Orbx P3D 4.4 and NO SEASONS!

[F737MAX 5,585]

2 hours ago, kevinfirth said:

https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/165729-to-season-or-not-to-season-that-is-the-community-question/?tab=comments#comment-1456502

OrbX re-evaluate TE seasons...

Best news of the year! 😄

What's great is that ORBX has listened and it looks like we will get the choice of best ortho image for summer and a slightly reduced quality ortho to get all the seasons.

A very good compromise that guarantees that I will buy both options.

[Stub 2]

Brilliant news - thank you ORBX for listening. I too will buy both.

[KBUR 178]

27 minutes ago, Stub said:

Brilliant news - thank you ORBX for listening.....

 

Yea, this is ORBX at its best....I really love those guys!!!

Edited January 2, 2019 by KBUR
English is not mine

[ckyliu 1,749]

I am impressed at Orbx's response, I like the idea they'll offer LOD15 Summer only and LOD14 all seasons (no indication I could see of how these would be priced though). To be honest the seasonable trees alone didn't seem too bad.

I do wonder if my system would run LOD15 well though, I don't know what translates in to as pixels per metre. I expect most of the performance impact is from the 3D buildings and trees though.

Edited January 2, 2019 by ckyliu

[Christopher Low 5,352]

LOD15 is 1.2m per pixel, which is not excessive. PlayHorizon VFR Photographic Scenery England and Wales is rendered at this resolution.

[ckyliu 1,749]

Thanks @Christopher Low, I'd definitely want the LOD15 then as I already use Horizon VFR X and occasionally find the resolution lacking.

It's a shame Orbx aren't doing a LOD16 like Horizon did for Scotland but then again they were massive!

[Christopher Low 5,352]

The problem with the Horizon scenery was the lack of consistency in the quality of the textures. Poor quality, badly colour saturated 1.2m per pixel textures can look a right mess.....and that is indeed the case in certain areas of the Horizon England and Wales photoscenery. I am hoping that the ORBx TrueEarth images are more consistent as far as texture quality is concerned. We already know that they have been extensively colour corrected, so that is a good start!

[Guest]

9 hours ago, kevinfirth said:

OrbX re-evaluate TE seasons...

That topic got closed quickly.  I think JV is making the assumption people will not buy season and pay for the extra bandwidth costs (distribute on cheap external HDDs), I'll buy seasons, Orbx will make more profit with them ... 2TB so?  I picked up a 10TB HD for $260 and 2TB M.2's have dropped over 50% in just a few months and they'll continue to drop (just like good 4K monitors can be had for <$300 as just 2-3 years ago that would be $3000) ... storage capacity has not reached it's limits, still a long way to go and in a few years 10TB M.2's will be affordable or we may have moved onto even better storage options.   Flight Simulation has always the limits of hardware from the first day it was sold on the PC.

I can understand the costs of bandwidth, Orbx pass those costs onto those that want to pay ... I know cloud structures like AWS and others, you can be setup to pay "on demand" ... so Orbx would pay for only what they use and they pass that cost onto the consumer (me) ... that's fairly "normal" real world business practice.

Sorry JV got a little upset over no seasons = no purchase, but I've bought existing Orbx products with seasons and then to be confined to only using "summer" all the time ... that's like asking me to not use 75% of the products I already have/purchased that comes WITH season.  If Orbx does TE California without seasons, then I'll stick with Orbx SoCal/NorCal with 4 season ... California, Oregon, Washington look incredibly different for each and every season.  I'm not a "season-phile", I'm for realism, the very reason seasons were made available via the SDK in the first place some 2 decades ago ... how is "Summer only" more realistic?  I understand the business aspects and those can be worked out so as to make a profit for Orbx, I know JV can't possibly believe "as real as it gets" means summer all the time? 

I can understand some locations do indeed look very much the same regardless of the time of year, Hawaii comes to mind and I'm sure there are many locations where a single season or just two seasons is probably enough.

I have enough of "summer" all the time from AF2 and XP11 ... if I want to do summer all the time, I'll use those platforms.

I'll buy LOD15 seasons (no need for LOD14) also, whatever gets me to "as real as it gets" ... why restrict delivery options?  If I have to pay a premium to get premium I will ... heck I did that for years (primarily because most of my cars were FI and/or high compression) when I used to buy gas for my various dino-based vehicles until I switched to EVs. 🙂

Just give me the option where Orbx ... I have no issues with Orbx making profit from that option.

Cheers, Rob.

 

[ckyliu 1,749]

@Christopher Low Oh I know the colour is terrible, my non-flightsim friends have commented on screenshots I sent them being weirdly luminous green and brown (is Playsims the same as Horizon btw?)!

But the actual LOD15 1.2m/px resolution I occasionally find lacking in detail and I expect that issue would disappear at LOD16 60cm/px but whether I could stomach the necessary file size and performance impact is another matter, I never did get the Playsims Scotland stuff. I'm somewhat surprised ORBX didn't go for LOD16 given the imagery and support exists, guess it was a tradeoff. So I'd be going to TrueEarth purely for the autogen buildings (already got Treescapes) and better colours.

No way I would drop to LOD14 2.4m/px (seasons or no seasons) but it's a nice those who require seasons have the option. I ran LOD13 i 4.8m/px in FS2004, and it looked horrid, would not recommend any textures at that resolution.

Edited January 2, 2019 by ckyliu

[kevinfirth 1,393]

15 minutes ago, Rob Ainscough said:

That topic got closed quickly

Nope it’s still open I just posted - they moved the topic out separately.

I get most of their customers will be happy with either 1 season lod15 or full seasons lod14, but JV is anything but thick, I think he’d market a full seasonal lod15 if he thought he could monetise the marginal development cost sufficiently

[Guest]

1 hour ago, kevinfirth said:

I think he’d market a full seasonal lod15 if he thought he could monetise the marginal development cost sufficiently

Well, there are a few things that strike me odd in regards to his bandwidth costs ... specifically FTX Central Install/Uninstall process ... for example it will re-download the product again ... but this ties into my request for a "disable" of products via FTX Central.  FTX Central could prompt the user to "disable" or "remove" ... this would avoid the re-downloading process.  I know I frequently uninstall/install Regions, I could manually edit my scenery library entries or use another tool to do that, but that's opens one up for errors and no support and not to mention I don't know what "other" files might be related to a region, etc. etc. 

Anyway, I'm glad JV is "considering" the option for season, but to be clear I would be happy to pay extra for LOD15 seasons as an "option".  Maybe do a test run on one smaller area product so he can figure out how much it needs to be sold for in order to make a profit based on it's demand.  I do understand that most will not pay for that option (given the Navigraph survey and $200/yr seems to be the majority would not), but does that mean the option should NOT be made available for those willing to pay?

Nothing better for product sales than to have your customers showcase the best it can be.  I also understand there is somewhat of a gamble in storage costs but that can be factored into the consumer price.  There is some computational overhead for doing LOD15 in addition to LOD14 but that's set and forget and come back when it's done.  The work necessary to do the actual seasonal files, no doubt it's more work even if they don't use true seasonal PR imagery and just run the base summer imagery thru various Photoshop filters/scripts to get the desired seasoned look ... pretty sure they have all the seasonal trees already.

As far as alternate methods to doing seasons ... shaders approach can't define a proper season, it might be able to adjust it a little but it's NOT a viable substitution for a season.  Procedural "snow" doesn't define a season either ... seasons aren't just about snow.

Cheers, Rob.

[Guest]

5 hours ago, kevinfirth said:

Nope it’s still open I just posted - they moved the topic out separately.

The moved link is now closed?  Or is there another different moved link?

Cheers, Rob.

[kevinfirth 1,393]

22 minutes ago, Rob Ainscough said:

The moved link is now closed?  Or is there another different moved link?

Cheers, Rob.

https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/165729-to-season-or-not-to-season-that-is-the-community-question/?page=3&amp;tab=comments#comment-1457003

still open there...

[reecemj 146]

Robs original link is closed. https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/165691-orbx-true-earth-seasons-topic/

JV open his own. https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/165729-to-season-or-not-to-season-that-is-the-community-question/