Word of warning: Dont buy London landmarks (orbx)!

[The Flight Level 2,113]

49 minutes ago, Steve Dra said:

Quite possibly the best answer on the situation with 3rd party devs at this early point in the history of MSFS (is 5 days into the release long enough for it to even have a history? LOL).

I know for a fact when ORBX saw the level of detail we're getting out of the box, brown matter flowed freely from their hindquarters when contemplating the idea of just "porting over" their existing work we've been enamored with since the beginning of the industry (3rd party scenery design).

I wholeheartedly agree that some areas of the world need work, and I'm glad we have ORBXs out there that have the capability to enhance areas of the world.....the big issue is if they are going to "re-tool" and do it right...or try to feed the FS community re-hashed code that is clearly sub-par with the bar MSFS just set. 

Seems like for this release, they chose the latter, and we can only hope they were doing it for the obvious cash-grab of the new-to-simming crowd who truly don't know better.  I say "we can only hope" in regards to the fact that there is not an experienced simmer here, with 5 or more OBRX titles to their name, that knows this is not the ORBX we're expecting...we can only hope that they seriously are not so obtuse that they actually thought they'd not get called out by us.   If so...then we'd all drop them like a hot potato and move on.   But I have to believe they'll learn from this...go re-tool...and come back in few months with new scenery that WILL fit the bill.  Of course it's gonna cost more to cover the cost of re-tooling.

As much as it would have been easier for Boeing to build the Dreamliner from aluminium...they knew it'd never meet the performance goals of new, carbon fiber technology.   They spent billions to "re-tool" for CF manufacturing...and it will surely pay-off in the future.  That is where we're at in flightsim....all the 3rd party devs are gonna' have to "re-tool" to build stuff we're gonna want to pay for in MSFS.  And while not in the "billions" realm of cost...there will be a cost...and we'll have it passed to us (as it should be).

MSFS Scenery out of the box....

  My house

Hollywood sign:

Stone Mountain, Georgia USA

 

ORBX, Your turn....make THIS better...Impress me.  I dare you. 🙂

 

Great commentary Steve! Couldn’t have described it better!

[paintedfutures 6]

16 hours ago, Moria15 said:

Orbx have stated on their forums that they accept there are no undulations on the runway as there should be at London City and they are looking at a fix for this and will ensure that all future releases correctly reflect the terrain of the airport...

Now we just have to wait and see how long they take.

Graham

What really surprises me about their London City airport add-on is that it seems like ORBX didn't even look at the default airport to see what needed to be improved. They just decided "right, we'll port over an existing airport from another sim, maybe move around a few objects, and job done". This style of development would be surprising from a modder creating something for free, but from a developer charging money for an add-on to a revolutionary product? What on Earth?

Hopefully this whole debacle has shown ORBX that they should make add-ons that actually improve on the base sim, even if it means abandoning techniques and workflows that worked for older sims like XPlane and P3D.

[flycln 435]

They had it out on release day and surely made a lot of money. Mission accomplished for ORBX. 
 

That their QA is sorely lacking has been obvious for months. They don’t seem to care. 

Edited August 23, 2020 by flycln

[SirKibble 16]

On 8/19/2020 at 8:31 PM, CaribbeanCLANK said:

Now I do not have the sim. I played for several hours yesterday at a friend's house. We flew over default London and Orbx London and we did like what we saw with Orbx's product but that was from altidude. At a glance we did NOT notice the low res quality of Orbx's assets. Flying several hundred feet in the air we did not see these details or should I say "lack of details"....IGNORANCE IS BLISS!!!!! 🙄

Going on the reputation of Orbx from our library of FSX and P3D product, we didn't even think twice. Luckily, my friend only bought London and didn't purchase other products. I just shared this video with him. 

I would love to see what FlightBeam's KDEN has to offer compared to the handcrafted version in the sim. After watching this video, I am curious to see comparisons of other products. A bit disappointed in Orbx but hopefully they fix this. 

 I like your caution. If you have doubts about Flightbeam, they paid a visit here to post comparison screenshots and address issues. 

 

[RudyB24 296]

They have learned form this past week, this what they say wit the update they sent to Microsoft to appear in the store soon, were a.o. the default buildings are re-instated:

Our Landmarks London pack has received quite a lot of attention and we are going to explore how we can improve on aspects such as higher definition models, particularly for the more prominent POIs, while maintaining high performance in the sim. 

Please note that there are still items in the pack such as bridge placements and areas where the Thames is not flat and we are working with Asobo to rectify that.

The past week has been quite the learning journey for us and we appreciate everyone's support and patience.

[flyboy340 0]

Does anyone know how to uninstall this product completely? 

[flyboy340 0]

Found the entry <Package name="orbx-landmarks-london-city-pack" active="true"/> in  - Content.xml "Scenery config file" 

located - F:\WpSystem\S-1-5-21-2324766538-1109606644-3205909984-1000\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_8wekyb3d8bbwe\LocalCache\Content.xml     (F:\ was my installation drive)

Has anyone tried manually editing these files without causing problems to other parts of the sim?

[Elwyn 67]

it's now 50% off! 😁

[Gabe777 132]

The biggest worry is that Orbx will find their niche by offering 15, 7, and 1cm resolution patches.

The problem here is it will annihilate framerates.

I can fly over London easily at 30 FPS solid at dusk with a storm around me.

Never been able to do this before.

If Orbx come along and start putting "band aids" everywhere ... (Small areas of improvements), using the 15 CENTIMETRE REZ ! marketing guff.... We are gonna start seeing massive Framerate drops all the time as we approach one. They need to blend in with existing scenery and just alter or modify shapes and positions, without making it "look better".

Otherwise.... It's a no from me !

Norway and Alaskan airports ? Yes please Mr Orbx 👍.... but band aids dotted around ? No thanks Mister 🥴🥴🥴

 

 

 

😁

Edited August 23, 2020 by Gabe777

[Reader 2,021]

22 hours ago, Moria15 said:

Orbx have stated on their forums that they accept there are no undulations on the runway as there should be at London City and they are looking at a fix for this and will ensure that all future releases correctly reflect the terrain of the airport...

 

 

It is worth mentioning, though probably pointless in this topic, that the default EGLC runway, though undulating nicely, does not reflect the real world.

 

[G-RFRY 1,712]

I lived in Chobham in the early 70s not far from McLaren HQ they built a new. and i know they have had some hard times of late but to build a housing estate on the roof come on, a building that won an award.

 

[JerryT87 22]

On 8/19/2020 at 10:51 AM, Carts85 said:

I hope this sends a message to all the 3PDs that we won’t settle for just the same old cut and paste jobs of the old tired scenery of the past, the gap between default and payware scenery has drastically closed and we expect a lot more from them.

Same for the addon aircraft. I saw a video on the Carenado 182. That thing sounds like an RC plane. These guys are really gonna have to step up their work on sounds if I'm going to drop cash on their software..

[Chock 17,769]

18 minutes ago, JerryT87 said:

I saw a video on the Carenado 182. That thing sounds like an RC plane.

You can't really know for sure what something sounds like from a youtube video. On my video of the Carenado 182, I used a Blue Snowball Microphone Cardioid/Omnidirectional microphone for the v/o, since it was on my desk and therefore convenient for a quick video which was more about the flight replication, visuals and systems simulation.

That Blue mike is intended mainly for v/o blog stuff, but with sound from the monitor also picking up on it, as well as a digital recording of the sound on the PC from the sim ending up in the NLE mix, you're going to get misleading impression of the sound. This is even before YT compression gets hold of it as well.

And all that's before we even get to whether you watched the video with your own audio replication having the flat response of a neutral monitor monitor speaker, or headphone, to replicate the sound on the video without further tweaking it. So whilst I did preview the 3D 5.1 placement of the sound on my video my moving the view around, that was purely for positioning, and not audio quality because there's no way it would accurately depict the audio EQ etc from that set up.

I daresay that might be the case with other videos out there too. In reality, it's not got the best sound, but it's not as bad as some people would have you believe.

Edited August 23, 2020 by Chock

[Ricardo41 5,949]

On 8/22/2020 at 7:43 PM, Steve Dra said:

I know for a fact when ORBX saw the level of detail we're getting out of the box, brown matter flowed freely from their hindquarters when contemplating the idea of just "porting over" their existing work we've been enamored with since the beginning of the industry (3rd party scenery design).

 

I think that a lot of developers are currently suffering from intense intestinal distress, because for the first in the history of simming we're asking: is this addon as good as the default?

[JerryT87 22]

26 minutes ago, Chock said:

I daresay that might be the case with other videos out there too. In reality, it's not got the best sound, but it's not as bad as some people would have you believe.

But is it as good as the Asobo sounds out of the box? It should be at least to that standard. Thats the point I was making. That is the new minimum for sounds now, "not the best sound" isn't good enough for me.

The 3rd party guys have a lot of work to do to meet the new minimum standards now in place. Its going to be a bit of a painful process I think.