NZFF

Looks like VLC has nothing to worry about, the trees are a bit nicer in the shots, but thats about it. And note they don't have Tekapo modeled to fly out of... yet?

LOL oh my god we have been waiting for this ? not to down the team over there but that looks horrible and are more than happy to continue with VLC in my system which looks alot better than those screens , yuck and happy to be VLC supporter ..
ty kelvin for the heads up i stopped looking awhile ago but yeah im going to bed happier actually over the moon that this looks worst than ever ..
opinion

Don't forget it's a beta build. Wait for the final version!

I have to be honest, I was expecting a bit more from ORBX as well

Regards to all
Dave

The trees are totally alien, look nothing at all like anything in our native or introduced bush, definately gonna have to do something about that.
Kinda strange how the posts in that thread are talking it up, cant be many kiwis amongst the postees so far?

Shots 3 and 8 look pretty good. All of the shots with autogen are ugly as they are all the same kermy green trees. Not at all like the diverse native bush that we have. Hopefully they will address that.

When I saw these shots I did think that this post wasn't aimed at us locals, people love Orbx mountains, so it is kind of inevitable that they would showcase the alps. It does make sense to give potential customers a bit of the drama, whereas here we are more likely to want to see something we recognise. I have no doubt that the finished package will have it's strong points, but the few comments here confirm what I believe -- that VLC is world-class, and under-rated outside NZ.

There are a few Orbx 'features' which I never wanted to see here in New Zealand, and a lot of them are illustrated in these screenshots, but some of these are my own rather slanted view -- for instance, I think that one of the main features of New Zealand, which is borne out by my own experience flying, is the sunshine, and one of the major Orbx 'themes' is moody, stormy, cold-looking screenshots full of dramatic clouds. We have to embrace our hole in the ozone layer, and you gotta love NZ's bright sun and deep shadow. Sure, we have some stink weather, that's for sure, but we don't fly in it unless we have to.

EDIT: Oops, I did get a PM telling-off regarding this post. I guess it does imply that the Orbx screenshots are moody, whereas they are 'good weather' shots, which I like. I was in fact refering to the cold-looking rock, but my original post did go on a lot, so I trimmed most of it out. Which I shouldn't have bothered with, since this is going to get lengthy anyway...

My main Orbx 'feature' was trimmed because a couple of others have mentioned the trees. Actually, I'm not too worried about the trees they've shown, Orbx have a knack of pulling some pretty amazing trees out of the hat just before release. It is not an easy job to represent NZ native bush in the sim, mainly because you need to represent a dozen different climates in just one set. This was a major issue in VLC, and the finished product is always going to be a compromise. Believe me, the VLC bush went through a lot of different iterations before it was finished, and I expect Orbx to do the same.

Looks like it did two years ago when there was a landclass file released that used Oz blue textures over NZ north and south ,really not much difference to that and looks the same to me but this time there is only one Island ,all this flow stuff etc how about "scenery flow "were you dont need a switcher and flps flow which dont drop to a crawl on a 6 core ,i stand by VLC for a couple of reasons ,first big one is that its cheap and its accurate in everyway possible telephone poles/ cell towers /road lighting main highways and side roads /maori maraes 3500 airstrips and a lot more which can be added over the both islands very quickly due to the Vector design and one hell of a NZ designer Timmo ,with on going work developing the very good base we have its only going to get better and will never be a pavlova made out of custard ..

Im surprised you got told off for your opinion via PM i thought we dodged that bullet when we all stood down being admin/mods so we could have a say , like others do so easy without the bombardment of PMs ,i suppose if we were on the other side we just delete that member or posts for whatever we felt was not in our interest or business interest , pretty horrible way to treat people im glad we dont do that around here without good reason ..
opinion

I am going to join the 'underwhelmed group' on this one. I was excited to read that more NZSI screenshots were out, and that 1st November that it was going on prepay, but when I saw the shots, I was also very underwhelmed by them. I only hope that in the remaining weeks that they improve it a lot, as compared to the other Orbx areas, this one does not look anywhere near as good.

But time will tell.......only a beta as they say.

It is going to be very interesting to compare screenshots once it is finally released.

smooth landings.

Maybe it's time for some more cross-forum adverting for VLC?....

OrbX has a track record, and many people would probably be over-hyped and ecstatic for it even if their NZ South looked like Antarctica. (It's OrbX, so it must be accurate....)

Advertise the unique, accurate features of VLC, as well as all those great screenshots, and more customers will come.

The opposing offering will probably look very nice, but I think the argument here to use in the advertising is accuracy over maybe...over the top visuals that may not necessarily be valid in the real world. Hard to explain without making VLC out to be a product lacking in visuals...but you know what I mean.

happytraveller wrote:

QUOTE (happytraveller @ Oct 28 2011,5:59 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

I am going to join the 'underwhelmed group' on this one. I was excited to read that more NZSI screenshots were out, and that 1st November that it was going on prepay, but when I saw the shots, I was also very underwhelmed by them. I only hope that in the remaining weeks that they improve it a lot, as compared to the other Orbx areas, this one does not look anywhere near as good.

But time will tell.......only a beta as they say.

It is going to be very interesting to compare screenshots once it is finally released.

smooth landings.

Thats exactly my reaction although I wasn't going prepay it...it would of been a possible purchase in the future.

One thing with VLC is that we have a lot more detailed airports both freeware and payware. At this stage Orbx only have Queenstown planned.

Im also looking at building a free Queenstown airport upgrade shortly as a request from a customer who lives nearby ,im happy to go head on with them ,competition is a good thing and im going to enjoy every minute of it ..

creator2003 wrote:

QUOTE (creator2003 @ Oct 28 2011,1:48 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Im surprised you got told off for your opinion via PM i thought we dodged that bullet when we all stood down being admin/mods so we could have a say , like others do so easy without the bombardment of PMs ,i suppose if we were on the other side we just delete that member or posts for whatever we felt was not in our interest or business interest , pretty horrible way to treat people im glad we dont do that around here without good reason ..
opinion

The 'told off' bit was a bit tongue in cheek, the message did come from a kiwi who I respect for his opinions, and is sometimes my 'conscience'.

SeanTK wrote:

QUOTE (SeanTK @ Oct 28 2011,8:00 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Maybe it's time for some more cross-forum adverting for VLC?....

I mentioned this a while ago, I think that we get a bit comfy here at NZFF, and although a lot of our members contribute to other forums, maybe a lot of us are happy just to stay here. When I say 'us', I mean VLC users who don't have a vested interest in the business side of things...

Trolly's NZ flight is a case in point -- a beautiful, professional-quality 'article' showcasing New Zealand -- but kind of preaching to the converted here at NZFF:)

The flightsim 'market' does have its foibles. Orbx is firmly aimed at the US market, whereas in my experience the US has no interest in NZ, whereas Europeans make up a huge chunk of my customers. But if Orbx use their existing customer base to sell NZ to the US, then it doesn't really matter whether it looks like our New Zealand, it would actually make more sense to filter it through the Lord of the Rings, and make it a Hollywood version of a Kiwi's image of an English writer's epic...

Which reminds me, I reread the Hobbit this week, I thought I wouldn't enjoy it as much as when I was 12, but I think I enjoyed it more, now that I have a visual guide to the characters and places, courtesy of Peter Jackson. Now Bilbo has a voice, albeit Ian Holm's, rather than Martin Freeman...

SeanTK wrote:

QUOTE (SeanTK @ Oct 28 2011,8:00 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Maybe it's time for some more cross-forum adverting for VLC?....

Read the newer posts on the orbx SI forum and you will see that someone tried to mention VLC without using the name when Venema just said it out loud and praised VLC. He also mentions a new approach to mass autogen with little effect on fps. I am sure the finished product will be as every bit polished as all the other orbx products. Thats one of their strong points - They are always pushing the envelope, but only because they have the money and resources.

The quality of the NZ scenery blows me away though concidering the comparitave manpower to the bigger scenery developers.

Not a member of the OrbX forums so I can't access them, but it's interesting to hear that the person you named actually blatantly advertised for VLC. I wonder what kind of responses that got.

Nice to hear that they are working on the FPS issues. I've heard a few iffy things about their Pacific NW series, and though I tried the demo with minimal ill effects (it looked great), I understand that overall, their products can look fantastic, but have a tendency to be "draining".

If this "Venema" person is an OrbX staff member, then that's great (and refreshing) to hear that there is not bashing going on between developers, because I suspect that there could be some flare-ups since they are now competing with pretty much every other New Zealand scenery developer at this point, and will be more engaged in doing so in the future as they expand on their product. (Figuring one day we'll see OrbX Hamilton, Wellington, etc, etc, thus putting a few people at odds.)

John Venema is the GM/MD of Orbx.