Classic British Flight Sim

The tech underlying what ORBX is doing now with the Netherlands and soon with the UK and beyond is something they've been working on for almost a decade now. It's only recently that good enough satellite imagery has really come along that is consistent enough to do large areas and get consistent results in how the AutoGen looks on top of it without hand-placing everything. They demo'd this tech a few years ago with one of their releases (can't remember which one now) but they still hadn't gotten it to work on the country level. Now if we can just get consistent imaging of the world (which is possible, just time consuming and expensive for whatever company wants to do it to get it done all in a short time window to ensure consistency) then ORBX can do the whole world and make it the "base level" and we can not worry about crappy textures ever again.

The photo scenery is all acquired at a relatively low level using aircraft rather than satellites. ORBX are likely to be posting new screenies for The Netherlands in the next day or two. These should give us a very good idea of what to expect for the UK.

Just been looking at the latest screenshots of the Netherlands over at the orbx forum. Very impressed. Similar to the Earth Simulations sceneries but on a country wide scale. Price seems reasonable as well at £30.

Here we go, chaps - a video of the first True Earth release, the Netherlands, which is due out very soon. What disk space and GPU/CPU muscle is this going to take ? I dread to think, but there's no denying it's a work of art.

https://youtu.be/ooewsGRpv-A

My only caveat - it's all shot from a fair altitude, and photo-real scenery doesn't bear looking at nearer the ground.

My only caveat - it's all shot from a fair altitude, and photo-real scenery doesn't bear looking at nearer the ground.

This will interest you then Paul. Second video from ORBX in True Earth UK for X-Plane. Low down videos included.

Look closely at 1.59sec, I saw a train moving along the track!!


https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... 4U0AogkL9U

Regards
Nigel.

Paul K wrote: ↑

11 Apr 2018, 08:44

Here we go, chaps - a video of the first True Earth release, the Netherlands, which is due out very soon. What disk space and GPU/CPU muscle is this going to take ? I dread to think, but there's no denying it's a work of art.

https://youtu.be/ooewsGRpv-A

My only caveat - it's all shot from a fair altitude, and photo-real scenery doesn't bear looking at nearer the ground.

Amazing! Thanks for posting this Paul.

Brian

Yep, Nigel, I've seen that vid, and I note that it's X-Plane rather than P3D; the latter is what I'm on at the moment. There's no doubt it looks good - fabulously good in fact - but I wonder whether once you are out in the countryside, and the autogen becomes sparse, it will look quite as good as landclass at low level. What will bare areas such as Dartmoor and the Scottish Highlands look like from a few hundred feet up ?

I like what I see, certainly - but I'm only seeing what Orbx has chosen to show us. I'll await the flight sim community's verdict, I think.

The trees are truly awful.

Just to let you chaps know I posted a question in ORBX Forum regarding True Earth UK for FSX/P3D, John Venema informed me in his reply that they will be separating 32bit versions from 64bit versions because the 4GB limit of 32-bit platforms just cannot run the full True Earth feature as can the 64bit version however, they will charge only once for a True Earth region for FSX/P3D so you can upgrade from 32 bit to 64 bit without having to purchase the region again, from this I take it that it applies to any True Earth region.

You can't be fairer than that and I applaud ORBX for taking this into account.

Regards
Nigel.

A word of warning. I purchased ORBX England yesterday. I don't know if the installation went wrong, but all my default airfield grass textures got changed to a horible muddy brown colour. I have had to uninstall and import all the default World/Scenery/Texture files. A friend of mine commented on this on their forums quite politely............. and was banned. I don't think I shall be going there again.