FSDT Releases Key West

[FlyAndFight 37]

Picked it up last night and got to fly out of it this evening.  Really nice looking and no frame rate issues that I can sense.   Would have been cool if they had included an update for Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas.  Flew out there and found what appeared to be several houses but no "fort".  

 

 

 

[Kilo60 660]

24 minutes ago, FlyAndFight said:

Picked it up last night and got to fly out of it this evening.  Really nice looking and no frame rate issues that I can sense.   Would have been cool if they had included an update for Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas.  Flew out there and found what appeared to be several houses but no "fort".  

 

 

 

Yes Agreed!

[Kilo60 660]

On 9/23/2020 at 9:07 PM, raymar said:

Key West is one of my favorite vacation spots going back to my very early days and I have to tell you I am totally underwhelmed with this version.

I think we are spoiled by the Latin VFR version for P3D...

 

Didn't they remake the area around the Key West airport as well?

Edited September 26, 2020 by n4gix
Removed unnecessary long quote!

[virtuali 4,419]

4 hours ago, raymar said:

Totally disappointed, I am. Maybe this should have been one of those $5.00 airports or maybe free if you buy KORD for twice the price of this one

I think you are missing the point here.

First, your perception of value is a bit skewed because, you must remember that, out of 9.99$, we almost never get the full amount, since all retailers have a service fee ( including Digital River, which we use to sell from *our* website ), which might be lower/higher but, in some cases can approach that 5$. And, we also can't price the scenery much differently on our site than on other retailer sites. Also, since the scenery will be sold on the MS Marketplace soon, we couldn't even do what you were proposing ( make it free for KORD V2 purchasers ), because the MS Marketplace doesn't allow that kind of offers, with a product that is discounted or even free depending on a purchase of another. We don't know if this ability might be offered in the future, but for the time being it's not. Of course, we are not allowed to put something on the MS Marketplace, and give on our own site completely different commercial conditions. Yes, a discount for previous owners ( like KORD V2 ) is accepted, but a *free* product that Marketplace users would have to pay for instead, that's too much.

But all price considerations apart, you are missing the point about what a scenery for MSFS should be done, and it's seems you are still reasoning with the FSX/P3D old mindset. Yes, in previous simulators the default scenery around is usually so sparse that, in order to make a small airport more attractive, many developers modeled the area around it. We never liked this approach, because we mostly made large airports, but I understand that for smaller airports *in FSX/P3D* it made sense.

However, this is not FSX/P3D and this is not a scenery converted from it. It was made specifically for MSFS, and the default scenery for Key West lies in an area with Lidar Photogrammetry, so by default all the island is already modeled and, when a scenery lies in a Photogrammetry area, it has some design challenges:

- You cannot create a "proper" aerial photo if the area is already covered by Lidar. Yes, we do have a custom photoreal background, but it's not made as a true aerial photo, it uses the same method as Aprons, so we cannot extend it too much outside the airport background, otherwise it would take an insane amount of textures *just* to cover the Lidar, which is 15cm/pixel, so even for this small area, it would require thousands of textures to redo the whole island.

- Even if we did that, the only way to see an aerial photo that covers an area that was already covered by Lidar, would be configuring the sim to DISABLE Online streaming, because the sim assumes nothing can be better than Lidar so, a custom aerial image ( made as a "true" aerial image ) won't show up in a Lidar area, unless you fly with online scenery streaming disabled.

- You cannot really "exclude" Lidar objects. You can only flat them out, which means you would have to redo each and every house on the island to get some visual consistency. And no, for the same reason explained above, we couldn't even put autogen there ( as other sceneries for Key West in FSX/P3D did ), because custom autogen in a Lidar area would show up only in Offline mode.

- It we decided to nuke the lidar entirely, and remodel each and every building manually, the scenery would have been out for Christmas, it wouldn't cost "only" 9.99$, people would see it as "expensive" anyway, and would complained why we lost months doing Key West, when we should have done PHNL, for example...

- Even if we decided to remodel the whole island manually, it might still be entirely possible that, at one time, the Lidar on MS servers might improve, and that can happen at any time, without us knowing so, all that work that made the scenery more costly to do, might have gone wasted. That's the same reason why we haven't done anything to improve the water colors: MS clearly said in an interview they are going to improve water mask to have a better coverage of reefs, colors, bathymetry, etc. which in some part of the world already looks stunning so, it would be a waste trying to fix that *now* when it can be improved on the default scenery at any time.

We all should try to understand that, with a default scenery that is streamed from servers ( never happened before, in any sim ), it completely changes the way add-on sceneries are made, and allows you to get a proper FSDT scenery with proper textures at a very reasonable price, because it didn't took a year to make.

The only thing I can agree ( sort of ) to, was that we might add some detail to the NAS, because I DID flew there, as a passenger with some pilot friends, with a GA plane many years ago, and I do recall very well how careful the guy piloting was during the approach, not to stray off course because of the nearby military. But this can be always sorted out with updates later. 

Edited September 24, 2020 by virtuali

[RALF9636 1,920]

3 hours ago, FlyAndFight said:

Picked it up last night and got to fly out of it this evening.  Really nice looking and no frame rate issues that I can sense.   Would have been cool if they had included an update for Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas.  Flew out there and found what appeared to be several houses but no "fort".  

 

 

 

+ 1 for the Dry Tortugas and Fort Jefferson. Hopefully someone will add that for a nice trip from Key West (and we need some more seaplanes / amphibians).

[CFIJose 5,485]

4 hours ago, virtuali said:

I think you are missing the point here.

Thank you for the exemplary explanation. Most simmers have no idea of what it is to run an add-on business. You will get ZERO complaints from me at these prices. I just hope that you consider all the Hawaiian airports and venture into Caribbean destinations. These locations have been neglected by devs for years. If I had the knowledge, the talent, the personnel, and the money I would create a dev team and focus my energies on only tropical destinations.

Edited September 24, 2020 by DJJose

[steve310002 1,198]

Any further information on the fact that if you have certain addons installed in the Florida region, buildings for Key West Airport don't show up (as reported on the FSDT forums)?

Which addons does this clash with? Is it freeware addons (and precisely which ones) or is it Latin VFRs Miami airport that is causing the conflict?

Whilst I appreciate that only Asobo can fix the issues of such scenery conflicts (similar to the recent Orbx and Aerosofts conflicting addons), I also believe all developers need to test for this too if there is any other scenery either payware or freeware in the vicinity of their addon. Its too easy to pass the book. Asobo needs to get this fixed as a priority as when it comes to people wasting money on unusable addons, it won't be long before customers stop buying for fear of being burned twice. In the meantime for their own interest developers should be testing for this as its not good PR for them either.

I hope this gets resolved so I can buy this amazing addon with peace of mind that it will work as described. And it looks great BTW. The animations look really nice and for me such details really make the difference in payware airports. Well done on that!

[Sesquashtoo 2,846]

13 hours ago, regis9 said:

Yes I am loving the new pricing approach that most scenery developers have adopted and will buy more as a result.  I’ll probably end up spending the same in total, but with more nice airports to fly in and out of.

My one worry, that nobody has addressed...

Post Edit:

I deleted this post, because it expresses a personal opinion, that I feel might influence other's decision(s) to populate MSFS with 3rdP content, scenery and aircraft, ...and perhaps, nobody should possibly influence another's viewpoint on any flight sim, or added content.  So...enjoy all...for there are many reasons to enjoy MSFS.

Edited September 24, 2020 by Sesquashtoo

[virtuali 4,419]

11 minutes ago, steve310002 said:

Any further information on the fact that if you have certain addons installed in the Florida region, buildings for Key West Airport don't show up (as reported on the FSDT forums)?

Which addons does this clash with? Is it freeware addons (and precisely which ones) or is it Latin VFRs Miami airport that is causing the conflict?

We are looking into this, and Latin VFR KMIA surely is NOT the problem. While you cannot expect we'd test every freeware out there, in this specific case, we tried those two sceneries ( Hollywood Guitar Hotel and the Kennedy Space center ) and, of course, we couldn't replicate any problem.

However, these two sceneries surely have conflicts, meaning they are conflicting between *themselves* because:

Both aquilasim-guitarhotel and aquilasim-nasa have this file in their packages:

scenery\world\scenery\scenery.bgl

According to official info we got from Asobo, two filenames in different packages that have the same name AND the same path IT'S A CONFLICT. This came up straight from Asobo, so we can safely assume is correct.

In addition to that, the aquilasim-guitarhotel package has a file named like this

scenery\global\scenery\modelLib.bgl

There are MANY sceneries out there ( both freeware and payware ) that use this exact name and path and, again, this IS a conflict according to Asobo. We had this problem in our very first release of KORD, and in this case it was enough to update it by renaming our model library with a different name and path. Obviously, KEYW is already made like this, so there's no way the conflict start with one of our files, since they all have unique names and path.

However, it's possible the conflicts that OTHER files ( both because of the files named both scenery\world\scenery\scenery.bgl in case of those two, but also the scenery\global\scenery\modelLib.bgl that is used by *many* addons ) are causing between THEMSELVES, is triggering some kind of bug or unexpected behavior of the sim, which in this case is affecting our scenery.

Please note that, with both KMIA and these two freeware, we still cannot reproduce the problem, and this is also something I found: it takes a certain NUMBER of conflicting files ( for example many files named modelLib.bgl ) before things start to disappear.

The main issue is, with FSX we could simply say "be sure to place the scenery on an higher layer", but there's no Scenery Library with rearranging abilities here, we can only hope that freeware authors will start to be more careful how they name their files because it's 100% sure IT IS possible to create conflicts.

[CFIJose 5,485]

42 minutes ago, virtuali said:

Both aquilasim-guitarhotel and aquilasim-nasa have this file in their packages:

I have both freewares (aquilasim-guitarhotel and aquilasim-nasa) & LatinVFR's KMIA in my community folder and I do not see anything unusual with regards to scenery compatibility at KEYW or KMIA.

Edited September 24, 2020 by DJJose

[Farlis 2,280]

@DJJose 

Would you do us others a favor and not quote Umberto's complete posts everytime you answer him, please? 

Having to scroll through 10 paragraphs everytime, just to read your answer is not exactly reader friendly.

 

Edited September 24, 2020 by Farlis

[CFIJose 5,485]

1 minute ago, Farlis said:

@DJJose 

Would you do us others a favor and not quote Umberto's complete posts everytime you answer him, please? 

Having to scroll through 10 paragraphs everytime, just to read your answer is not exactly reader friendly.

 

Happy?

[cavaricooper 2,613]

@virtuali

Umberto-

I am enjoying Key West, but would second the idea of more NAS and Tortuga details. They are KEY to providing an authentic flavor to the area. Also, I did look for the Southern Most Point monument and could not find it... did I just miss it?

Thanks again- C

[virtuali 4,419]

28 minutes ago, DJJose said:

I have both freewares (aquilasim-guitarhotel and aquilasim-nasa) & LatinVFR's KMIA in my community folder and I do not see anything unusual with regards to scenery compatibility at KEYW or KMIA.

That's what I said: we also tried them, and couldn't replicate any problems but, the conflict is there nonetheless so, it's possible problems starts to happen after a certain amount of conflicts.

[CFIJose 5,485]

10 minutes ago, virtuali said:

That's what I said: we also tried them, and couldn't replicate any problems but, the conflict is there nonetheless so, it's possible problems starts to happen after a certain amount of conflicts.

I know. 😀

Some pics: