I know in the past it has always been a grey area about orbx airports with their respective regions. Many pass up good quality airports that orbx has rendered in fear of the scenery being mush without purchasing an expensive region pack that bogs down most systems anyways. I am here to tell you that today I took advantage of the orbx May sale which is 50% off of most if not all of their payware products. I bought KFOT, as well as 65S. Both are noted to *require* a specific region to “work”. I have tested both airports and they are good to go without purchasing the regions. In fact, they blend perfectly with my NA Land Class. I just thought I’d spread the word if anyone is looking for some good GA airports that aren’t going to break the bank! Hurry before the sale ends! 

Depends on the Airport. For instance KMRY has many elevation problems if you don't have NORCAL installed.  I've mentioned it to the Dev and he's not willing to do anything about it. There're a few other airports that I have that don't work "correctly" without the regions installed but I forget which ones. I have no idea why the youtuber "frooglesim" made such a big deal about this like 6 months ago. 

8 minutes ago, fakeflyer737 said:

Depends on the Airport. For instance KMRY has many elevation problems if you don't have NORCAL installed.  I've mentioned it to the Dev and he's not willing to do anything about it. There're a few other airports that I have that don't work "correctly" without the regions installed but I forget which ones. I have no idea why the youtuber "frooglesim" made such a big deal about this like 6 months ago. 

Understandable. It was just a friendly community heads up about two airports that work without their regions 🙂. I know people wonder which ones work and which ones don’t but we can add KFOT, and 65S to the “will work” list. 

I've always believed the Regions offer the best value from ORBX.  I enjoy their airports, too (got plenty of 'em ) but the regions offer top quality mesh, landclass, and vector all in one package.  Additionally, Regions also offer many upgraded airports.  Regions bring great bang for the buck (especially during their sales).

Greg

6 minutes ago, lownslo said:

I've always believed the Regions offer the best value from ORBX.  I enjoy their airports, too (got plenty of 'em ) but the regions offer top quality mesh, landclass, and vector all in one package.  Additionally, Regions also offer many upgraded airports.  Regions bring great bang for the buck (especially during their sales).

Greg

I have one region that’s sitting idle in my FTX Central, Central Rockies, but I’ve never actually had it installed. With NA Landclass plus Global, that’s good enough for what I do. I think regions are for pilots that bang pistons. Us turbine pilots fly too high to take advantage of regions lol. But to each their own. 

I used every single one of the ORBx UK airfields with Horizon VFR Photographic Scenery, and the only one that caused significant problems was EGPB Sumburgh. However, it is worth noting that the flatten files included with my UK2000 VFR Airfields packages were very useful for correcting certain mesh elevation problems that existed at one or two of them.

Edited May 26, 20197 yr by Christopher Low

3 hours ago, Deltaair1212 said:

I have one region that’s sitting idle in my FTX Central, Central Rockies, but I’ve never actually had it installed. With NA Landclass plus Global, that’s good enough for what I do. I think regions are for pilots that bang pistons. Us turbine pilots fly too high to take advantage of regions lol. But to each their own. 

I’m in the same boat as you as far as the regions go. I bought PNW years ago when it first came up but since most of my flying is in airliners, all of the extra detail isn’t worth the performance hit from the full regions. I’ve found that for my type of flying either using Global with their landclass product or photoreal for a certain area to be more than adequate without the associated performance hit.

I’ve used a few of the “region required” airports without the regions installed with no issue, but always feel I’m taking a gamble not knowing if an airport will work correctly without the region.

I’ve suggested a few times on their forums that I wished they would make all the airports compatible with or without the region requirements and even suggested that they might gain some additional sales, but was met with fierce blowback from the developers  who didn’t want to meet that requirement.

4 hours ago, Deltaair1212 said:

I have one region that’s sitting idle in my FTX Central, Central Rockies, but I’ve never actually had it installed. With NA Landclass plus Global, that’s good enough for what I do.
I think regions are for pilots that bang pistons. Us turbine pilots fly too high to take advantage of regions lol. But to each their own. 

As you haven't installed it, seems to me you'll never know.

I took advantage of the 50% sale yesterday to buy Brisbane, Canberra and Melbourne airports but also the AUS terrain. At half-price the whole lot came to less than 44 GBP. Bargain!

Quote

I’ve suggested a few times on their forums that I wished they would make all the airports compatible with or without the region requirements and even suggested that they might gain some additional sales, but was met with fierce blowback from the developers  who didn’t want to meet that requirement.

This is what I (and others) suggested years ago with respect to the ORBx UK airfields and compatibility with PlayHorizon UK VFR Photographic Scenery. I still think that they would have sold more copies of those airfield packages if they had made them fully compatible with photoscenery (and advertised the fact). I took a risk, and found that they worked pretty well. Since a large number of GA flight simmers who used the VFR Photographic Scenery also used Gary's UK2000 VFR Airfields packages, they would have been able to enjoy much improved versions of some of the airfields. I suspect that many photoscenery users decided not to purchase because of those "requirements" that were (and still are) mentioned on the product pages.

It seems strange to me that other developers make the extra effort to provide compatibility with other products, but ORBx are reluctant to do so. Gary Summons has done this with his UK2000 airports (although I think that he uses ORBx FTX UK Regions, so it was in his best interest to do so), but SIM720 provided compatibility options (PlayHorizon photoscenery/ORBx/default) with the handful of UK airfields that they released.

Edited May 26, 20197 yr by Christopher Low

UPDATE: 

I got lucky with the first two airports I had purchased and I guess I wanted to continue the winning streak so I proceeded to purchase KBVS. Turns out this airport has severe issues without its associated region. So if anyone is looking to take advantage of the sale and purchase KBVS, make sure you also purchase the region. Don’t make the mistake I just did 😅. The good news is the sale prevents the blow from hurting as much as it would if it were retail price so I honestly can’t be too mad lol. 

I've tried Squamish with and (purely out of curiosity) without PNW. It does work without PNW, but it looks terrible. I would say it's not worth it (even in a sale) unless you have or intend to get PNW.

Dugald

I own NO regions and all of the following airports work w/o flaws - KIDA, KGPI, KBZN, KJAC, KEGE, KSUN, KSTS, KSBA