Orbx?

[warbirds 555]

Anyone have any Orbx products for Xplane,,,such as Meigs Field ?

[olderndirt 2,295]

Got Meigs, Broome AU, Damyn's UK and the three TEGB's.  The airports are ports with a 40% discount if you bought them before while the GB series is new technology and very attractive.

[pmb 5,137]

I don't have any of their US XP products yet, will wait until they provide the TE regions as a background. However TE GB, all three parts, and the airports are excellent. Performance is good and they look really nice, if you pimp XP using xVision using the settings suggested on the ORBX forum.

TE GB South performs and - yes - looks much better than the P3D counterpart, at least on my system.

Only minor annoyance with XP is a slight shimmer in the medium distance under certain conditions, notably big cities, which other users see as well but seems to be impossible to get rid of as long as HDR is active in the settings (which I feel is a must and required for xVision to work).

Kind regards, Michael

[FlyBaby 659]

1 hour ago, warbirds said:

Anyone have any Orbx products for Xplane,,,such as Meigs Field ?

I have Meigs Field and while I do not recommend it, you may not take issue with the flat areas that Orbx brings with its scenery in XP,

What I like most about XP is the 3D world (I fly low 80% of the time); however, Orbx introduces flat houses, cars etc. in some of its areas that ruin the immersion for me.

The airport does bring that "field" area to life, but low altitude flying reveals a "step back" from the 3D environment (in the surrounding areas).

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

5 minutes ago, FlyBaby said:

I have Meigs Field and while I do not recommend it, you may not take issue with the flat areas that Orbx brings with its scenery in XP,

What I like most about XP is the 3D world (I fly low 80% of the time); however, Orbx introduces flat houses, cars etc. in some of its areas that ruin the immersion for me.

The airport does bring that "field" area to life, but low altitude flying reveals a "step back" from the 3D environment (in the surrounding areas).

That's my feeling also, about orthophotos in general. It's immersion-breaking to be flying low enough in a helicopter or on final approach in fixed-wing, seeing squashed buildings and squashed car artifacts on the ground. So I mostly avoid ortho scenery. I have a more believable experience with default landclass terrain and autogen, especially custom regional autogen like the free Japan Pro scenery.

I did buy the Orbx TE GB South just to test my assumptions, I will say they did a good job in editing or hiding the worst of the artifacts. It mostly shows up just here and there, and on "stretched" bitmaps on vertical surfaces like seaside cliffs.

With the cars driving on the wrong (er... right?) side of the road, and distinctive British landmarks, I do get a more regional flavor than flying the same area in default terrain. But those flattened artifacts still drive me a little nuts when I see them. So I have mixed feelings about it, and I haven't picked up the other GB products yet. 

[pmb 5,137]

As a pure GA/VFR flyer, I find it of high value to have terrain which actually represents the ground as is. While Orthoscenery made with Ortho4XP, even if used with a good W2XP complement, indeed shows the named artefacts often, I find their numer in TE GB bearable. And don't forget those roads often crossing through settlemenets or even houses in landclass/vector scenery are immersion killers as well.

But as always, that's certainly a matter of taste.

On the other hand, those usually flying at FL300 will probably not need or benefit from such type of scenery.

Kind regards, Michael

[FlyBaby 659]

58 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

That's my feeling also, about orthophotos in general. It's immersion-breaking to be flying low enough in a helicopter or on final approach in fixed-wing, seeing squashed buildings and squashed car artifacts on the ground. So I mostly avoid ortho scenery. I have a more believable experience with default landclass terrain and autogen, especially custom regional autogen like the free Japan Pro scenery.

Ha…somebody else gets it!

For me, Orbx was a must have for P3D, I had global, vectors and OpenLC.

I am not sure if I will get anything else for Orbx XP.

I even tried to delete the Orbx files for the area surrounding the Meigs airport, so that I would just have the Orbx airport and all else would be default XP.

[Colonel X 1,428]

12 hours ago, FlyBaby said:

I have Meigs Field and while I do not recommend it, you may not take issue with the flat areas that Orbx brings with its scenery in XP,

What I like most about XP is the 3D world (I fly low 80% of the time); however, Orbx introduces flat houses, cars etc. in some of its areas that ruin the immersion for me.

The airport does bring that "field" area to life, but low altitude flying reveals a "step back" from the 3D environment (in the surrounding areas).

 

Yeah it really took ORBX to make XP11 look like a last generation sim. 

[fta2017 160]

On 4/12/2019 at 8:25 AM, Colonel X said:

Yeah it really took ORBX to make XP11 look like a last generation sim. 

Yeah, that’s why their TrueEarth GB series is their fastest ever selling region products, clearly because people hate it 🙂

And hundreds of posts all over the internet, forums, FB groups from people saying they can no longer fly anywhere else except in TrueEarth really sounds like they turned XP into a last generation sim 😁

And I am really NOT looking forward to their TrueEarth series for USA, because I much prefer to fly over default XP’s ‘plausible world’ cartoon terrain.

... now to stick my head back into the sand again ....

Edited April 14, 2019 by fta2017

[olderndirt 2,295]

While it's a given that JV and his gang really know how to make a buck, it'd be nice if they had some stronger competition or ANY competition.

[fta2017 160]

Pretty sure I read on their forums that JV said that TrueEarth regions were not profitable (yet) because of the huge costs of getting imagery data and making thousands of 3D models.

My guess that is the real reason they do not have a lot of competitors in this area for XP11 because of the steep costs. Not sure how many companies out there have the funding to take these sorts of projects on.

But they do have some competitors though for P3D though  JustFlight’s poor effort for GB with no colour correction and no POI models, but more expensive than Orbx. And FranceVFR charging as much for a county or city as Orbx does for an area 100x the size. This proves again that their competitors cannot fund large scale projects effectively.

Their biggest competitor is freeware. Ortho4XP is often touted as the free alternative to Orbx but having tried both Ortho4XP and TrueEarth I am glad that JV is being charitable and making no money from it  😄 because there is just no comparison even if their ortho quality is perhaps not the best (compressed to keep install sizes down).

[Longranger 148]

58 minutes ago, fta2017 said:

Pretty sure I read on their forums that JV said that TrueEarth regions were not profitable (yet) because of the huge costs of getting imagery data and making thousands of 3D models.

Yes, directly the TrueEarth Sceneries probably don't earn money, but they have their own refinancing modell. The airports, together with the TrueEarth Sceneries are a totally different question.But right now they are probably not earning money, since they are building their development resources in the UK. Which also means, at the moment only the X-Plane version has a real chance to pay the bills.

If we look at the end of last year, nearly the complete company was doing TrueEarth stuff, and nothing else went forward. Now Australia switched back to their normal work while the UK is their &TrueEarth center, and one of the main research centers, like PBR sceneries for P3D and X-Plane. This is the real advantage for developers. Produce better scneries , while you have better control about the costs. While the old development framework was a bit cheaper you can now produce the same sceneries with a better quality for two or three simulators at nearly the same time! So the production costs for the scenery increased some, but the conversion costs drop considerably..It also means all plattforms have to pay.

The big moment of TrueEarth will be the US sceneries since there, the needed images are free..

[pmb 5,137]

2 hours ago, Longranger said:

Yes, directly the TrueEarth Sceneries probably don't earn money, but they have their own refinancing modell. The airports, together with the TrueEarth Sceneries are a totally different question.But right now they are probably not earning money, since they are building their development resources in the UK. Which also means, at the moment only the X-Plane version has a real chance to pay the bills.

Agreed. TE GB for P3D must have crossed their fiscal scheduling basically. In view of the still large number of P3D users with high expectations on the product, they certainly were hoping for a big income - which seemingly turned into a complete fail. Part of this money was sure foreseen for the new studio plus staff. Supposedly that's the reaon for the two generous sales they had lately.

Given ORBX TE NL works pretty well, they must have screwed up the XP-P3D conversion process. So this has to be basically rebuilt for the P3D TE US conversions to be successful. Otherwise people flying into Seattle will face the same slideshow as over London right now.

Kind regards, Michael

[fta2017 160]

8 hours ago, pmb said:

Given ORBX TE NL works pretty well, they must have screwed up the XP-P3D conversion process. So this has to be basically rebuilt for the P3D TE US conversions to be successful. Otherwise people flying into Seattle will face the same slideshow as over London right now.

Kind regards, Michael

I think you are ignoring the elephant in the room. P3Dv4 runs like a dog compared to the same number of objects/autogen in London in XP11. You can bet Orbx was on the phone to Lockheed pretty early during their beta testing (and Orlando testing), thus 4.5 coming out pretty unexpectedly quickly.

[fta2017 160]

11 hours ago, Longranger said:

If we look at the end of last year, nearly the complete company was doing TrueEarth stuff, and nothing else went forward. Now Australia switched back to their normal work while the UK is their &TrueEarth center, and one of the main research centers, like PBR sceneries for P3D and X-Plane. This is the real advantage for developers. 

Don't agree at all. The TrueEarth team is quite small if you actually bothered to read the user guide, certainly only probably a tenth or less of the company work on those.

End of last year we saw KBMS, NZGS, ESNQ, YTYA, KBSA released for P3D along with patches for KSAN, YBRM, KMRY etc, so that sounds like mostly ESP activity going on. So how do you come up with the statement "nearly the complete company was doing TrueEarth stuff" - are you just making it up without actually knowing the facts?

I am sure JV must laugh when he reads these sorts of posts, all this conjecture about the company that is so far from reality. But then again, he most likely does not read these forums I would guess.

 

Quote

The big moment of TrueEarth will be the US sceneries since there, the needed images are free.

Not for Canada from what they say, and 3D modelling and ortho colour correction is not free 🙂

Edited April 15, 2019 by fta2017