ORBX buys former Earth Simulation assets and - Plans Channel Islands Redux

[mutley 4,498]

August 1st, 2018 - Toowong, Australia: Orbx Simulation Systems has recently purchased all digital assets from Earth Simulations Ltd, which ceased trading in 2015. 

 

Over the coming year, the Orbx team will be developing completely refreshed versions of their popular Channel Islands and Isle of Man titles for Prepar3D, Aerofly FS2 and X-Plane 11.

 

Orbx CEO John Venema today said "This is a great result for both the former users  of Earth Simulations and also the Orbx community.. It has been a desire of mine for some years to carry Darren and Vicki's benchmark scenery titles forward and give them a new lease of life."

 

The sceneries will be split into four products:

• Alderney
• Guernsey
• Jersey
• Isle of Man

Each will be priced competitively based on their land mass and features, and all will be completely rebuilt from the ground up using freshly licensed imagery from 2015 and 2016. We will add a vast selection of Orbx library objects and completely overhaul the performance of the autogen and models in order to  provide state-of-the-art destinations for simmers.

 

John added, "Our colleagues at Turbulent Designs have been tasked with these projects for FSX and P3D and I am confident their team will produce a rock solid set of products."

 

Following the FSX/P3D releases, the scenery will be ported to XP11 and AFS2 and the usual 40% cross-platform discount will apply for Orbx customers. Because this project has involved a substantial investment in new imagery, contractor, and other license fees there will be no free upgrades for previous owners of the ES versions of these islands from 2015 and earlier. These titles will be exclusively available from OrbxDirect.

 

Darren Vincent - the former director of Earth Simulations - said today, "I'm very pleased that Orbx have taken custody of our work and will give it a new lease of life across these simulator platforms. I am sure our previous ES customers will embrace this redux of our sceneries which we are very proud to have made back in the day. I wish John and his team all the best with their plans!"

 

John concluded with "We will make use of the many digital assets that are available from the ES files, which you will see in products like TrueEarth Great Britain and elsewhere."

 

The first channel island to be released will be Alderney for FSX/P3D which you can expect within the next 3-4 months. Previews will be shown once it has entered into beta testing..

[needles 1,013]

Great news for Daren and Vicki who put so much love and attention to their products.

Also good news for ES supporters.

[J G 927]

I am a big fan of ORBX.  Good to see.

[Kevin Firth 114]

Positive outcome :)

[lionwing 71]

I've never owned the ES products having sought them for several years hoping they might be found lurking in the depths of a Google search.

 

This is great news and will look forward to adding them to my ORBX library.

[brett 2,315]

Time for a 5TB hard drive.

[wain 879]

never had their products bt I am interested to see how this goes, is this anything like true earth Netherlands or a whole different ball game?

[mutley 4,498]

Wayne, their products are awesome, a mixture of photoscenery and autogen to a realism level we had never seen before or since. If Orbx can pull this off, and there's no reason to believe they won't then won't these islands will be an absolute gem/

 

[wain 879]

thanks for the input Joe, looking forward to seeing what this looks like....