Kjaye

Thanks for doing this. Seafront Simulations are working on their UK Southwest scenery now too so I'm super pleased your boats won't clash with theirs. Once we have their souhtwest pack, in conjunction with their southeast vessels and your landmarks the South of England will look pretty beautiful, which is great as I live in Devon! Are you going to update the Discovery map at some point with the official list of POIs and landmarks?

Thanks for acknowledging this Ebert! For myself, I certainly don't want a refund, I appreciate the value of the POI additions, it was just the duplications and lack of any POI list that really bothered me. The additional ships that interfered with other add ons such as Seafront Simulations and Mamut Marinas were the worst offenders so glad to hear that will be fixed. Thanks for listening to your customer base. There is a lot to like about the add on and I'm looking forward to exploring each countie's castles and historic buildings once we get the POI list especially.

It's such a needed feature and would please so many Orbx customers. If I was Seafront Simulations, I'd be really annoyed the way Orbx ships have ruined their Vessels Southeast Pack. I don't want to make out the GB South pack is worse than it is, it's still a net gain for me, I love having the additional castles especially, but the conflicts shouldn't be happening this far into the sim's development. You can't expect to add 700 POIs in a small geographical area and there not to be overlap with other products. Attempts to address that should be prioritised, especially as this is the third in the series now and Orbx has had three years to get this right.

I know that this is nothing to do with you, and I really appreciate how helpful that you personally have been, but this is really unacceptable in my opinion. It just feels disrespectful, both to Orbx customers, and to their partners that they feel it's acceptable to dump a bunch of low quality, crappy models on top of other developers far superior work. I don't understand how the ships could even be regarded as acceptable on any level as fit for release, as a product of the so called premier developer in the flight sim community. Static wakes? Seriously? I am currently in the weird position with this addon for using it for inland flying to see the castles and historic buildings, but then disabling it to fly over coastal cities and towns. The response from your CEO to these complaints that she'd refund anyone who was upset there were no giraffes in the pack just reads like a middle finger from Orbx to their userbase. The pack should be divided into bgl files and folders so that users have some control over what content they want added. The price isn't relevant. I'd have happily paid £30 for a version that allowed me to decide if I want the ships, or masts etc added. I can tell that you're a passionate and genuine person, who cares about the customers, but I don't think the coorporate division care at all in all honesty.

I don't think the lack of animals will bother most of us, as you say, it's the third in the GB scenery series and intended to complement Central and North, both of which I also have. I certainly don't want a refund, the castles and historic buildings are a really nice addition, however I feel there are more genuine criticisms than missing exotic animal life. An official POI list, like we got with North and Central would be a good start. Can we have something on the Discovery map on the Orbx Central app please? For me, the biggest complaint, with all three of these add ons is the way that they clash with other third party mods, including your own partners. I really don't want the Orbx ships, any of them. Masts, radomes, chimneys etc are also already done by other providers and we end up with duplicates with these. Is there any way you could help us resolves this, structering the objects into different folders or .bgl files for example so that we can turn off what we don't need? This problem is one that is only ever going to get worse, as more and more scenery gets developed for the sim, a way to resolve these ugly duplications should be given some thought imo.

Yes, not sure what happened with this add on, but it seems the initial project was more ambitious and than just kind of altered at the end. Whilst disappointing, I am satisfied with the overall offering, 700 POIs for under £10 is good value and I am still enjoying the purchase overall despite the rocky start. My biggest issue is with Orbx acting as if other regional solutions don't exist and making no attempt to minimise conflicts with other major add ons like We Love VFR (240,000 downloads), Gaist ships, Mamut Marinas and even some of their own partner's offerings, like Seafront Simulations. The major issue for me is the additional ships. They are atrociously bad. Models from what looks like 20 years ago, all just completely static, many with static wakes. How can the supposed leading add on developer in the whole flight community think they are acceptable? The battleships and the static tanker around Plymouth are so bad they actually made me laugh. I would love an option to simply remove every ship from the add on as they a net negative and make flying to places like Portsmouth and Plymouth unbearable. I actually finally learned how to use add on linker just I can easily disable the add on when I fly around coastal cities. On the plus side, the castles especially are really nicely done. I live in Devon and all 18 major castles in my county are covered, which I certainly didn't expect and the outlines and shapes are pretty accurate. 'Walking' around Berry Pomeroy especially in VR is strikingly nostalgic for all the times I went there in my youth. Okehampton, Totnes, Castle Drogo, Powderham, Compton as well all like similar enough that I would have been able to recognise what I was walking around in VR in a blind test. Dartmouth is especially well done. I don't want to come across as wholly negative, it's only because I love having these regional packs that I feel so passionate about them, My major complaint is that Orbx seem to act as if the sim isn't 3 and a half years old now, with hundreds of add ons, including very well established free regional packs, like We Love VFR, Mamut and Gaist, that combine for almost a million downloads that duplicate much of what Orbx have added here, and nearly always much better. I would rather have the option to just purchase the castles, historic building and football stadiums, and have the rest disabled as ships, masts, chimneys, communication radomes, lighthouses and even piers have all been done much better elsewhere. If these assets were structed in .bgl files that we could just disable, 99 percent of the duplications would go away, and the few remaining would be much more acceptable. Anyway, I hope this doesn't sound too negative, since John kindly took the time to hand input all the POIs so that we knew where to look I've have enjoyed a nice couple of hours flying around Devon in VR visiting castles, and I'm really looking forward to to visiting all the other counties in the region.

What did you delete, GB South? I'm still hopeful that Orbx can offer a solution to this. The add on has lots of great content, it's just it also contains hundreds of superfluous content that has already been provided elsewhere. Just the European region of We Love VFR has 240,000 downloads on flightsim.to alone, it seems incredible to me to pretend it doesn't exist and duplicate multiple versions of what it does. The same with ships. Are we just going to pretend that Gaist, Mamut's Marinas and Seafront Simulation, with over 500,000 downloads combined don't exist either? You can certainly argue that these don't exist on Xbox so they need to provide them for XBox users, and I would agree, but just put those objects into .bgl files so that PCVR users who have these add ons can disable those Orbx objects and most of the problems go away. The reason I get so worked up is becaues a) the scenery add ons have a ton of great content that I want so I don't want to uninstall it, and b) it's not a hard technical fix, just structure the objects in .bgl files like other developers do. The sim has been out for 3.5 years at this point, if you're going to push 700 POIs into a small region and not consider what impact that will have on the consumer who might actually have other add on software than just your own then you deserve to take criticism for it. Next year, in MSFS 2024 Asobo are introducing masts, satellites, chimneys and towers themselves so every single user have duplicate conflicts everywhere in the UK unless Orbx do something to fix it then. I assume at that point they will anyway, so hopefully they can do it now. Anyway, I'm not saying that they wont. It's the weekend, I understand they might reply in the week, so fingers crossed.

You misunderstand me, I'm not expecting Orbx to be have better quality than a narrow scenery focusing on a specific area, I'm expecting them not to duplicate what their scenery partners are doing. John above said that that was the idea, and these are mistakes. Seafront Simulations is an Orbx partner. Their Vessels South East pack is a very high quality ships pack for the southeast of the UK. That's literally all it does, high quality ships. I don't want Orbx ships placed on top of them ruining them. I want the option to delete the Orbx ships. It's not hard to do. All they need is to provide groups of objects in .BGL files like everybody else does, then we could edit them out. It's the same with all the communication masts. Orbx model a handful, which then clash with the We Love VFR mod and you'll end up with two masts at each site. Orbx only does the major masts, whereas We Love VFR does them all. I can't uninstall We Love VFR as I would be missing the major masts around my area, as Orbx only does one, at Princetown on Dartmoor, where I now have two. If they had all masts grouped together in a .bgl file though us of who use We Love VFR, and that number is literally thousands of people, then we could disable the Orbx masts, along with the Orbx ships, and most of the conflict issues go away. there are some really nice castle, churches, and historic building models in this pack, but unfornutately it also throws another 300 to 400 models of stuff most PCVR users will already have from elsewhere so we either to have uninstall other add ons, not use the Orbx add on, or just put up with some areas having two lighthouses, two masts, two sets of radomes, chimney, ships etc dumped down on top of each other. This isn't a hard technical fix, it just requires objects to be ordered into .bgl files that we can disable if we don't need them.

Thanks so much for doing this John! Do you think Orbx will be able to correct any of these conflicts. If exclusions can't be made I'd personally rather Orbx removed any models that conflict with other payware partners, as the other models are nearly always better. Not a slight at Orbx, more that this is a 700 bundle pack, whereas where another developer is working on an area, it's a much narrrower focus so should be higher quality. For example, Seafront Simulations should be much better than Orbx as that's what the scenery was focused on. But I'd love to have the better HMS Victory back again! I realise that none of this is your decision btw. Excited to have a look through the list now!

They don't need to be compatible with everything, but not clashing with Asobo world updates, and their own software would be a start. I pointed out several examples in Great Britain North when that released where they had duplicated POIs that Asobo covered. A lighthouse at Out Skerries which was very well modelled by Gaya for Asobo still has a low poly Orbx generic lighthouse embedded in it. They also had clashes with their own Orbx Sumburgh airport add on. I've not spent much time in GB South yet, just loaded it up and visited some local areas and it clashes badly with Seafront Simulations UK South East vessels pack. These are an Orbx partner whose products I've bought via the Orbx Central app. That add on has a beautifully modelled version of HMS Victory, Nelson's ship at the Battle of Trafalger, complete with an interior that now has a lower quality Orbx model inside of it. There are ships enmeshed within other ships in various places too, Plymouth for example, if you have RealVFR's Plymouth scenery. Freeware developers like Superspud and Mamut put out multiple versions of their add ons to avoid conflicting with other sceneries, or in the case of Mamut's add ons allow to disable certain features, so it shouldn't be beyond the capabilities of the number one flight sim scenery developer in the world to do likewise. The irony is, that the better customer you are, and the more purchases you have made, the more you suffer. Having a way to tackle exclusions and duplicates like this should be a priority if you're releasing multiple scenery packs, each with 600 or 700 POIs.

Thanks, John, I really appreciate this, as I am sure will many others.

I do get that they can't model everything. But having a POI list so people actually knew what they were getting would be helpful. I know they will add it in a few days on the Orbx Central Discovery map, but it should release with the product. Also, the scenery conflicts are annoying. As I live in the south of England I have purchased every single payware scenery in the region as well as downloaded every relevant flightsim.to add on. This means that they multiple scenery clashes where objects merge together. I'll post some pictures tomorrow so you can see what I mean. I'm not sure if this is something Orbx can resolve, or if its an Asobo issue but either way it means this looks like a pack that will have be installed and uninstalled depending on the flight, which is shame. Plymouth and Portsmouth look worse with the add on than without if you have RealVFR's Plymouth scenery and Seafront Simulation's Vessels South East as their mutual objects clash. It might not be fair to blame to Orbx, but I don't think its unreasonable to be disappointed that this is the state of MSFS in 2023, where you can't prevent multiple copies of the same landmark be installed on top of each other. I really hope MSFS 2024 is better in this regard.

Just spent half hour nipping around with the drone cam. It's hard to explore when we don't have a list of POIs so I just flew to places I figured would be POIs. It seems that Exeter Cathedral, Paignton Pier, Teignmouth Pier and Killerton House were not modelled. The first three I have models elswhere so not a big deal, but disappointed to see Killerton wasn't included. I did see models for Totnes and Compton Castles, but Dartmouth castle is still autogen. There are quite a few clashes with other sceneries. Most notably Seafront Simulation's Vessels UK South East. That has some beautiful ship models, such as Nelson's HMS Victory that now has a lower quality model enmeshed into it. I also can't see any discovery flights or missions to do the church and castle tours, and I haven't found any fields with farm animals in yet. Anyone been able to find these features?

Thirded. I'm especially interested in whether this clashes with Seafront Simulation's Vessels Southeast pack in places like Portsmouth and Dover. Will I now have two HMS Victory's for example?

I assume soon enough that the POI list will be added to the Orbx Central Discovery map anyway like with GB North and Central? Would be nice to have an overview of the highlights, the advertisement page doesn't mention a single POI specifically and the trailer doesn't name anything. I think I see Well's Cathedral and maybe the Bodmin tower beacon in Cornwall, but these are complete guesses on my part.