Orbx Global for XP announced

[tonywob 4,770]

6 hours ago, N1125Y said:

sorry for the silly question, but do we really need ORBX if using Ortho4xp along with  HD Mesh Scenery v4 overlay ????

I argued this case about 2-3 years ago on this forum on why would anyone buy photoscenery when you can generate it yourself and the simple answer that surprised me at the time was "No, I'd rather buy ready-made scenery than make it myself". As a programmer, I thought this was crazy on why anyone would not want to make their own scenery for free 🙂. I made my own scenery tools to add autogen etc (World2XPlane etc), and released many overlay packages out there, but there was definitely a need to make all this easier.

Anyway, to answer your question in relation to using Ortho4XP/HD Mesh overlay in comparison to an ORBX GB TrueEarth region:

- Often, imagery pulled from Bing or wherever have colour differences, clouds, problems on the coastline. The nasty looking change of colour when flying over the scenery. For ORBX's GB TrueEarth regions, not only have I spent months hand-editing and correcting all the orthos to remove clouds and colour differences, I also fixed up the coastlines and added water masking. If you have time to do this yourself or are lucky to find a good source then by all means do this yourself, but believe me, it is not a fun job (thank you Spotify for helping my sanity)

- Colours are altered on the TrueEarth orthos to match the vegetation layers and buildings that are added so everything blends together. I've seen many cases with scenery where the trees and objects really don't match the ortho colours and it can look pretty bad.

- The autogen layer is far more accurate than just throwing a HD Mesh overlay on top. For GB, the houses and even single trees are accurately overlayed on the orthos. HD Mesh is just an approximation and when using this approach you'll end up with trees covering fields and houses that don't look like they belong on the scenery

- Hundreds of custom modelled landmarks and POIs. 

- The question of legality/morality arises. Downloading GBs (even TBs) of orthos from some provider for free and they will be paying the bandwidth costs can't be right and there is only so much of a good thing that is going to last and eventually Bing/Arc/Google are going to put a stop to it.

For a global texture replacement, well this is something I personally wouldn't use because I prefer accurate scenery, but I know many would like it. A global texture replacement would still be X-Plane default scenery, but with more suitable textures, so if you don't mind this, then that's great and it's worked very well on P3D/FSX so far.

 

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

11 hours ago, molleh said:

It's almost like there might be some people out there NOT using Orth4XP...

(Raises hand!)

I don't like ortho scenery for several reasons:.

I like flying bush planes and helicopters, often at low flight levels where I will sometimes see artifacts on ortho scenery like "squashed" 2D buildings and flattened cars in the photo. I just hate seeing that kind of thing, it breaks immersion. I know commercial ortho scenery may have these artifacts edited out, but they may not catch everything.

I enjoy the play of light and shadow at different times of day on the scenery, and in different weather. Just my opinion, but I think the default landclass texture responds better to different lighting and weather effects on the ground.

I do a lot of mountain flying, where the HD and UHD terrain mesh with default texture looks very good. With ortho scenery I often notice weirdly stretched bitmaps on vertical or near-vertical mountain surfaces. It just doesn't look right. I noticed this in the recent Orbx GB scenery on white cliffs on the southern coast.

Finally, I enjoy landing helicopters away from airports. It's what they're good for, right? The resolution with ortho-based scenery isn't high enough in the critical landing phase. The ground dissolves into a smooth, pixellated blur, so I have no visual height reference. With default landclass terrain, the ground still has a grainy texture right up to touchdown, so I can judge height and land smoothly in a helicopter.

Maybe when we're all using petabyte or exabyte drives, and vastly faster Internet connections, I could get the kind of ground resolution that would let me land a helicopter on ortho-based scenery. But the other problems would remain. Ortho scenery does have the major advantage of being a good visual match (at altitude) for areas you're very familiar with in real life. For everywhere else in the world, I think procedural terrain is the way to go. It will also be a better system if we get procedural weather and seasonal effects later on, which Austin has talked about. I can't see that working on ortho-based scenery.

[FlyBaby 659]

2 hours ago, Paraffin said:

(Raises hand!)

I don't like ortho scenery for several reasons:.

I like flying bush planes and helicopters, often at low flight levels where I will sometimes see artifacts on ortho scenery like "squashed" 2D buildings and flattened cars in the photo. I just hate seeing that kind of thing, it breaks immersion. I know commercial ortho scenery may have these artifacts edited out, but they may not catch everything.

I

 

Exactly. Same here, low flight and helis. I switched to X-Plane because of its 3D world. I recently bought an Orbx airport only to discover that they flattened (2D) some of the surrounding area, which is a step back to me.

No one really seemed to take issue with this approach, but I will not buy anything else Orbx if they are not going to stay true to the 3D world.

 

[FlyIce 354]

I agree that a high quality global texture for XP11 would be nice. The quality of current textures in XP11 is definitely not satisfying. Those textures just don't look well polished, kind of amateurish.

Ortho4XP is great and I made >10TB orthos using it. Even for me, since I haven't done any orthos for about a year restarting Ortho4XP still feels a bit dreadful as there are always some hoops to jump through to get everything run smoothly.

To Tony, what is the zoom lever of GB TrueEarth ortho? Sorry if this question has already been asked and answered. Haven't bought it since haven't got time to fly sims for quite a while. Sure can understand and appreciate your efforts on correcting those ortho images. It'll be a pity if the ZL is too low. 

Edited January 2, 2019 by FlyIce

[Paraffin 2,197]

As a postscript to my post above, I did just buy the Orbx GB South, as a test for my preconceptions. It's 15% off in the end of year sale, which helped.  🙂

I have a Bell 412 helicopter in the FSEconomy game based nearby in northern Europe that I haven't flown, and I need to get it working on assignments or else sell it in FSE. If nothing else, the landmarks in that Orbx package will be an incentive to head north and do some flying in the UK. I'll see if my feelings about orthos still hold up after enough time spent over that scenery.

[Simicro 247]

15 hours ago, Paraffin said:

(Raises hand!)

I don't like ortho scenery for several reasons....

Same here. I'm flying helos and GA too and I'm happy with the default scenery combined with some free/payware airports.

Ortho is too technical/time consuming and takes a lot of SSD/HD space.

 

 

[tonywob 4,770]

5 hours ago, FlyIce said:

To Tony, what is the zoom lever of GB TrueEarth ortho? Sorry if this question has already been asked and answered. Haven't bought it since haven't got time to fly sims for quite a while. Sure can understand and appreciate your efforts on correcting those ortho images. It'll be a pity if the ZL is too low. 

It was purchased at 1.2m/px. I'd say this corresponds roughly to ZL17, give or a take depending on the latitude. There was a discussion some time ago on why higher ZL wasn't included, and the simple answer is that the cost to purchase was magnitudes in order higher, and also the bandwidth costs would be really high. For most purposes (unless you're flying really low), this seems to be a good balance

 

[FlyIce 354]

Thanks for the answer! 1.2m/px is ZL17 which is the zoom level I used for my almost all my own Ortho4XP tiles. That's great. Definitely will find time to purchase and fly the scenery!