Orbx TrueEarth NL

[Kevin Firth 114]

Quite surprised there has been no discussion of this really yet!  Here's my take on it...

• Excellent colour corrected photoscenery for NL.  I'd prefer it to be 0.6m/p rather than 1.2 m/p but file size is important.  And yes this is photoscenery in multiple seasons - something no other dev has really gone for other than Earth Simulations, and they couldn't make it economically.
• To get an entire country in good photoreal with seasons, and watermasked, for the price they're charging is astounding - there's a whole LOT of work involved in that alone.
• The entire country is autogenned up to the eyeballs.  The urban areas are very good, with lots of precision modelling and high detail areas.  Away from those the accuracy tends to get a little iffy, but hey, its a simulation.  I think they could do better in this area in future releases in this product line.  Regardless of that, it looks excellent from altitude.
• The vegetation autogen seems to be very dense, but looks like standard region vegetation to me.  The variation is minimal and it starts for me to look a little cartoonish after a while.  This is another area where more vegetation models and vegetation autogen groups could be employed and improved even further in the future for more realism.  It still gives very good immersion despite this.
• The bespoke models and POI are as always excellent.
• The price is good for what you get.
• Performance for me is good.  I'm running an 8700K overclocked to 5GHz, with 3200MHz DRAM and a 980Ti.  With that I get over 30fps 99% of the time, even with all scenery options enabled and most P3D sliders up at maximum.  Yes the CPU runs hot at 80-90 deg C even with superb cooling, but this kind of scenery is why we load up on hardware and kick the hell out of it isn't it? :p
• To some people the downside may be the size of it - at 77Gb it is NOT small, but considering what you get it simply cannot be.  I bought myself a 6Tb HDD for under £149 from overclockers to start to manage my photoscenery properly for the future.  You don't need an SSD to put photoscenery on, so I wouldn't recommend you even try.  Invest in some decent storage and future proof yourself - it's never been more affordable

 

Overall: Room for some improvement autogen accuracy wise, but for the price this knocks anything else out of the park.  (And the UK is coming hopefully later this year...)

 

Edited April 28, 2018 by Kevin Firth

[mutley 4,487]

Thanks for your assessment Kevin, I haven't tried it out yet, are you keeping the daytime shots a secret? 

[dogtrack 345]

A good read.  Will certainly be getting the British Isles when available.  Away from home, however, I do like my mountains.  Hence no Netherlands for me.

[Lucy.P 168]

1 hour ago, dogtrack said:

A good read.  Will certainly be getting the British Isles when available.  Away from home, however, I do like my mountains.  Hence no Netherlands for me.

The same for me. It's a good review and if NL was on my flight interest I would go for it. Unfortunately it isn't so this review has got me very eager for a release of UK.

[Kevin Firth 114]

4 hours ago, mutley said:

Thanks for your assessment Kevin, I haven't tried it out yet, are you keeping the daytime shots a secret? 

Let me do some for you now Those were just a couple I took in my favorite time of day for flying...

 

[Kevin Firth 114]

[Kevin Firth 114]

 

[mutley 4,487]

Wow, now that does look good 

I still can't believe the price, bring it on if this is the shape of things to come.

Cheers,

Joe

[J G 927]

Very interesting!  How does this fit with the old Orbx Netherlands scenary?  Does it complement it or replace it?

[Christopher Low 63]

It replaces any other scenery, John.

[J G 927]

Thanks.