Orbx

This product is not dependant on you having *any* Orbx products installed. It upgrades FSX/P3D1/P3D2/FSX:SE default tree textures as well as FTX Global and FTX region tree textures. You get about a 10-15% FPS improvement and slightly less VAS usage. It's our first product which also works for default non-Orbx installations.

I endorse FSX:SE fully. There is clearly a performance and VAS usage improvement, anyone trying to downplay that is wasting internet cycles, just ignore them. There were improvements made to the very old code and some glaring bugs fixed. This is not news to anybody and the evidence is tangible. At their invitation, I visited Dovetail Games in Kent UK yesterday and came away impressed. Good guys there and they have a vision for flight sim. FSX:SE is now installed on my dev PC and it's my go-to sim now. Enough said. We are deep-testing objectflow.dll now, hopefully we'll release the FSX:SE very soon, stay tuned.

Orbx has released over 200 freeware airports for FTX Global in the past year alone, just grab them from our website. These utilise all our libraries and include animated people and objects, 3D grasses and hundreds of clutter objects at each location, so they are substantially better than just a coat of lipstick. The free airports we're releasing for Europe are pretty much payware quality. I think developers have a responsibility to give back as much as they get, to the community that feeds them. In our case since 2008 we've given away four times as many free airports as payware ones and also spun off a freeware group called AussieX which has given away countless airports, sceneries and repaints. I'm not trying to solicit a slap on my back, just saying that payware developers have a responsibility to continue to maintain their roots in what makes the FS community great in the first place.

openLC NA is coming along nicely, should be out in first half of 2015; we spent a LOT of time improving openLC EU 1.1 That is good to know. I am visiting Dovetail's office the week after next so I'll give them some headspace to try and convince me. It's going to be a big ask to sell a $99 DLC to someone who paid for a $7 sim, lol!

We love that DTG breathed new life into FSX with SE but we're not offering our products as DLC for Valve and DTG to take margins off, it's just not a good business move for us, especially when they run 80% off snap-sales. We just don't want to compete with Steam for the same business. What we have found though, is that Steam users know how to use Google and we're getting a bunch of incremental business anyway because regardless of whether DLC is on Steam, customers will look for 3rd party addons from wherever they are available. And yeah, continually changing exe version numbers are a PITA. With P3D it generally only changes quarterly or less, and we can re-sign our DLLs quickly for that, but FSX:SE is proving a little trickier. I am more interested in what DTG does next. That should get my interest, not FSX-redux.

Incorrect. Orbx has updated all its 3D lighting to the autogen based lights which don't have 3D light pole objects attached and do have correct light splashes underneath. We also offer a control panel to change the colour pallette and sizes of lights. Additionally we also have intersection brake/red/green lights and neon lights near shopping centres. Since our lights are autogen there is zero FPS impact if you use your same slider setting for autogen density.

I can answer #3. A. You can try this freeware shader fix here at AVSIM: http://library.avsim.net/login.php?Location=%2Fdownload.php%3FDLID%3D185080 B. Or purchase Steve's DX10 fixer tool (highly recommended) Either way, you'll need to run DX10 to fix our 3D lights, unless someone has a DX9 fix we don't know about.

Yes LM are using the latest version of Visual Studio.

You can install Orbx products directly into FSX:SE as long as it is installed after the original FSX. Dovetail uses the exact same Windows Registry key for the root FSX folder location, so all our addons install fine. Caveat: you will need to use Steve's DX10 Fixer to resolve the FTX Global lights showing up as black squares. Also we'll need to release a re-signed version of our ObjectFlow.dll library, but other than that our initial tests suggest all our stuff will work fine. Of course if you have legacy FSX also installed on the same PC, I can't speak to that situation since I've only tested on a virgin PC with a virgin FSX:SE install.

With new tech coming up the line (which I cannot talk about publicly yet), yes we can make a GTAV style entire world. To be honest, visually we could do a job pretty close to what Rockstar did using current gen tech, given the small size of their game world. A lot of our recent releases are bigger in square miles and have a very high level of immersion at ground level. I'm talking about P3D though, FSX is frozen code that has been extended about as far as we can take it with our custom tech.

Thanks for the positive feedback on Norway! The GTAV video is pretty, but let's put things into context: GTAV is the most expensive video game ever made in history, with a budget of $250 million and hundreds upon hundreds of developers spending 5+ years to make it. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Development_of_Grand_Theft_Auto_V It's also set on a tiny island a percentile fraction of the size of Norway. The Orbx FTX Norway team varied between 5-7 people, mostly part-time and they took just under a year with a six-figure budget. No comparison really That said, give me $250,000,000 and I promise you Orbx could make GTAV style scenery for the entire planet, probably with $190 million cash left in the bank!

Specifically, 33% off everything for over a month, sale ends January 1st. Thanks for giving folks the heads up on this Olli

Thanks Mitch, kind words and the whole team appreciate your feedback.

Indeed Gordon Madison is currently working with Duncan to diagnose his performance issues in a very hands on interactive manner. Having the developer himself guide you through the issues is very welcome for Duncan I am sure.

Why are you guys using browsers to download large files? You should always without fail, use a download manager. Why? Because a DLM will resume a lost or interrupted connection, and all Orbx servers support resuming - allowing a lost connection of a 3GB file to continue if it is at 97%, for example. I have been using GetRight as my DLM for a decade, it's free. Furthermore, GetRight allows you to use up to four concurrent connections to the same server, effectively doubling your download speed or more. The four connection option is included in the free version. I even use a DLM to download large files from our own development servers. We've had some recent feedback from customers about failed downloads and almost all of the reports are from those not using a DLM.

All you need to know is here on our forums, no login or account is needed to view: http://www.orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/76414-all-you-need-to-know-about-orbx-products-pdf-document/

Making remarks that insult Islam might well get you banned from AVSIM for life as well. You may be 80 years old but we just don't tolerate rudeness and table-thumping on the Orbx forums, and the mods here would not tolerate too much more of that style of remark either. Yes, we do get a lot of praise and positive feedback from our customers when we release new products. It seems though, that it's frowned upon by many in the FS community. How dare people actually appreciate the work that went into developing products!!!? To me it just smacks of professional jealousy from jaded people who have nothing better to do than be negative about most things whilst hiding being an internet forum moniker.

KRDD Redding will be released by this coming weekend all going well KHAF Half Moon Bay will be March, Scott is extending the PR and also working on the free CityScape SFO and coming through 2014 ... KSQL San Carlos KMMH Mammoth Yosemite, Mammoth Lakes KBIH Eastern Sierra, Bishop CA O57 Bryant in Bridgeport, CA CA51 The Sea Ranch E55 Ocean Ridge Airport KEKA Murray Field airport + O33 Samoa KMRY Monterey Regional Airport KBLU Blue Canyon Airport KACV Arcata So plenty of NCA goodness to be had by the end of the year

Been talking to Mir from FlightBeam and he's making a V3 of KSFO to perfectly match our NCA color pallette and autogen. I flew into KSFO a few days ago and took a bunch of photos for him too

That has been done, and the installer release for P3Dv2 is imminent, just doing final testing. Then that will be closely followed by all the NA regions with the new lights for all three sim platforms, then NZ. I do realise that there has been a bit of a lag between P3Dv2 and updating those regions for it, but adding the FTXG lights is mainly a manual process which has taken some time. We're also beginning to roll out stand-alone new versions of our AU payware airports for P3Dv2 that leverage new tech and the shadow system of that platform. Oh, and thanks for the kudos and feedback for the freeware, we have hundreds more free airports for FTXG coming in 2014 and quite a few payware-quality freeware stand-alone airports too, the first being EDBH. It's been a crazy busy 2013 and the team is just having a little breather with their families before we release NCA Northern California and openLC Europe in Jan/Feb.

I love Scotch Eggs. I have them with a big blob of mayonnaise and a sprinkling of salt and pepper :wub:

Sums it up perfectly. Same old same old. Meantime Orbx's customer base grows ever larger and we continue to release more products despite the drum-beaters seemingly wanting us to fail. VECTOR is a stunning sales success and we're very pleased that a large percentage of FTXG customers have also purchased VECTOR. Meantime VECTOR V1.1 is being worked on and should be released mid-January. If people had bothered to read the User Guide they would have understood our thinking behind VECTOR, that is has warts and will continue to improve over time.

Apple got slammed when they launched their own maps last year. The ridicule lasted months upon months. People were predicting this was the beginning of the end of their empire. Etc etc. Now? Most blogs and news sites think that Apple's maps (after 14 months of continual revision, improvement, bug fixes) are now much better than Google's. Funny that

Our FTX Global V1.1 installer is ready to be released possibly today. Anyone who purchased it will be able to download it for free from their FSS account. They will also be emailed. We plan to create triple-installers for FSX/P3D1/P3D2 for all our products progressively over the next 12 months, obviously with the regions being easiest to do and then the airports which will require some more re-jigging. We will also update our migration tool so that if you have our products running in FSX you can run them in side-by-side mode with P3D2 at the same time. Most of this will be free, since we don't believe in charging customers twice for the same products. Some airports will incur a modest upgrade fee if the developer spends many hours enhancing it to take advantage of P3D2 features.

On the contrary, the included User Guide makes it very clear that we are primarily demonstrating the three FTXG layers (base, vector, openLC) plus a bonus free mesh from PILOT'S. Our Pacific Northwest free demo also includes a payware-quality KHQM Bowerman Airport and a large photoreal bay and also photoreal mountain peaks in the Olympic Peninsula. However we did not hear people calling it misleading and expecting PNW to be filled with payware airports. Our Tasmania demo comes with a payware quality Launceston airport and again, we chose to add it to make the demo more enjoyable, not to mislead or misrepresent. We could have left out the glacier and photoreal BIRK Reykjavik airport but we chose to add them in so that the demo could be enjoyed more. You can easily disable those two photoreal files in the demo if you want to revert to purely seeing the 3+1 layers. In fact, Neil Hill is now working on airport upgrades for all the remaining airports in Iceland as a free patch. Indeed there is, and one of our customers has already done for Keflavik X it in this video - You can see the airport from 2:39 onwards