Orbx

Yes, it fills the gap between PNW and Tongass Fjords.

OK the patch is now live - http://fullterrain.com/support.html#lancair

Thanks for your support everyone! The Lancair is now officially the best selling aircraft at flightsimstore.com, which is not bad for it being a few days on sale :)The V1.1 patch is not far away now, in final QA testing. We've added mouse clickzones for the 2D popups (in addition to the SHIFT+ 2/3/4) and also the ability to use the default Arial font for the GNS for those who don't like the Garmin authentic fonts. Further clarity to the AP panel and other minor fixes as reported by customers.We have two more aircraft in development right now, which we're just as excited about. Thanks again for the great reception you've given the Lancair!

Actually Mitch, we inadvertantly placed the Lancair v1.1 patch link on our support website (it's since been taken down). We've uncovered a few little niggles with some VC lighting which we're working to fix. But if you downloaded it and it works fine for you, that's all good then.We should have the v1.1 patch out by Sunday night.

Oh dear :)Well I did not mean to start WWIII with my suggestion to use our support forums. Couple of things:- Ron, despite his enthusiasm for Orbx (which is appreciated), does not represent our company view- In this age of cookies and browsers, I don't buy into any passwords/inconvenience arguments - I use many companies' support forums and they're one-click away :)- From a developer's perspective it's not nice to see a topic on AVSIM entitled "Lancair problems" in the the week of debut, particularly when the problem reported on AVSIM was already answered quickly on our support forums and would have taken the OP no more time to find his answer on our forums, versus posting here- If you are truly concerned about any potential warts or flaws in a product, surely the place to get a "feel" for that is the vendor's official support forum? That's what I do. On the flip side, we all understand that AVSIM is *the* go-to place for FS discussions on the net, so in some respects I do understand that a daily habit is hard to break :)

Please use the Orbx support forums to report any issues. We have a great support team on 24/7 standby to assist you with these sorts of things. AVSIM is not the support forum for Orbx products ;)But I do want to say "thank you" for purchasing the Lancair, it's appreciated!

Indeed, AVSIM is not the support forum for Orbx products :)We have an excellent 24/7 support team and your issue has already been reported and resolved - http://orbxsystems.com/forums/index.php?topic=27694.0Thanks for purchasing the Lancair, we appreciate it!

It's available today (about 4 hours from now), since the pre-pay exclusive period was only 24 hours.

We're privileged to have Andreas make these videos for us, because he always adds such emotion to them without resorting to visual trickery - just a lot of patience and clever use of FS Recorder. A lot of the stuff we make has been designed to appeal to the "explorer" demographic, meaning it caters for those who like to fly low and slow and enjoy the thrill of seeing what lies over the next hill or valley. Mind you, there's still immense fun with technical approaches in complex airliners into large international airports, but I admit I love my bush flying a lot more :)

Indeed we're aiming to release Pacific Fjords this month.

Since my PC specs has been referenced ( pretty much the same spec but i7 920-D0@4.2Ghz and twin Veloraptors with dedicated RAID-0 controller), I don't use any fsx.cfg tweaks at all and usually run all sliders maxxed except water 2.X High and vehicle traffic at 16% I don't fly heavies and generally stick to non-urban areas and my FPS is around 30-40 on a single 2560x1600 30" monitor.Couple of tips for you, take them or leave them:- I use the autogen density slider (and only that slider) to control performance. Maxed in rural areas, Dense in urban areas, Normal at large international airports- I also don't have vehicle traffic set higher than 16% because anything more is unrealistic IMHO, and I use my traffic speed tweak to set them to 60mph max- I just use FSX AA and leave the nVidia CP to set AFx16 and the visuals are perfect to me (see my vids and screenshots)- I run FSX in Windowed Maximized mode which is smoothest for me- I don't run Antivirus or any other external weather apps (I just use my own weather themes)- I don't use any 2048 or 4096 textures for aircraft or clouds- Having the twin raptors in RAID-0 eliminates blurries - I don't fly complex FPS hogging aircraft (I think the Aerosoft A320 is a step in the right direction in that respect)- I use Windows 7 64-bit with at least 6GB DDR3 1600 RAM- I only run 37 processes in Windows and disable Window Indexing completely. Keep Windows lean and mean!- I rarely defrag my HDSo with those caveats above I've been enjoying smooth consistent FPS in FSX ever since I upgraded to my i7 920 about 18 months ago. No blurries, no stutters, smooth flights, and no tweaking.So my answer would be, most definitely it's possible.

FSX is in the prime of its life. I've bought some simply wonderful aircraft these past weeks, and there's plenty more addons from a bunch of vendors incoming. If you thought summer was busy, winter is going to be crazy ... we promise!

The enthusiast community (read, hard-core simmers who purchase 3rd party addons and visit AVSIM and other forums) can be counted about 50,000 people, maybe less. MS sells several million copies of each FS franchise release, but over 95% of those customers never, ever purchase addons for the basic sim, or even apply the SP1/SP2 patches. A lot of customers get it as gifts from family and invariably FS becomes shelfware along with countless other games bought at Christmas time etc.There would be very, very few 3rd party addons which have sold more than 15,000 units, perhaps maybe a handful. MS is not targeting this new game at us (the community or developers), but at a global, casual gamer audience who want to be captivated from the first 5 minutes and probably have a very simple, fun and visually pleasing experience. (Think about how many zillions of copies of Pilotwings Nintendo sold). Don't see this as a slap in the face to the hard-core community, but more akin to a Valve, Bungie or EA releasing a title designed to move units, not appeal to the level modders. MS is a business, and we'll see a business-driven focus in any future releases, of that I have no doubt.Of course, we are also the most vocal of their customers and feel "closer" to MS as a result, but the cold hard fact are this: they are catering for a different audience with this release, and that can easily be determined from their press release language.

Thanks Jeroen for giving folks a heads up on this. You kindly made a map for our forum users, which I've shown below and also edited to show how PF fills the northern gap between PNW and Tongass.In addition to Bill being on the team, recent signings include Bob Bernstein, who's working on a PNW version of his FS9 Classic W16 Monroe Firstar, and Alexander Metzger (ex DA) who is doing the FDX for the Lancair IVP due soon.

Just to dispel some myths:- We have not signed any documents with MS- We asked people to not quiz us on Flight because there's been some misleading rumors over the past months we are working with MS- My "we'd have to shoot you" quip was just me being tongue in cheek- Based on the last NDA Orbx signed with MS during the FSX beta back in 2006/07, no developer can even admit to signing any documents because that in itself is a breach of the NDA terms. Maybe the Flight NDA is more relaxed? I doubt it though, knowing their legal processesMy thoughts on Flight?It's just a marketing announcement and website skeleton launch, nothing more. MS have flagged their intent but delivered little to no information and certainly no specifics. I imagine that they have a very clear and tightly controlled PR plan over the next year or so. This is no different to many other 'stealth' launches of many games on the market.- Orbx will support Flight if and when it's released (and if there's money in it for us, obviously)- We're very happy that MS are continuing the franchise- We welcome Microsoft's obvious reach to a global moms and pops non-enthusiast market; that has to be good for every FS developer- Our focus remains very much with FSX, which is now the premiere FS platform globally, with the largest installed base (by a huge margin) and still selling tens of thousands of units a month for MS, so much so they had to recompile the gold master because they exhausted their registration key range- I've certainly enjoying quite a few belly laughs at the speculative comments people have posted, which seem to be based on a few lines of PR agency textLet normal programming commence; it's far too early for us to spend cycles on Flight right now.Finally - on behalf of all FS9 and FSX developers, I ask that you please don't stop buying our software - if you want 3rd party add ons for Flight it's absolutely vital you continue to support this industry, because we all need to survive to be around to do the R&D to develop for Flight. Pressing the pause button now based on one teaser trailer would kill off the developer community before we even get our hands on the new SDK.

Hi Tim, understood; I'll ask the mods to remove this topic. It was mainly an FYI for developers here who have commercial products to sell.

I've been aware of Lockheed Martin's licensing of ESP from Microsoft for some time, but they contacted me this week to announce the upcoming RTM of their custom OEM version of FSX/ESP (called "Prepar3D") for commercial use:http://www.prepar3d.com/They expect this to go RTM in about three months.This is good news for us, since our shareholders and partners needed a path forward to use our FTX products commercially. The interesting news is from Lockheed is that they are improving the codeline with bug fixes and improvements. I will certainly be lobbying them for multi-core CPU and DX10/11 support, and an extended animation engine.If we can get some current-gen tech smarts into the engine, we'll explore further options with this.Interesting times.

That's a bit quick to resort to spiteful remarks when things appear to not go your way.Even though I believe we communicated the terms and timing of the July promotion effectively (in fact, almost ad nauseum), I believe the morally right thing to do is to allow all customers who purchased 3W5 Concrete before August 1st to get a 100% discount on WA56 Israel's Farm.That keeps things in the spirit of the promotion and makes everyone happy :)We have adjusted the FSS store script and logic. So, to get your free WA56 you simply log into your FSS account, proceed through the WA56 checkout process and if your purchase of 3W5 was before August 1st, you'll get a 100% discount.And if I may ... WA56 is very special indeed. The AVSIM editors have a copy and reviews of 3W5 and WA56 will be published in due course. Remember, its official release was only yesterday ;)

If FSX were dead, Orbx's revenues would not be growing by 160% year on year; our forums would not be getting 200 new members a month (nearly 8,000 members already); our FTX website would not be getting 4 million hits per month; we would not have released 23 FSX products with 23 more in production; we wouldn't have have a staff list of 60 people and growing; we would not be selling record numbers of FTX products for North America and our distribution channel would not have grown to 9 resellers in 7 countries.Dead? I don't think so ;)I think the FS industry is finally relishing in a stable, static platform which the hardware has almost caught up with. I also agree that AVSIM probably quieter because people are finally coming to grips with FSX and how to get the most out of it. These days we tend to celebrate new product releases rather than bash ACES :( In terms of forum posts as of today, the AVSIM FS2004 forum has 13,030 topics and 76,777 replies versus the AVSIM FSX forum with 69,323 topics and 436,358 replies.

Well well, what an interesting discussion..Firstly let me agree that the price of PNW is far too low for what it's cost us to produce. It will take 12 months before we break even. But PNW is a loss-leader product, and a 'sandbox' for us to make payware and freeware airports in.We make the payware airports because nearly 40% of PNW customers buy them, and a survey we conducted on our forums suggested that eventually over 70% of PNW customers will buy them long term.We are also trying to create a whole new way to enjoy the sim, extending the experience far outside the cockpit and trying to appeal to the 'explore and discover' demographic. The strong sales of both PNW and these add-on airports suggests we are right in our assumption that this is what simmers want. I had a meeting with ACES three years ago at DEVCON in Bellevue and told them this was the direction that flightsim was heading - to a more experienced-based simulator that was much more immersive than ever before. Everyone in that room agreed with me at the time.We intend to release many more of these airports in each of the regions we produce, and of course we'll continue to thank our customers for their loyalty by releasing payware-quality freeware sceneries as well (Portland City being next).In terms of detail? We're just getting started really. We have stuff in the pipeline which will add incredible detail not just to smaller airports but large internationals too. And wait until you see what the 1S2/3W5 team does at Orcas Island!Remember Richard Goldstein and the GeoRender series? I bought all of his stuff back then. You can blame Richard for igniting the spark in our eyes that makes us go to such detail in FSX.

Now released :) A bunch of beautiful photoreal FREE airfields for Orbx PNW; go get em!http://aussiex.org

Pacific Fjords and Northern Rockies will be this year, well before NZ South Island.

and soon ... onward past Port Hardy and north to Alaska using FTX Pacific Fjords and our PAKT Ketchikan Airport on the way.

Nice shots, and thanks for the comments, it's appreciated! :)

They are 15 miles apart, a quick hop really.3W5 Concrete has just gone on general sale now.Thanks for the kind words everyone, it's appreciated. I'm also working on a free upgrade which joins these two airports together in photoreal for that 15 miles along the river. That's a background project but it won't take too long.