Orbx airports and regions

[toprob]

Those who follow Froogle on YouTube will have seen his comment on Orbx's 'requirement' that their airports require the underlying region to be installed. There's a lot of comment on the forums about this, which I won't get into -- except to say that I have no problem with this, but I do get comments from people who are interested in a particular airport, but don't want the Orbx version because they don't want to purchase the region. I'm mainly talking about FTX NZ here.

Disclaimer:
This is the sort of post I like to see here on NZFF, but not from me:) I have too many vested interests, so I'll put those aside and just give the facts, jack...

After watching the Froogle video and reading the reactions, I wondered if you could actually install Orbx NZ airports without the region. So I gave it a go with Queenstown. The answer is 'yes', although I will point out that I do own both FTX NZNI and NZSI, I just don't have them installed in Prepar3d v4. So I installed Queenstown into P3Dv4 which 'only' has VLC plus my own stuff... although it does have FTX HD Trees.

FTX Central didn't even comment that I didn't have NZSI installed, it just went ahead and installed NZQN. For the initial install I removed my own photoscenery, which was as far as I was prepared to go to go 'default'.

I will try the other NZ airports when I have some spare time.

Here's some screenshots showing VLC + NZQN. You results may vary, as I said I have FTX HD Trees as well.







Then I activated the Godzone Subscription, the installer normally looks for FTX NZQN and makes some changes (to the underlying photo plus the facilities) so I needed to make these changes manually -- if anyone wants to try FTX NZQN and Godzone Sub without having to un-install/reinstall the sub, just ask me how.










The only real issue is the level of the lake near the airport -- you'd need to decide whether you could live with this or not:

[chopper_nut]

That was the thing that always concerned me was the mesh. I really wanted to get the PNG stuff but I wasn’t going to fork out for TWO extra expensive packages covering a vast majority of the world that I’ll never fly over. I’d be interested to see the results at Jacksons without FTX global etc. I’m glad Froogle has called them out on this

[emfrat]

It was the elevation issues that put me off Orbx in NZ. That and other sillies like covering Shetland in trees, when there are none, as a quick look at GE would have shown. So I stayed with VLC and Godzone. I do have Wollongong in NSW, but the default Oz coastline is rubbish and spoils it. I have a couple of their AFS2 sceneries and they look great. I hope their True Earth Scotland is as good.

Mike

[Charl]

Tower of Babel... another reason I stayed away from ORBX for a whole generation of flightsimming!
But as Mike points out, they have come home in AFS2 and it just fits beautifully.
Here's a taster of their recent Palm Springs scenery:



Just imagine NZ... (I know, I know, it may have been mentioned )

[toprob]

Oops! I just noticed that the Facebook post points to this particular post, rather than the start of this thread! So if you came here from Facebook, start at the top....

I need to mention that when I originally posted this, I had seen Froogle's normal weekly video, which covered Orbx's 'required' issue, but I didn't know he did a separate video just covering this. So the 'blow ups' on the big forums are just to be expected! I said I wasn't going to get into the rights and wrongs of this, but the discussions are entertaining -- there seem to be three types of people involved, those who support and appreciate Orbx because they do great work (me now), those who hate Orbx for some reason and look for reasons to attack them (me back when..), and the funniest group -- those who live in fear that Orbx will pack up and leave if anyone says anything bad about them...

Anyway, I have had time to install Whangarei without NZNI, which of course is a much later release than Queenstown, which shows in the quality. Whangarei is my favourite Orbx airport. It also 'fits' into VLC a lot better than Queenstown, I can't really find any issues at all. There's just one issue I noticed with both airports, approaching the airports initially gave very stuttery performance. I'm not sure what this is, but it could be my virus protection having a quick look at new files, or P3D looking for missing bits -- not that anything appears to be missing, but maybe the airports rely on the extra vegetation classes which only come with the region. Still, this settles down after a while, so not a major problem.

Just to reiterate, my tests here are using Vector Landclass as the 'base', rather than default Prepar3d. Default NZ is not great, so if you use default, you may not get the same result. VLC was always the 'defacto' default for NZ, but is no longer in development. It was removed from sale some time ago, and apparently became freeware, but it is not available anywhere, I think. I still use VLC in my main simulator, Prepar3d v4, but I use FTX NZ in both FSX and Prepar3d v3. So it is great news to me that I can use Orbx's NZ airports in my main simulator!

First up, here's an overview of the whole scenery within VLC, you can see where the city changes from FTX to VLC. Not bad at all.


Here's my rough estimation of the edges of the scenery, ok, it ain't a perfect match, because of the 'dry' summer landclass textures against Orbx's 'greening' of NZ. I suspect that the reality is somewhere in the middle.




The hills in the background of both these shots are VLC, but they work really well as a backdrop.

[Timmo]

Here's the installer for VLC if anyone wants it

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1Paq5_ ... vLg2wKhyIj

[toprob]

Wonderful, Tim, cheers for that!

[AhunterG]

You beat me to it Rob! Kind of... It is a very interesting topic and one that I am very glad Froogle has brought up.

I have also always believed that without the corresponding region the airfields would likely be unusable due to likely elevation problems. In saying that though there has never been anything stopping anyone from purchasing a region and using it in the base sim or Global product line... It's just a bit risky considering it isn't officially supported by ORBX and there could be issues.

My immediate thought was that it needed to be tested. I went with the freeware CAC8 a water aerodrome in Canada, my assumption was that it would be a nightmare since I don't have the NA Pacific Northwest region. Blending with Global and Vector isn't 100% but asides from that it doesn't seem all that bad. Correct me if I'm wrong but I recall hearing that regions were somewhat similar to Global and Vector combined but had more content relevant to the particular region??...

So that leaves me with the impression that as long as Global and Vector are present, problems should be minimal. I think it needs extensive testing with various complex airports, probably some of Norway's might be interesting to see the outcome of.

I think it would be wise for ORBX to support Global and Vector in all products, old and new with options for if a region is present. That way people are more likely to purchase airports all across the world and not be deterred by not having the appropriate region.

I certainly wouldn't expect ORBX to support the base sim, it is absolutely awful... I remind myself of it each time I do a fresh install of P3D.

Andrew

[toprob]

Interesting stuff, Andrew.
Good point about Global/Vector, I wonder whether that would make a difference to the NZ airports I've already checked.
Now to Gisborne -- this is a bit of a miss, as there are elevation issues on the actual airport itself, including one end of the runway for some reason. I have checked my sim install for any conflicts, but can't find anything in P3Dv4. I'm aware that there's a VLC Gisborne, but I deactivated that initially.
The rest is ok, although a much more obvious border mismatch around the edges. I will give the elevation issues some thought, but in the meantime I wouldn't recommend FTX NZGS without the NZNI region. There's also a weird issue with the FTX textures in the third shot here -- as I overfly this area, there's a shifting colour change which I guess is something to do with seasonal changes. I know that VLC has its own seasons file, which in part controls the colouring of landclass textures. I wonder if it has something to do with that, but as I said, weird.

[toprob]

A post on the Orbx forum reminded me that I needed to add Milford Sound to this thread. The Orbx post did point out that Milford didn't work without the SI region, but this only really applies to the default mesh.

The problem was that the default elevation mesh has always been damaged at Milford Sound. It actually looks like when the mesh was put together, it included the cloud cover, rather than the ground, so you get huge rolling 'hills' where there should be some sharply defined features.

However if you have some other mesh, like VLC, then Orbx Milford works perfectly well just dropping it in. I really like this little airfield, mainly because Orbx's NZ vegetation is so stunning. However the Sound itself has always seemed oppressive and dangerous to me, so I don't fly there!