ftx global

[jaydor 345]

You have all forgotten or do not know, That ORBX made the decision to link up with P3D and hope to be the main scenery developer for P3D. 

 

So as far as JV is concerned the future is with P3D although he has stated ORBX will continue to make and support FSX, so I think the photoscenery compatibility issue

 

as far as ORBX is concerned is dead in the water..

 

A Megasceneryearth avid collector myself (10 States so far and still going) I too wish for better smaller add-on airports to support me/us..

[Andrew Godden 945]

 

It's a simple matter of business and economics!!! Why make your product compatible with a competitor's product?. It doesn't make sense (cents) and, therefore, it doesn't make money.

 

You are assuming that existing UK photoscenery users will come flocking to the FTX banner. That's quite an assumption. I suspect that they are actually losing money by not making the FTX airfields fully compatible with UK photoscenery. I don't have any figures to prove or disprove that, but I reckon that sales of the FTX airfields would be significantly higher if they were compatible.

 

 

Christopher,

 

No, I don't make that assumption at all and nor does my post imply it.  What's more, Orbx are under no illusion either, as is stated on various FS Forum threads by John Venema, the CEO.  Such an assumption comes from a UK-centric view.

 

Any project's business case would not fly (pardon the pun) on speculative estimates of how many "...users will come flocking to the FTX banner...".  Rather, as with most business cases of this nature, it is based on solid, quantitative figures from their current product lines and a small percentage of either new adopters or migrating adopters from other products.

 

In fact, it would appear from JV's frank comment's that in blunt terms, Orbx doesn't really care if UK Gen-X VFR photo scenery users and other VFR scenery users adopt FTX Global or not - which suggests he already knows he is on a winner - and you can't blame him, cause he's simply a businessman out to make money.  In fact, I would think this is also because, believe or not, there is a greater percentage of flight simmers in the world who neither fly in the UK nor care for UK photo scenery.  If there is a single take away from this discussion, that is the most relevant.  You choose VFR photo scenery, that's your prerogative and no one is criticising you for it.  There is a now a new product on the market and you have to weigh up the options, do the cost benefit analysis and make your decision on which way you want to go.  We have all done it before, strangely enough, every time a new version of MSFS came out and now with X-Plane and P3d in the mix.  You choose.

[jaydor 345]

Oh!  I forgot to add to may last post.  I fly both camps, for low and slow I use FTX.  For high in the sky I use photoscenery..

[Andrew Godden 945]

 

It's just a plain business and economics decision based on supplying to a known market demand, probably with a bit of maths thrown in - 126,000 sq mi (UK and Ireland, if we assume that is roughly the area covered by Gen-X) out of 56,560,000 sq mi. - which probably just doesn't add (stack) up.

I don't profess to understand how the respective scenery products are made, I just enjoy them and whilst it might well be "easy" to "nearly" make it 100% compatible, there is, in that statement, a margin for which no-one can neither qualify or quantify with empirical data and, more importantly, what that means to Orbx's plan for FTX Global. All I know is, the "easy" and "nearly" statement wouldn't have passed any business case ROI and NPV scrutiny in companies I worked for.

I don't think the uk airfields issue is anything to do with FTXG, certainly it in my mind anyway

I confess I used the words easy and nearly as a deliberate qualification due to my relative lack of development experience. I have managed to make two airfields compatible (with the exception of matching the photoreal colours, which can only be easily done with access to the source material. OrbX has that, I don't, but the time involved is fairly negligible as it involves altering in photoshop and then running the image through resample a second time.) The time it took me to do so was approximately 1hr so I don't buy the argument that it is economically unsound - after all how many sales do you need to make to recoup that investment of time and effort?

I accept there's more to it than that, in terms of rewriting an installer to manage it etc and I don't honestly know what that even involves, but on the face of it the costs involved don't appear so out of scale to the potential market to render it uneconomic to do so. I also remind myself of JV's comment, which was not that it was an economic decision, he merely stated it was essentially a design and architecture decision. (Not his exact words)

I'll continue to try to integrate Orbx scenery with what I use right now, and to be honest I'm more and more coming round to using their scenery. I think at some point I will move to using the terrain mesh that comes with the OrbX regions to minimise the work I need to do there. I do like the idea of the FTXG night lighting very much, so I'll very likely move to using photoscenery for day flying so I can see the accurate ground detail, and OrbX scenery at night so I can get the night lighting when it's probably more important than accurate photoscenery

I agree that any developer will be in control of what their products do and don't do, I think being honest that my reaction to the lack of compatibility offered out of the box is down to a feeling that I am being excluded in a sense from my own community - I want to buy and fly the airfields but it feels as though I'm being told I can't unless I become a fully paid up member of the only ever use OrbX fanclub. . In that sense it is very much about cake shops and global domination!

Cheers k

 

 

Kevin,

 

When all is said and done, I, like all of us at times, have agonised  over the great "will I, won't I" decision for some FS product, and particularly so, where it is a series of products.  This has certainly been the case for me with any photo scenery, and simply because of the type and style of flying I do, I have chosen to not walk that path.  As I said in response above we have all been down this path with every new version of MSFS and now X-Plane and P3d.  I don't care to count the thousands of dollars I have spent in MSFS add-ons, the truth would probably give me apoplexy.    The locked four draw filing cabinet behind me that I keep it all in, haunts me enough. 

 

Anyone want to buy a mint condition copy of MSFS Ver 2.0? 

 

Cheers

Andrew

[ddavid 149]

Question: Is FTXG better than FSX default?

Question: Will Microsoft be issuing improvements to said default?

Question: will OrbX be issuing improvements to FTXG?

Answers on a postcard...

Cheers - Dai.

[jaydor 345]

Question: Is FTXG better than FSX default?

Question: Will Microsoft be issuing improvements to said default?

Question: will OrbX be issuing improvements to FTXG?

Answers on a postcard...

Cheers - Dai.

 

 

What's a postcard?

[Bruce (a.k.a. brian747) 142]

If I understand the foregoing correctly, it would appear that I am more fortunate than many, in that for me the FTXG decision has been greatly simplified. An unreconstructed Big Iron man. I never fly VFR, and would never think of cluttering my disk with gigabytes of photorealistic scenery that I can't possibly enjoy from 35,000 ft when flying with real world weather, so replacing the default fsx textures (regardless of whether I might for some unimaginable reason want to uninstall FTXG and return to them) is no big deal.

 

I arrived in the Orbx camp slightly to my surprise and entirely on account of Orbx England et al, which I found to be impressive, and am very happy with. I found what I described on the Orbx forum as their "obsession with grass strips" a little bizarre, but was happy enough with the items I had bought. However, it just so happens that the imminent 777 release has fuelled in me a desire for better overall global scenery at the very time that Orbx offered some, so I suspect that I may well buy FTXG. Not a hard decision in my case, then.

 

But I can well understand that VFR flyers have more complex issues to contend with in this respect, and I deeply commiserate with you at what (it appears) may be something of a fork in the road for the future of fsx simming.

 

One other observation, if I may: could it be that many of the imagined difficulties with mixing the various scenery elements effectively might be fairly readily dealt with by a simple rearrangement of the priority sequence of items within scenery.cfg? I realise that there are many simmers who shrink from this, but I would highly recommend them to consider it, along with downloading the (free) TweakFS "Scenery Config Toolbox" from here: http://tweakfs.com/download/fsx_scen_cfg_toolbox.zip to help them move things around and tidy things up.

 

But if this hobby/obsession was easy, it would probably not have retained its fascination for so long.....  

 

Cheers,

 

Brian

 

[Kevin Firth 114]

Hey Brian,

Glad the Orbx thing is working for you It's growing on me in some places but it won't ever be my complete world...

Sorting out the conflicts is not as simple as rearranging the scenery order - if only! There are a number of conflicts that need to be overcome, in no particular order;

a) the Orbx photoreal sections are colour matched to the FTX region which is different to GenX. I actually prefer the colours of OrbX but there you go...ideally they need to she altered to match the photoreal. Easy to say, hard to do, since without access to the original source image you have to find an alternative legal one...

b) Orbx uses a 10m mesh as opposed to the 5m resolution one with photoscenery. Inevitably airfield addons that are blended to match a 10m one will result in some terrain anomalies with a 5m one. Sometimes this isn't a problem, sometimes it is terrible, and terrain mesh mods are notoriously difficult to get right.

c) autogen needs to be blended with any existing stuff, such as Treescapes. Simply putting one scenery area on top of another can eliminate all autogen in a square below the top level. Added to that FSX only uses one set of autogen files, so you need to sometimes merge the autogen files to be able to use Orbx and non Orbx sceneries. Now that Orbx and Earth Simulations are sharing autogen files this shouldn't be a particular problem going forward, but it has been in the past...

I so wish this hobby of ours was simpler, but it isn't

Cheers k

[needles 1,013]

Guys, have we all forgotten the good old days.

 

From this:

 

 

To this:

 

You decide. Simple.

 

EDIT: I also have VFR GEN-X photoscenery installed.

 

[britfrog 180]

As I mentioned a year or so ago our hobby is a very personal thing no two people derive the same pleasure from it, everyones setup's are different, so it goes to say no two people are going to agree over much either. Brian flies big stuff but doesn't see the point of photoscenery, I on the other hand also fly big jets and wouldnt be without photoscenery, to get back to the origin of this thread which is global and whether it is an improvement over the stock textures, it is, however it will never be, and wasn't designed as a replacement for photoscenery, this is where their regional scenery comes in , and it is in this regional scenery that their very good airports will only work .

 

Now all airfields are installed into fsx in the same way their boundaries are by and large demarked by the boundary fencing, local roads whatever and it is very easy to place an airport on top of another Kevin and I already do it with varying degrees of success , and knowing how easy this is, is what frustrates Kevin and I and I dare say others , That  relative easyness  for us, with some rough edges/inaccuracies , would be 5 minutes childs play for the guys that do it for ftx especially as they have 95% of the airport already done it is just the stitching to finish the job that is needed,

Who knows maybe an ex-employee of ftx will do a deal where he can do just this in the future, time will tell.

[Christopher Low 63]

We would still have to purchase FTX England/Scotland/Wales to use them in the first place....

[Kevin Firth 114]

We would still have to purchase FTX England/Scotland/Wales to use them in the first place....

Not necessarily true Chris, as a maximum you would only have to have one of those in order to just get the autogen you would need. Nothing else from the region pack is necessary for you to have whatever OrbX say as far as I can tell. Even then, it may be possible to use the airfield without the wider autogen, I haven't tested that properly though. Different airfields are produced by different devs who work in different ways and include different amounts of area coverage, so you may find better results without autogen with different airfields.

having said that I bought Scotland for the extra landmarks and to see how they did the central Edinburgh autogen to see if I could steal it for my photoscenery . The regions aren't that costly after all, and with the advent of no FPS impact night lighting I am going to move at some point to OrbX region scenery only for night flying, so I don't mind buying the regions anyway

EDIT: buying the regions supports the uk dev team as well, which can only go toward supporting the production of more and more European scenery....

Cheers k

[Kevin Firth 114]

Guys, have we all forgotten the good old days.

From this:

At least I might get 30fps once in a while with this

[Andrew Godden 945]

We would still have to purchase FTX England/Scotland/Wales to use them in the first place....

 

 

 

We would still have to purchase FTX England/Scotland/Wales to use them in the first place....

Not necessarily true Chris, as a maximum you would only have to have one of those in order to just get the autogen you would need. Nothing else from the region pack is necessary for you to have whatever OrbX say as far as I can tell. Even then, it may be possible to use the airfield without the wider autogen, I haven't tested that properly though. Different airfields are produced by different devs who work in different ways and include different amounts of area coverage, so you may find better results without autogen with different airfields.

having said that I bought Scotland for the extra landmarks and to see how they did the central Edinburgh autogen to see if I could steal it for my photoscenery . The regions aren't that costly after all, and with the advent of no FPS impact night lighting I am going to move at some point to OrbX region scenery only for night flying, so I don't mind buying the regions anyway

EDIT: buying the regions supports the uk dev team as well, which can only go toward supporting the production of more and more European scenery....

Cheers k

 

 

 

As I replied to an earlier post by Britfrog on his first experiences with FTX Global, the FTX airport series are integrated to the underlying detailed mesh scenery provided in the corresponding FTX region scenery, i.e. FTX England / Scotland / Wales.  By not using that region scenery, you risk scenery height anomalies with the FTX airport.

 

Cheers

Andrew

[Kevin Firth 114]

Sorry, you are right Andrew, I omitted that from an earlier post - but I have used SBuilderX to relatively easily create custom sloped flattens to overcome those terrain anomalies, so it still holds true that you do not _need_ the region in order to make them compatible

 

 

We would still have to purchase FTX England/Scotland/Wales to use them in the first place....

 

 

 

We would still have to purchase FTX England/Scotland/Wales to use them in the first place....

Not necessarily true Chris, as a maximum you would only have to have one of those in order to just get the autogen you would need. Nothing else from the region pack is necessary for you to have whatever OrbX say as far as I can tell. Even then, it may be possible to use the airfield without the wider autogen, I haven't tested that properly though. Different airfields are produced by different devs who work in different ways and include different amounts of area coverage, so you may find better results without autogen with different airfields.

having said that I bought Scotland for the extra landmarks and to see how they did the central Edinburgh autogen to see if I could steal it for my photoscenery . The regions aren't that costly after all, and with the advent of no FPS impact night lighting I am going to move at some point to OrbX region scenery only for night flying, so I don't mind buying the regions anyway

EDIT: buying the regions supports the uk dev team as well, which can only go toward supporting the production of more and more European scenery....

Cheers k

 

 

 

As I replied to an earlier post by Britfrog on his first experiences with FTX Global, the FTX airport series are integrated to the underlying detailed mesh scenery provided in the corresponding FTX region scenery, i.e. FTX England / Scotland / Wales.  By not using that region scenery, you risk scenery height anomalies with the FTX airport.

 

Cheers

Andrew

 

 

[Andrew Godden 945]

 

Sorry, you are right Andrew, I omitted that from an earlier post - but I have used SBuilderX to relatively easily create custom sloped flattens to overcome those terrain anomalies, so it still holds true that you do not _need_ the region in order to make them compatible

 

 

 

 

True Kevin,  I'm sure anything is possible with the right tools, expertise and inkling to do it.  I guess that just doesn't represent your average flight simmer who just wants an "out of the box" solution.  Sure, their are some of us here that hang out in the Hangar who have varying degrees of expertise in a vast array of different areas with FS, which is why we are offering assistance and guidance to those with questions, but we are no longer your average flight simmer.   We probably now fall into the category of knowing just a little too much that it gets us into trouble. 

 

Cheers

Andrew