Orbx TE Washington state USA + UHD not AFS2

  • The preview looks soo fantastic. My gut feeling says that they will make an AF2 version given some time. Perhaps the long term investment approach. It's such a great area to pass up. Maybe XP12 will offer a smooth VR expierence. Until then..

    I think the only reason we see ORBX scenery for Aerofly at all is that John Venema has a liking for smooth VR performance and wants to experience his own products in Aerofly. He already stated that they don't make much money of their Aerofly product line.

  • I would be very happy to have IPACS created payware Washington, Oregon...

    I know they will be outstanding!

    Windows 7 (64-Bit), Asus Sabertooth (Intel Z87) SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0, Intel 4th Gen Core i7 4770K (4.5GHz Overclock) Quad Core, Cooling Antec 920 Dual Stage CPU Liquid Cooling,16GB Dual Channel DDR3 SDRAM 1866MHz, 6GB Nvidia GeForce GTX Titan, GDDR5, PCIe, 950 Watt PC Power & Cooling MK II.

  • Let's stay lucid and dream not too fast,:sleeping: and let's get back to basics, TrueEarth England! What date???:/

    Best wishes 😉

    Pascal

    AFS2 / FS4 / MSFS / - Intel(R) Core i7 -12800HX 4.80 GHz - DDR5 4800MHz 32 Go - NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 3070 Ti 8 GB GDDR6X - 2x 2 TB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4

  • I would be very happy to have IPACS created payware Washington, Oregon...

    I know they will be outstanding!

    I think it should be free and part of the natural growth and expansion of DLCs.

    Regards,

    Ray

  • TE GB will be great, but TE NL and Helgoland were a disappointment sales wise, so I gather. Maybe because we can make good sceneries ourselves? Does the possibility to make user generated content at a high level, bite us in the back here?

  • TE GB will be great, but TE NL and Helgoland were a disappointment sales wise, so I gather. Maybe because we can make good sceneries ourselves? Does the possibility to make user generated content at a high level, bite us in the back here?

    I don't think so in my opinion. I would gladly pay for decent quality sceneries given that I have put hundreds of hours in creating my home area alone, side projects, helping others etc.

    Curious out of the 18,500 forum members. How many are AF2 users??

  • Same here. User created scenery is nice to have obviously, but if you want to even remotely come close to the quality ORBX has shown you'll spend hundreds of hours for a fraction of the area. First, orbx ground imagery is color corrected aerial orthophotos all taken in the same season. Google and Bing are satellite images (NOT orthophotos as many seem to believe, just look at the footprint of a tall building and see how it's distorted) with wildly variating colors, in my home area there's a line running right through my hometown where the surrounding green fields suddenly change to brown, obviously one image has been taken in spring and the other one in late summer. A few miles away there are several clouds obscuring some forest and village areas. That alone kept me from using satellite image scenery for Prepar3d when I was still using it, even generic landclass looks better than badly colored photoscenery IMHO. Second, for a believable scenery you have to place VFR reference objects like wind turbines, masts and powerlines. Although the new Object Generation Utility helps with this, it depends on OSM data which is pretty bad and incomplete in many places. Third, there are POIs like castles, stadiums, landmark buildings and so on which need to be made as custom 3D models to look believable. I know that many people use sketchup models from the 3D warehouse for this, but those are often poorly designed for simulator use, with way too many polygons and drawcalls. If Aerofly ever gets advanced features like real weather, cloud and terrain shadows, animated water, AI traffic and the like badly designed models like that could be the bottleneck that finally kills performance in an otherwise smooth performing scenery.

    Orbx even creates whole City areas as custom 3D models where each building has its exact footprint, even irregular or round shapes are possible. The standard cultivation only knows rectangular buildings. Just fly over Amsterdam or Rotterdam in True Earth Netherlands and you'll see what I mean.

    In short, I for myself just don't have the time to create scenery that even remotely resembles the quality ORBX or IPACS have shown so far. I hope to see many more quality products for Aerofly in the future, maybe also new developers making the leap to the new platform, but this will also depend on sales numbers.

    Regarding user base, I faintly remember a poll at the ORBX forums where about 2% of the forum members where using Aerofly. Isn't that sad?

    Cheers, Fabian

  • Maybe because we can make good sceneries ourselves?

    I don't think so either: first of all buying TE scenery is a LOT easier than creating it yourself ;) but secondly the quality of TE scenery is a LOT better than any user created scenery I've seen so far. The quality of the photoreal textures, the regional autogen, the 'cityscapes', the precisely placed trees, the numerous POI's... Maybe some of those who are content with their own made sceneries are happy enough with it and decided to not buy TE scenery but I think only a very small percentage of AFS2 users is into creating scenery themselves.

    Let's hope TE GB sells well otherwise the future of AFS2 is looking a bit grim, at least for me.

  • Totally agree about the subject of TrueEarth from ORBX!

    Orthophoto is incomparable with everything else. Now without criticism because I really like the quality of ORBX, However what I've seen in recent years, and it must be made clear, what I dispute is the policy of ORBX , in a previous thread, I had already mentioned it, and I will never say it enough, ORBX is simply a gas plant.

    Let me explain, the only thing that matters to them is the economic benefits, be it AFS2, FSX, XP or P3D, and they do not care about those who bought this or that SIM. Unfortunately, this is the harsh reality and that's how JV works.

    And what slows the sales for AFS2, it is only the life in this card that is (Static) in other words, they would be Number One in sales,

    all SIM confused.:thumbup:

    Cheers;)

    Best wishes 😉

    Pascal

    AFS2 / FS4 / MSFS / - Intel(R) Core i7 -12800HX 4.80 GHz - DDR5 4800MHz 32 Go - NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 3070 Ti 8 GB GDDR6X - 2x 2 TB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4

  • Let me explain, the only thing that matters to them is the economic benefits, be it AFS2, FSX, XP or P3D, and they do not care about those who bought this or that SIM. Unfortunately, this is the harsh reality and that's how JV works.

    Er... they are a business...? Isn't that how ALL companies work? If economic benefits wouldn't matter to them they would be out of business pretty quickly.

    Now I do believe Orbx is also in it for the love of flightsimming, they are not ONLY interested in economic benefits, but at the end of the day all those ortho files and scenery creators and what not will have to be paid. So it's logical economic benefits are a number one priority.

    I think we might consider ourselves lucky already to have TE NL and that they are working on TE GB. None of that has been made purely because of economic benefits, I can guarantee you. ;)

  • I also think Treue earth GB gets made for Aerofly because John Venema himself wants to see how it performs in Aerofly, he stated that he is a great fan of Aerofly on several occasions. Also he's living in the UK so this region is of personal importance to him. Washington on the other hand will have to meet business expectations, which will be difficult considering the small user base. The only thing we can do is support the development by buying their scenery,I don't want to advertise here but I think it's worth it. Also IPACS is just too small a team to deliver large scenery areas on a regular basis.

    Edited once, last by Fabs79 (April 29, 2019 at 5:39 PM).

  • I must readily admit that I would most likely not buy another US Scenery. UK, Germany, Austria or France I'd buy in a heartbeat. TE-NL I bought the day it was released. I'm just not interested in flying in the US.

    I like flying where I've been in real life before or where I'd like to be in the future. I did a 10 weeks trip with my wife and baby daughter through the heartland of the Aerofly default scenery and for that reason alone Aerofly is my go to Sim, the photoreal scenery makes me feel I'm being there again. I've never been to Washington but it's on my to do list. That said, orbx has to consider where they will get the best sales numbers, and the biggest flight Sim market is still the US, followed by the UK. The pacific northwest was one of their best selling landclass sceneries ever and it's just common sense to start their True Earth product line for the US in that area again. They have countless airports there already that obviously are easy to port over to Xplane (look at how fast they turned out their British airfields for that platform) and even if they offer 40% discount for existing users they can make a lot of money with much less effort than if they developed a completely new region. On top of that, the USGS provides free orthophotos with 1m/Pixel resolution even for commercial vendors, so development cost are lower than for other countries. According to JV they had to pay 20000 dollars just for the tiny fraction of British Columbia included in the Washington scenery, imagine the cost if they made a complete Canadian scenery. Ortho imagery for France seems to be equally expensive, while in Germany some federal states provide high resolution aerial images for free while others charge for them. So from a business perspective, we most likely won't see many sceneries outside the US for the foreseeable future. Just my 2 cents.

  • Yes, in a way your philosophy of seeing things is correct, but remember that in the past, ORBX had already supplied countries like Germany, Ireland, Norway or Scotland for FSX and P3D! So in my opinion, and this despite I also appreciate the landscapes of the United States, it would be better in the first place, to see developed in TE these for AFS2. But the path is still very far from reality.;)

    Best wishes 😉

    Pascal

    AFS2 / FS4 / MSFS / - Intel(R) Core i7 -12800HX 4.80 GHz - DDR5 4800MHz 32 Go - NVIDIA GeForce RTX™ 3070 Ti 8 GB GDDR6X - 2x 2 TB SSD M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4