Matt McGee

Alaska, B.C., Western Washington, and Idaho all have good scenery and good bush flying. (You already know about NZ and PNG.) Lots of Orbx airports in these areas too. KMYL McCall is a nice Orbx airport to use as a realistic base to explore all the famous backcountry strips in central Idaho. Milo Taylor currently has two packs of Idaho bush strips available in Orbx Direct, IDA The Deadly 3 and IDA Not so deadly 3. It sounds like he will be doing more!

Glad to hear you are doing more Idaho bush strips Milo!

Orbx Central will let you put your scenery on whatever drive, or drives, you want. I used to have P3D on my c: drive while my Orbx scenery was on my d: drive.

Hi Badl4nds, I'm just on the Orbx beta testing team and don't have any info on Orbx's future plans, so I don't know if it is coming to XP12. I was just asking the OP to clarify which product so someone "in the know" might be able to answer the question.

Which TrueEarth Great Britain are you waiting for? (North/Central/South, P3Dvx.x/XP11/XP12)

Hello G.H., I don't speak for Orbx, I am just a beta tester, so these are just my personal observations. Historically, Orbx doesn't talk much about their future plans, no matter how much people ask or threaten to leave. Feel free to post your questions, because occasionally someone from the staff or a developer might chime in, but don't be surprised if you don't hear anything official about future plans. I can't really talk about what I can see from my position as a tester, but I think it is OK to say that I can only see a few P3D things currently being tested. It doesn't appear to me that Orbx has totally abandoned P3D, though I have. I used to test FSX and P3D scenery, but I don't even have them installed anymore. It seems pretty obvious that MSFS is the new darling of the consumer flight sim community. (No offense to X-Plane, which I also test Orbx scenery for, but market share doesn't lie.) Developers are going to create scenery that they think people will want to buy, and most people seem to be buying for MSFS 2020. With MSFS 2024 on the way, I would not be surprised if the small number of P3D products currently being released gets even smaller in the future. Again, this is all just my personal view.

Seems to work fine for me and some other people who have replied too. The OP’s suggestion that “a single "on Special" tab would simplify my spending”, seems to directly conflict with your own complaint, “Some of the lists are long so I usually give up.” Given the number of products on sale, a list of all sale items would be correspondingly long, thus exceeding your attention span. The current format of first selecting a category of interest (ie. Europe) results in a shorter list of products that you can then sort for an even shorter list of products to look at. My guess is that most people have specific airports, counties, or developers that they are interested in. Not just “something on sale”. Just open the region where the interest is and sort the products by name, price, or developer. Whether I am looking for a specific airport, or just scanning the products in a particular country, OC and Orbx Direct seem pretty straightforward to me. Just my personal opinion. I would say that organizing products by theIr geographic region and making them sortable by name, price, and developer is both logical and intended to simplify customers finding what they are interested in. Orbx isn’t moving around products like a supermarket.

So right! Out of curiosity, I opened Orbx Direct and scrolled through all the MSFS products at a speed where I could read the product names and also see the red sale prices. It took me 6 minutes and 55 seconds. There are currently a lot of products on sale, so a filter of only things on sale would still have a pretty long list. Within each region you can already sort by Name, New, Price, and Partner, so you can already get the lower sale priced products listed first. I'm not against the ability to generate complex searches of the product library. As the numbers of products grows, the time it takes to scan through the products will grow too. Being able to filter searches by tags such as: product type (Airport, Cityscape, Mesh), airport type (Grass, Paved, GA, Regional, International), developer, country, best selling, or other tags, would be nice. However, I don't currently find it unduly difficult to just scan through the current products. A "benefit" of scrolling through the whole list is that I sometimes stumble upon products that I would not have thought to search for. Everybody is different, but I am more likely to get a product that I have a personal interest in, than I am to buy something just because it is on sale. Happy holidays!

What did you do that the universe is punishing you Don? (Trying to be humorous!) Sorry, I know how frustrating it is when stuff doesn't work, especially when it is working OK for others. For what it is worth, I'm not seeing the issues that you are after the latest MSFS 2020 update. The default toolbar at the top of the screen works and so does the pop-up round one for Flow Pro. NZA Simulations' NZMF looks really good on my PC. (Once I uninstalled the conflicting Asobo version included in World Update XII.) Sorry I don't know what is going on with your sim, but take heart that it can work. It just might take a bunch of troubleshooting and perhaps re-installing. Like Graeme, I am also puzzled about your "default 737". I have the Premium Deluxe version of MSFS and don't have a 737.

Many products get released without ever having a preview post in the Preview Announcements forum. Just because you don't see a preview post, doesn't mean Orbx isn't developing anything. I am aware of several Orbx products in development and I suspect there are more. There are also several updates being tested.

Great minds think alike Rob! I am currently taking screenshots too! Just finished the fourth one. Will post when finished. Edit: Here are screenshots of each location, in order from the OP.

The User Guide tab on Orbx Central's NZMF page also has the instructions for disabling the World Update XII versions of Milford Sound, Martins Bay, and Quintin Lodge.

I really like the KBOI airport, but that does seem a bit expensive! I'm sure @Nick Cooper or one of the other Orbx staff can help you with this issue. Just FYI: Since I am a beta tester, I don't see prices when I am logged into OC. If I go to Orbx Direct without being logged in, I see a price of 25.85 AUD for KBOI.

Honestly, the time between seeing a product's initial beta and its release can vary by quite a bit. I've seen some betas with virtually nothing wrong with them. Testing went quickly and they were released in a mater of days. I've also seen betas that were in earlier stages of development. We'd test what was there, knowing that other elements and features were still being worked on. We would look at subsequent builds until all the elements had been added. These can take weeks or even months to progress from beta to release. Here are some of the things that can affect the speed at which a scenery goes from beta to release: - Size of the scenery. It is a lot faster to test a small airport like W16 First Air, than a large one like YMML Melbourne. - How quickly the testers get their testing done and reports in. And how many of us are available to test each day. - How many issues the testers find. Sometimes there is virtually nothing wrong. Other times, there might be a bunch of issues. - The time it takes to fix each issue. Some things are easy to fix, other times there may be some weird bug that is hard to fix. - The amount of time per day the developer (or developers) can devote to fixing any issues the testers have identified. Out of curiosity I took a look at the timeline for EU Great Britain - North. I helped test Beta 1 and then two subsequent release candidates. It took 33 days from seeing the Beta 1 until it was released on Orbx Central. I am not trying to hint at anything, just showing an example of how long something covering as much area and with as many points of interest as Great Britain - North took to test and release. A similar product might take less time, or it might take more. I really does vary from scenery to scenery.

I have been an Orbx customer and regularly on the forums for over a decade. In my opinion, Orbx has always been pretty tight lipped about what was being worked on. It isn't anything new. There have been some road maps released in the past, but also complaining from users when something was delayed or cancelled. Perhaps that has affected their sharing of information? I have no inside knowledge of Orbx's customer engagement strategies. The Preview Announcements forum does have plans and progress from some developers who choose to reveal what they are working on, but I don't fault devs who are focused on production more than engagement. Personally, I am more interested in the quality of the scenery actually being released than I am in projected plans. I assume development strategies are complex. Like what happens when a developer is considering, or already working on, an airport and hears a competitor is developing the same one. Does he or she skip or stop development, or do they race to be first to market? Not a clue about EGLC v2 decisions. I do know that Orbx has many independent developers who choose that they want to work on based on their own desires or interests. Regarding your original question about EU Great Britain - South for MSFS, I am unable to comment on any scenery which I might be beta testing.