lateagain

Hi Jeremy, It might be worth a thread asking what aspects of each folk are interested in? Suggestions from the wider community should make "headings" for "sections" of each type of upload pretty comprehensive? If reviews followed a "Pro Forma" format then the headings would act as "Memo's" to the reviewer and make comparisons between like uploads easier? If there is no feedback for a section it could be left blank or a comment as to why that aspect wasn't tested or relevant posted. You're quite right though because folk upload ALL SORTS of useful stuff for the Sim. Most of my "input" has been for Train Sims but the same considerations apply for flight sims. I'd also suggest that the reviews were in the sections for the specific SIM? X-Plane, FSX etc.etc. :lol: ...sound really organised don't I ?! .......but in reality...... ^_^ Keep up the good work. Hope I can contribute but trying to move house right now so rather preoccupied... :smile: Geoff

Excellent screengrabs. Perhaps a standard format for these reviews would help? Help reviewer and reader that is? That is a list of headings to address specific areas, External Model, Cockpit, Flight Model, Instrumentation, Navigation etc.etc. If we took the same aspect of each model then it would highlight strengths and weaknesses and folk aware of alternative modifications or "aliases" (cockpits, tweaked physics etc. etc.) could post links. Also could the reviews contain links to the specific models and components reviewed as there are many versions of most aircraft out there? However big or small aircraft are they all have the same features? Just different levels of scale and complexity. I think this section is a great idea and look forward to a regular read. Only reservation is the "NEW" bit. In the virtual world new isn't always best? Geoff

:lol: ...but on the bright side Stephen there's been LOADS of excellent new Bush/GA/STOL aircraft released that my "buck" goes to, to fly the regions and airports I already have? The folk who listen get my buck every time? ^_^

:lol: ....maybe we need a noisier mower?! :LMAO: ....but then "None so deaf as those who don't want to hear?" :huh: .....btw delighted to hear that folk have noted a distinct improvement in Scotland? ...although it's a very different geography to most of England.

Well I've been away from Flight Simming for a few months, although obviously the latest releases wing their way to my inbox from suppliers I've used in the past. Interesting to read how much better many "regulars" find Scotland than England and even more .....well more what? Disappointing? Reassuring? Disgusting? ....I refer of course to the many of us who've bought loads of ORBX titles and have been sadly disappointed by England to the point we've uninstalled it!!! :huh: You'd have thought that with such a significant simming market they'd have done or at least announced a major "makeover" for the UK? I'm sure I'm not alone in deciding that it was such a disappointment that I'll not be spending any money on UK airfields they produce unless they do something to improve the standard of England as a region to start with. Please don't rehash all the "obvious" discussion about England from threads on it's release :rolleyes: but if anyone knows of any plans for a makeover I'd be interested. Obviously Global may grab the attention of Jet Jockeys ...but us Low N Slow types want higher, better depth low down. Including Major Airports (as in Wales) is no inducement for GA pilots when landmarks and coastlines make for more realistic scenery. Geoff

Great topic because Bush flying is just pure flying with challenging strips. Add any great scenery package and any of the aircraft recommended above and if you still pine for your FMC..... well I'm sure PMDG are tweaking their latest attempt to take your cash and keep you happy?! :lol: ...Meanwhile it's hard to choose any one from the list above (my shopping list after a 6 month break from FSX working on a Train Sim project already has the Fairchild 24, An2 and Staggerwing on it and this threads reminded me about the Twotter update!) but I can't say enough how much I like the Sibwings BirdDog. A choice of cockpits and different types, flies like a dream and can get in or out of just about anywhere. Good sound and one of the best all round views of any aircraft? My other recommendation for bush flying would be Track IR. I'd go as far as to suggest it's THE "must have" for immersive bush flying and there's loads of tweaks and suggestions for using it with other packages here in the forums. Trouble is I haven't even got to grips with the TriPacer yet, the Kodiak has hardly been airborne and there's 5 aircraft on my shopping list :wacko: .

.....so I take it as you're all commenting on and comparing freeware anti-virus software you only use freeware FS add-ons? I know we're (Simulator fans of all sorts) ALL add-on junkies ....but come on guys? Without our high end boxes the sims don't run so surely they're worth a few bucks worth of TLC? B) I've used McAfee for years, as did the organisation I worked for. It now comes included with the deal from my ISP here in the UK. One utility (comes as freeware with a payware upgrade - but doesn't ram that down your throat, merely gives you a choice with the frequent updates) is C Cleaner. The plus of this programe is that it strips out all the junk various processes dump all over your hard drive as well as the potential malware. It also has an excellent Registry cleaner/fixer which comes with a one click BACKUP before it does anything. A no brainer really? Geoff

Well Oz is the oldest package so I guess this will be one of the discounted items? It does have the advantage if you like tubeliners of having some major airports by ORBX. There is also a good bit of freeware for Oz. Check out OzX. http://aussiex.org/forum/ For something different from the PNW with a variety of scenery and a recent challenging field (Milford Sound) I'd go for NZ (both Islands) or SI and Milford Sound add-on. Also take a look at Tongass Fjords X http://silvercloud-s...roduct_id=29812 which will give you an area North of but compatible with FTX Pacific Fjords. Trouble is there's a lot to choose from and IMHO PNW is still the best yet. Geoff

Hi ???? Skywolf? Got a real first name ...they seem friendlier to me.... Anyway my question i answer to your question is what do you fly most? The reason I ask is that if you prefer jetliners Oz and NZ have things going for them. If you prefer "regional" or faster GA then adding to your PNW choice is good. If you want a change of scenery that covers all types then NZ N&S have something to offer? If you're mainly Low n Slow then area is less important than available fields etc. To help you more a bit more info would help. Geoff

David you know full well why this forum section exists and to pretend otherwise is mischievious at best If you were a publisher and had a limited market would you not seek to gain feedback from your customer base from ALL sources? I am far from being alone in being critical of FTX ENG so you'd expect any reasonable organisation to be looking at reviews and feedback. Whilst they have a policy of banning people from their forums for posting anything they don't like they can hardly be surprised if folk don't post there. I refer you again to my previous post? Well you can assume what you will but IMHO the quality of ENG is nowhere near as good as PNW in many specifics. That's not to say I believe it cannot be improved! Indeed were it improved to that standard I'd be more than happy with it. If you're happy with it now you'd be even more so if the attention to detail I feel it currently lacks were given to it. Ever since the first negative comments were made about ENG people have been making comparisons with photscenery. This is the Unofficial ORBX forum. 99.5% of folk who post here know what ORBX's product is. Many of us own most of it. Surely you understand that the criticism or questions are posted on that basis. This thread is about a service patch. It's not about point scoring, or any other salutation. My post, as others have pointed out, is to ask what's fixed and what still needs attention. More detailed info included with the download would have been useful in that respect but in it's absence.... Further more quite a few people had specific problems that not every user experienced. Unless these can be discussed freely without every issue being treated as a flame by those who don't share the problem they'll never get fixed. Because I don't want to be banned from their forum. Simple as that. Until they sort out their PR/customer relations I visit their forum for information only. Let me throw the question back. Why don't they post on here more often? Why are dialogues so few and far between? An odd stance to take with someone seeking improvement in something you already like :lol: I'm all for freedom of speech and if we all thought the same it would be a dull place. Apparently not everyone shares my opinion though? :rolleyes:

What Battersea should look something like and what the density and type of building should be. Earth Simulations have done some of the best renditions of the channel islands yet but here's a blog about developement of Jersey http://www.flightsim...blogspot.co.uk/ Note that there were some issues with compatability of FTX ENG and Earth Simulations stuff. I believe (? ..someone may confirm this?) they are fixed now? BTW just noticed the building site in the first Bing shots is complete here in Google Maps

Yes, several both illustrated and written! .....but as you've failed to find it even though I posted a link a few posts earlier in this thread? I'm pleased they've done that but as you are not aware of issues I've identified, I was not aware of that one. :rolleyes: :rolleyes: speechless. ...well several other people have posted a whole list of issues that aren't fixed. BTW one of the most articulate gained a 1 year ban from the FTX web site for doing so according to his posts here. I happen to think he identified a very possible widespread problem. What he reports certainly applies to areas I know. Some of the issues I identified are merely "object placement" or rather moving that placement to a correct location. The ferries at Dover are as big as many cruise liners. Not many people in the South of England will not have seen them and most will at some time or another have travelled on them. Dover is one of THE most significant ports in the country. As for other areas? In years of simming (Rail and Flight) I've used all manner of reference material to see "what's there" at various locations. With Bing Maps Google Earth and Streetview the research is hardly taxing? Apart from that some of us have actually travelled you know :huh: Firstly your happiness is summed up in your signature? If you fly tubeliners FTX ENG looks reasonable? At 2000' VFR it's less so. If you think flying is about programming an FMC you don't need visual reference points. Low and Slow that's how you navigate. England isn't full of spectacular geographic features so in the RW we navigate by reference to landmarks. In fairness to FTX ENG team ORBX has commented that "some things will have to wait for SP2". That's fine. My question in my first post in this thread was "What's fixed? ...and still needs some attention?" Not an attack on the publisher, team or anyone else? A simple question that didn't strike me as unreasonable?

Simmerhead, as I said..... :lol:....but I've been around Simming forums for eleven years and I know how threads get hi-jacked, distorted and dragged off topic. I'd be the first to agree that your attempts to compare the options is the way to go. Just that this thread is specifically about a long awaited, and IMHO, very necessary patch. What I wanted to hear was what others had gained from it? I have issues with the content, or to be precise missing content, but othere were having various compatability issues. Just want to keep this thread specific to the patch that was all :mellow: . Geoff

My post is NOT to discuss such matters. I have bought (as in paid hard cash for) ORBX ENG, as I have bought all their previous "regions" and a good few airfields. I am not a troll trying to trash FTX/ORBX (why two names? BTW) I am a customer. Therefore my post stands as such. I'm not interested in anyone who wants to create a flame from it (not aimed at posters here so far) but merely to find out what the experience of other customers is? As I'm a Brit lets take the analogy of the Spitfire? It went through 24 Marks! 24 "Upgrades". Pretty unique for any piece of engineering? Why? Because the basic package was good and there was a will to make it even better! 24 times better. I'm not "demanding" 24 patches for any software. I'm merely stating that as FTX have built at least 3 or 4 "marks" of a good product they could improve the latest further. If we'd have given up on doing that a few decades ago I might not be here to post this ^_^ but because we didn't one of many legends were born. I want FTX to be a "legend" not an "also ran". Comparisons with other products should/MUST be made. However that's little help to those who made a choice and "placed their bet"?

Just looked back at the points I made in this thread http://forum.avsim.n...nk/page__st__50. So few of these appear to have been addressed that if it weren't for the thinning out of trees in Hyde Park I'd have thought the patch hadn't installed at all?! There still seems to be a lot of Dali'esque melted bridges around London and the docks North of London City look like a Florida housing development! All I can say is that I hope there's a team still working on further patches. Reading back over some folks posts I stumbled across one that said that Sellafield looked almost photoreal. The Entire Power station at Dungeness (can't miss it if you look for Lydd on Google Earth or Bing) isn't there. Dover harbour isn't changed at all and still has totally inappropriate "ferries" (infuriating when a ship moored against where one of the quays should be looks more like the ships that should be there) and sand bars where there should be quays and harbour walls. Obviously my interest is in areas I've flown over so there are many parts of the country I've yet to explore. If so much work has been done and I see so little where exactly has it been done? Certainly some of the town/road alignment issues are no better? I'm not trying to "flame" here it's just that in the areas I've looked at I see little if any improvement so there must be a lot changed elsewhere? BTW I checked the zip for errors, RTFM, and had no problems with the iinstallation that reported so I have to assume it worked. If I missed a step feel free to shout me down because I really wanted to be posting "Oh that's MUCH better....." :huh:

What's fixed? ...and still needs some attention? The release notification says a lot of work has gione into it (which let me say I don't doubt) but doesn't mention specifics other than saying it addresses some of the issues raised? Downloaded but haven't had time to apply it or use it yet. Geoff

Says who? .....and in any case do you really think that will happen within the expected life of ANY hdd? Do you expect it to happen in your lifetime? I've got a draw full of corrupted drives! SSD's may soon be joining them but right now any such statement is pure speculation? Lets not forget that SSD technology is improving all the time. You only have to read the independant review sites to see which are robust and which are flaky. Having said that a (I'll not name them) HDD producer of high repute produced a batch recently that completely totalled a lot of folks data. I'd always bought their discs because they had a really good reputation. Anyone who ever made anything occasionally has a bad batch, a bad model ....but the good guys work through that and learn by the mistakes and regain their reputation. Find me an article that supports your premise and I'll find you one that suggests that this is unlikely to occur in the lifetime of any machine it's put into. Indeed some of us might wonder if we'll last as long as any data we treasure?! :lol: Some of us here had the first ever available "Home Computers". We've seen state of the art storage devices come, go and become almost unrecoverable in MONTHS. I've a drawer full of those too. Hardware development makes 36 month old kit look like antiques. The reallity is that there's plenty of good kit out there that the average nerd would laugh at. Imagine if the DC3 had been a computer? The Lockheed Electra had such bad press as an airliner but went on to become the craft of choice for flying into hurricanes!!! The sad thing about technology is that much of it is measured by standards that would NEVER be a reality. Why? Because when there's miniscule differences in performance the reviewers clutch at straws to find a difference. Read any review of graphics cards and they'll happily post a "league table". Read how each card performs different tasks, responds to REAL (as opposed to theoretical benchmark tests) and the League Table soon begins to look like nonsense? Sorry for the rant but at my age I've read so many opinions that were based on speculation and rumour, and as a technician for most of my life the majority of the myths and rumours proved to be total bull. Geoff

Hi Ian, Well it isn't the ORBX forum nor even the Unofficial ORBX forum here at AVsim and for that reason your request and all the other comparitive posts are perfectly valid. The official ORBX forum can have it's own rules but this is a flight sim forum and comparissons between products from different publishers are what any consumer of any product would seek? You wouldn't buy any other product without comparing what was available. If anyone has the latest version and could post some screenshots using the ORBX World preview locations so that we have a comparison I'm sure you'd earn the gratitude of many fellow flight simmers?

Why would you ever buy anything until it had been reviewed and compared with similar products. There ain't no prize for having anything first ....and there's a lot of rewards for buying the later model (with all the fixes and patches) of ANY product? I appreciate the frustration if you're looking at this specific but there's a lot of other areas that can bring something new to the Sim in the meantime? BTW what DID happen to good comparative reviews..... Geoff

Thanks for the "heads up". At first glance it all seems very impressive ......but then you get to looking closer. Does Norway have the same tiny field systems we still have in parts of the UK? .....and do they really run up the sides of mountains at 45 degrees?! It all looks very green too... but I've yet to check the location illustrated. Say Norway to most folk and their immediate word association is Fjords rather than rolling green hills. The idea of a rolling programme seems good but it also seems somewhat at odds with (or even in parallel with?) still developing regions? Does this mean regions will be ven MORE detailed? If so, how so and what effect will that have on performance? The game plans good ....but can the teams deliver what the fans are being sold? As they say "seeing's believing", so till then it's smoke and mirrors? Geoff

:lol: " .....how ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm, now that they've seen Paris...." The French, "God Bless em", have produced some of the best aircraft ever made and indeed my initial flying training was in a Rallye! However their fierce protection (a losing battle?) against the dominance of the English language doesn't serve them well? The web site has multi lingual flags on the title but all are "greyed out". However getting Google to translate the page isn't too bad. Very difficult to sort out what's what in their product range though? Not the best laid out web site! When you click on the "3D" symbol a lot of different areas come up ....which is confusing as because I was under the impression that only two areas had been done so far? Couldn't work out what the other one was looking at the site yesterday? I hope they continue this across all their regions? there are a few I'd buy for the geography. Again like FTX ENG it seems a weird concept to have done the country by "political" rather than global/geographic borders? It would cost a lot to cover the whole country and because of the quircky political boundaries even a specific "region" would involve a few purchases. Which is the other region?

Hi Rich, As Bill Womack is now working with ORBX his Plumb Island and proposed Martha's Vineyard might give a clue as to area? If it included "Bawstin" up to the mouth of the St Lawrence it would be about the same size as PNW but all the Newfies would be spitting blood if they got left out? ....and we wouldn't want them to be. With the recent FTX ENG release I'd rather they made smaller areas to better detail than try and cover bigger areas with less attention to detail? The usual debates between types of VP's will ensue? Bawstin and Canadian Cities on the St Lawrence are the only real "tubeliner" destinations but the entire region is well served (unlike FSX?) by regional feederliners and airports? Of course if Bawstin's Logan was included there are already high detail models of this available and that would allow tubeliner jocks to take off in FTX, fly across the continent (more interesting than the atlantic even with default scenery?) and land in Seattle or Vancouver in FTX? Can't believe it's taken so long to make this obvious possibility? As far as GA is concerned there's loads of interest and no end of military fields for Fast Jet jocks. There's already a decent freeware photoreal scenery of Mount Washington in the libraries but that and Plumb Island is all I have right now and knowing the region I'd love to see more. BTW forgot the potential for floatplanes. Lake Winnipesaukee and Moosehead lake spring immediately to mind? The more I think about the time I've spent there the more puzzled I am that it's received so little attention so far!

I've two SSD's (a 120 for the OS amd a 240 for FSX) waiting for me to find time to ghost and copy the relevant drive and files across. I always keep my OS on a seperate drive and keep as much data and other programmes as possible on a seperate drive. I'd have bought a bigger drive for FSX but that's too rich on price for me now. My original 64Gb (so called) SSD that the OS system came on with my box has proved fast and reliable but with only about a Gig and a half spare space it's just too small. Once the OS is ghosted to the 120 I'll put Train Sim stuff on that. The space freed up on the HDD by transferring FSX to the SSD would be useful but on the other hand it would be an excellent ready made back up? With 3Tb Hdd's about the same price as the smaller SSD's now transferring any downloads or future downloads to that would be an obvious backup solution? Backup? You know ....it's what you'd planned to do the day after the HDD actually corrupted B) For those asking what size they need try this excellent free utility. It gives you the exact size of every folder and file on your drive. http://www.jam-softw...are/index.shtml I was staggered at the size of the Downloads folders I'd accumalated for Train and Flight Sims. They are by far the biggest content on my HDD's. Quite apart from FSX it will show you exactly what is clagging up your HDD's. It's fast and simple to use. Next decision will be goverened by price until SSD's come down more? HDD's have never been cheaper or bigger? My rule of thumb for HDD's is you'll need as big a drive as you can afford and that will always prove to be not quite big enough :lol: .

....but in ziss case ...is just stoopid ...no? Great clip Geoff :lol: