honest since doing a full install of P3Dv4.3 I haven't got round to installing vector but installed all of my ORBX all regions except Alaska, and I don't miss Vector.

[officercrockey 196]

Another point is that P3Dv4 came with a major update of the default vector data. In many places it is hard to tell the difference. It never was their favourite product and maybe they will discountinue it at some point.

[ErichB 3,639]

For all its niggles, Orbx Vector is not just about airport elevation points, it's also about accurately depicted coastlines, rivers and other water bodies.   Flying over any coastline, or area where there should be a water body -  without vector data installed, soon makes it apparent how essential Orbx Vector actually is.  Those angular coastlines are awful without it.  

 I can think of perhaps one example where Vector Elevation Correction has not worked for an airport which left obvious issues.   In all other cases it has worked very well.  The frozen water bodies issue is annoying,  but who really needs it.  Turning it off is a non-issue.

Turn most of the roads, bridges , tunnels and all of that nonsense off, keep the rest.  It is still an essential,  'must have' installation for me.

[AnkH 2,260]

I go even a little bit further and make the claim that for every airport that shows elevation issues but not being selectable inside the FTX Vector config tool, FTX Vector is NOT the cause of the elevation problems.

Otherwise I agree, an update that FTX Vector AEC tool also recognizes add-on.xml based sceneries would be nice. The diversion via Lorby-SI is a little bit cumbersome, but at least it works. Personally, I only use the Manual Approach for now, means: I check if my novel scenery is listed in AEC, if yes, manually disable it, if no, everythings fine.