fta2017

So much misinformed conjecture... If you bother to read the AustraliaV2 announcement you will see that the landclass regions team is unchanged from ten years ago, with Holger still at the helm. Holger has nothing to do with TE regions; those are led by TonyW. So there are different teams working on different tech. But the P3D crowd smell a conspiracy even though most of the recent new Orbx releases (not ports) are for P3D and JV promised this past week that most new content will be for P3D. Clearly the upcoming AustraliaV2 has taken a lot longer to produce than was planned, likely adding more and more features like photoreal areas, to make it a hybrid of sorts. Why is everyone ignoring the big white elephant in the room? TE regions run superbly on XP11, but really badly on P3D (for now). Add to that P3D’s lack of proper autogen building scaling and the same TE regions just don’t look the same across sims. I very much doubt Orbx would pursue TE regions for XP11 if they were not selling. I also do not understand why people are being critical of Orbx for pushing boundaries with new regions tech as hardware and storage improves, and new sims do a good job of it. For a measly $60 you can try XP11 and also the free TE GB demo to see for yourself. In fact Orbx recently ran a promo with Laminar to discount XP11 to make it even easier to try out. i agree Olc Africa is very much overdue but I’d guess resources have been put back on it (Eugene leads OLC but was distracted with TE for Netherlands P3D), so if JV says it’s entering beta in a few weeks there is no reason to disbelieve him. If it’s not being previewed in June and not delivered in July then yes, I would smell a rat too.

Yes that is exactly what I am saying. I have both TE GB South for XP11 and P3Dv4 and there is no comparison. P3D simply cannot handle large scale orthoimagery efficiently, the roads look bad and the autogen is just ... wrong. Oversized, overscaled and no complexity at all (ie no gables, porches, balconies, chimneys). XP11’s lighting and atmosphere engine is miles ahead as well. But I use both sims for their unique strengths so this is not a sim-war discussion, just acknowledging which does certain things best.

Orbx are artists, and want to keep innovating and making the best scenery they can. Here is an example. I watched the Orbx Twitch stream last night where they flew around PNW for P3Dv4 and visited many of their iconic airports. It looked great, but out of curiosity I played JV’s sneak preview Washington trailer on a second monitor at the same time. The difference was profound to say the least. As in there was no comparison. The XP11 Washington looks REAL, but the landclass PNW looked repetitive with tracks and roads painted on top and with laughably oversized autogen houses. I think they know this, and have found a platform which allows them to realise their creative ambitions much sooner. Does it mean they are abandoning P3D? Not based on their past 12 months’ new title releases which weighs heavily in favour of P3D. Most of what is being made for Xp are ports anyway. The P3D community’s smugness is wearing off really quickly now. Once upon a time they used to taunt the XP community with ‘but have you got Orbx?’. Now that Orbx has embraced XP it’s turned it’s ‘They have abandoned us!!’. Little do they realise most of what Orbx is making for XP has already been available for FSx/P3D for over a decade, yet they still feel jealous.

No words ...

Don't agree at all. The TrueEarth team is quite small if you actually bothered to read the user guide, certainly only probably a tenth or less of the company work on those. End of last year we saw KBMS, NZGS, ESNQ, YTYA, KBSA released for P3D along with patches for KSAN, YBRM, KMRY etc, so that sounds like mostly ESP activity going on. So how do you come up with the statement "nearly the complete company was doing TrueEarth stuff" - are you just making it up without actually knowing the facts? I am sure JV must laugh when he reads these sorts of posts, all this conjecture about the company that is so far from reality. But then again, he most likely does not read these forums I would guess. Not for Canada from what they say, and 3D modelling and ortho colour correction is not free 🙂

I think you are ignoring the elephant in the room. P3Dv4 runs like a dog compared to the same number of objects/autogen in London in XP11. You can bet Orbx was on the phone to Lockheed pretty early during their beta testing (and Orlando testing), thus 4.5 coming out pretty unexpectedly quickly.

Pretty sure I read on their forums that JV said that TrueEarth regions were not profitable (yet) because of the huge costs of getting imagery data and making thousands of 3D models. My guess that is the real reason they do not have a lot of competitors in this area for XP11 because of the steep costs. Not sure how many companies out there have the funding to take these sorts of projects on. But they do have some competitors though for P3D though JustFlight’s poor effort for GB with no colour correction and no POI models, but more expensive than Orbx. And FranceVFR charging as much for a county or city as Orbx does for an area 100x the size. This proves again that their competitors cannot fund large scale projects effectively. Their biggest competitor is freeware. Ortho4XP is often touted as the free alternative to Orbx but having tried both Ortho4XP and TrueEarth I am glad that JV is being charitable and making no money from it 😄 because there is just no comparison even if their ortho quality is perhaps not the best (compressed to keep install sizes down).

Yeah, that’s why their TrueEarth GB series is their fastest ever selling region products, clearly because people hate it 🙂 And hundreds of posts all over the internet, forums, FB groups from people saying they can no longer fly anywhere else except in TrueEarth really sounds like they turned XP into a last generation sim 😁 And I am really NOT looking forward to their TrueEarth series for USA, because I much prefer to fly over default XP’s ‘plausible world’ cartoon terrain. ... now to stick my head back into the sand again ....

Yes, and because Orbx being the charity that it is, will gladly spend $$$ doing the airport porting work and give it away for free, while other FS companies charge again for versions between FSX or P3D 1/2/3/4, let alone between P3D and XP11. /sarcasm_off Absolute nonsense! You can create scenery and airports for XP11 that do not use PBR. In fact, most of the thousands of default XP11 gateway airports do NOT use PBR. If you read some of the explanations being offered at the orbx forums you would understand that TE GB does not use autogen for a lot of the 3D building which make the sliders a bit redundant. They are working on a control panel to offer tuning of the scenery.

Finally we have some common sense prevailing. Let's lobby A2A to provide their offerings! Meantime I have a simple two-fold use of BOTH sims. P3D for my wonderful LC-based Orbx regions, huge airport library and global stuff, and long may they continue to release LC region stuff after AustraliaV2 and Honolulu. And XP11 for TE. It's not a sim war, and not trolling - it's just choosing the right tools for the job and not having to make an exclusive decision. Why do that when the "other" platform is a measly $60 investment?

You would be hard pressed to see 30nm on any day in the UK, even with clear weather, so JV’s suggested settings actually make sense and are aligned to his cloud distance and LOD radius settings. i think the elephant in the room is being ignored here... P3D4 just cannot handle large area ortho scenery with millions of 3D objects on top of it like XP11 can. But everyone seems to be in denial about it and blaming Orbx. Even though LM themselves have admitted a loading time bug, and 4.4 fixed photo real blurry issues, and, and and ... see the issue? Fixing 25 year old code is a never ending task. Buy the very same TEGB South scenery for XP11 and a copy of that sim, and see for yourself just how fluid it runs without the need for a single tweak or slider change between London and Shoreham, Portsmouth or Bala, or anywhere for that matter. when A2A moves across to XP, the floodgates will open. Not trying to incite anything here but it’s just so,obvious where Orbx sees its future I am amazed nobody sees this.

XPlane TU NL + SP released? Really? Please tell me where I can get TE NL for X-Plane and i’ll buy it immediately 🙂 If oversized barns ruin your flight experience then you’re taking the hobby a bit too seriously. Sorry.

People are so quick to blame Orbx, when the above link makes it clear the long loading times are a bug in P3D and finally admitted by LM and it will be fixed in the next beta. I also own TE Netherlands and a bunch of Orbx products and I am not concerned about the SP1 for NED, because I cannot recall Orbx ever promising a service pack and not delivering it. Vector alone has had 6 or 7 major updates since it’s release, and so has FTX England which at SP6 right now. I do think they are struggling with resources internally a bit and I hope they can expand their team to take on these ambitious new projects.

Orbx TrueEarh GB and PNW.... now!

Rob Ainscough’s P3D bias is so obvious it is embarrassing to say the least. It’s amusing how he went to such lengths to mention pros and cons of XP vs P3D only to be corrected by someone who actually uses XP, which Rob clearly does NOT based on his ignorance of simple lua script fixes for the sim and lack of any videos of him using it on his Youtube page (other than to show supposed flaws in XP bs P3D relating to CPU core threading). He even blames XP causing “drift” on an Xbox controller in one video when in fact he had Cinema Verte mode enabled which was the real cause 😉 It is becoming a bit annoying to see Rob’s bias negatively influencing potential new adopters of XP11, particularly when he behaves like an expert witness, but is anything but. What is the agenda here?

I’ll have to dig around on the Orbx forums but I am pretty sure JV has been on record that GB would be summer only for about 9 months now, after it was brought up by customers following the TE Netherlands release. So this is not some sudden change of mind by him as people are perceiving. FWIW I don’t need seasons since I only fly VFR in summer and I would actually prefer smaller produc download and disk sizes versus another 650GB of seasons baggage I don’t want/need. I think the most salient comment in this whole topic is the one about Google. When Google Earth/Maps goes multi seasonal then we know the tech has matured to offer that to us simmers.

I’m waiting for Orbx to finish TrueEarth Great Britain South for P3D. We will then have a large region to compare directly between P3D and XP11 and with their payware airports inside too. I’ll wager there will be a bunch of comparison videos between both sims and one will look infinitely better than the other with smoother FPS as well. That is going to get a bunch of tongues wagging.

How is this shady? It’s clear as day that Orbx have always designed their airports to sit on top of their regions. I think they have made that clear since they made YMML back in 2008. I don’t think they have ever made an airport for default anything. i certainly wouldn’t buy one of their airports without their region tech under it, that’s just the way their ecosystem works. All this “debate” is just background noise by people who don’t get how Orbx sells their stuff. oh and last time I checked you have always been able to buy just their airports by themselves from their website. They just won’t look as good without their regions. Seems clear to me. edit: here is a post from the Orbx forums from five years ago where Jarrad Marshall recommends a region to go with a new airport and the reasons why it won’t look good without it https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/58093-time-for-a-holiday-introducing-broome-international-airport-ybrm/?do=findComment&comment=524591 And another one regarding Jackson hole, back in 2013: https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/59356-bowerman-airport-questions/?do=findComment&comment=538821 I expect there are probably hundreds of such similar answers on their forums over the past ten years. Again, nothing “shady” about this and in fact they make it quite clear when asked. edit: another one from Tim Harris seven years ago, explaining the exact same thing quite clearly https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/30725-explained-missing-cairns-autogen-scenery/?do=findComment&comment=264329

Looks pretty crisp to me ... If you right-click on the above image and display it in its own browser window at full size it looks very impressive indeed. I'm sure there are parts of their source data which is so-so but you're missing the point. 95% or more of XP users don't have the time, skills or inclination to fiddle with Ortho4XP and fill their HDDs with terabytes of data and then end up with questionable object placement and trees all over the place in a random manner. This is a turn-key out of the box solution that Orbx will sell in droves. Hats off to them I say!

There is no need for TreesScapes because they are making their own UK photoreal product which includes every tree placed, based on what I can read on their forums.

I can't speak for PMDG, but as far as I know based on interviews he's done (a Cosford 2017 video from memory), JV from Orbx was planning DLC for FSW but was waiting on the SDK to be fully completed. They have DLC on FSX:SE so I don't see why they would not have done for FSW, especially since they had licensed Global for it already. Speaking of the size of development teams, it's a safe bet that Orbx has the largest in the industry these days, but they have no plans to make their own flight simulator. I also remember JV saying years ago that making their own sim was not on the table because "it would take $35million and ten years, more than we'd even want to spend". His comments here are interesting too: https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/150476-orbx-10th-anniversary-the-history-of-orbx-series-parts-1-7/?tab=comments#comment-1326102 "Flight simulation engines will become more efficient and the interim platform winners will be the ones that are the most tightly coded and embrace new modern technology and systems without dragging the sim to its knees. Sim companies that don't foster a healthy third party developer community from inception will lose out (remember the MS-Flight debacle?). Flight sim addon developers will become increasingly platform-agnostic and new tools will emerge to compile content across many simulators and operating systems at once. The consumer won't be locked into a single sim, but will pick and choose addons for all his installed sim platforms to suit whatever mood they are in for the flights they want to do. And they will be most loyal to publishers that make buying choices easiest and provide support across the most platforms. The days of fan boys devoted to a single platform will die quickly as more and more new sims enter the market. There will be no guarantee that the darling favourite sim of 2018 will be the dominant platform of 2028, not by a long way. Simmers will become more fickle about which sim they use, even more so than some of the flip-floppers we see posting on forums today about how they switched away, and then switched back. The new minimum frame-rate will be 90FPS. There are kids less than 14 years old today who will be CEOs of companies that introduce remarkable new simulator engines and technology this coming decade and will uproot and disrupt the status quo of the our industry. The simple rule is: 'adapt or die'. Eventually the actual flight simulator engine will be marginalised and not relevant anymore. It will be all about the content which will run across a bunch of different simulators. The best performing most open standard sim will be the most commonly used. Closed proprietary platforms will die off. It has always been about the content. There is a reason we guard our IP so diligently at Orbx; all those assets can be used on future platforms without knowing what those platforms are today. Orbx's value as a company is not how many sims we support, but how many assets we produce that will eventually run on anything."

I think JV knows far more about the situation than most others in the business since DTG licensed Orbx for the base terrain. I think his approach to call for grace and consideration has more to do with his intolerance for the usual conspiracy theories and soapboxing that usually feed on events like these, as can be evidenced by numerous posts in this topic from people who have no clue what really went on. The fact Orbx did not publish any DLC for FSW is telling. He was critical of MS when they closed their doors to third party with Flight and I expect he had the same personal views about DTG, but give the man his dues because he hasn’t said a negative thing about them despite being prodded in plenty of interviews about Orbx’s plans for FSW.

Orbx are releasing a payware YBGC and YSPT soon, I would not bother with any freeware IMHO.

Developing for Orbx is very lucrative actually. I listened to a podcast a few years ago where JV mentioned his top airport developers earning over $100k per year. He’s a savvy businessman who has built a product delivery system that other vendors are now rushing to copy, except he’s 2-3 years ahead of the curve with a massive customer base on OrbxDirect now. So even if you baulk at having to pay the Orbx “tax” of say 50%, the reality is you’d sell far more copies through OrbxDirect than almost any other sales channel, and earn a lot more in the end. Combine that with having multiple products on their store and it has a cumulative effect. I use P3D and AeroflyFS2 but not XP11. However, if Orbx started selling their airports (and new airports) for XP I’d buy a copy of that sim in a heartbeat. That is the true influence of Orbx on the XP community, and Austin and Laminar know that.

Geez give JV a break, if you bothered to read his explanation it is very clear he mistakenly assumed shots he was given by his developers some time ago were from P3D when in fact they were using Ortho2XP and W2XP for experimenting with XP11. Stop trying to cook up conspiracy theories when there's nothing to speculate about. He's apologised and not pulled the topic, give the man credit. I for one would like to see them developing for XP IMHO.