John Venema
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Posts posted by John Venema
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On 11/26/2018 at 8:09 PM, vfr_steve said:
Very nice! As you clearly have a higher resolution version of the UK available and are using it for areas around your airports, you could have an option for this to be available for the UK - I'd buy it even if it was 1TB per region and £100
We don't have that resolution imagery available for the whole UK. We only license ZL18/19/20 for specific areas at airports.
Would you buy a TE region at ZL19 for £400? Because that is what the price would need to be for us to afford the hosting bandwidth costs, perhaps even more. It would also take us about 5-6 times as long to clean up and colour match that resolution of imagery purely because of the sheer size of the files to manage.
What we are looking into instead is offering ZL19 areas where flying is popular or interesting. You will see this in the upcoming SP1 for South in central London and Portsmouth at ZL19.
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1 hour ago, davidrebolton said:
Any news hot off the press as to when Central will be ready for the masses?
We'll miss November. We are waiting on a bunch of stadiums and other POI models to be finished this week and of course all the bug fixes from beta testing.
Aiming for first week in December now, so not too long now.
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1 hour ago, jjaycee1 said:
@John Venema Have Orbx taken into account the requirements for Exclusions noted in TE-GB South and ensured that Exclusions are included in the Central version prior to release, or will we have to wait for a Service pack.?Personally i would prefer the job to be done before release so that we don't have to wait for something as important as the exclusions at airports to be delayed as we are in TE-GB South version. Seeing overlapping buildings a t some airports is quite an immersion killer, As you know people love the positive but dwell on the negative
No we are taking the opposite tack, removing all our buildings from South airports and not including any in Central. Authors of Gateway airports need to start conforming to the XP11 SDK and adding exclusions to their airports. The result will of course be that any airports not upgraded in the Gateway database will be flat without buildings.
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We're showing a beta build. Things will be missing.
I am using Ultra Weather XP in my shots, as does Filou. Emmsie uses XVision.
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57 minutes ago, Airlifter said:
I know this is XP, but can I consider this to be any kind of representative of what I can expect for a future release for P3D?
It will look near identical since we are using the same in-house production tools for both platforms and the same art assets. P3D won’t have the road overlay option though, and the lighting will look different.
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6 minutes ago, MartinM said:
Is RAF Valley modeled?
We don't upgrade XP11 airports. If RAF Valley has been done as a Gateway airport then it will be part of default XP.
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59 minutes ago, MartinM said:
I was wondering if owner of the P3D England, Wales, Scotland sceneries would be able to get some discount like you get with other ORBX Airports when having them on either platform.
thanks
Sorry no - different technology, substantial production costs, different geographical boundaries.
You will get 40% of EGFF Cardiff Airport for XP11 if you previously purchased FTX Wales though.
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12 minutes ago, G-GFLY said:
Looks outstanding! I'm curious why your water effects look different from what I see as standard, is this part of the package?
Many thanks,
Some of those shots use Ultra Weather XP which allows water colour and pattern to be changed. There's a ton of freeware and payware utilities to do this over at the .org
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17 minutes ago, chifan90 said:
Looks good, but will the Mac version be released simultaneously this time and have a better install experience?
Will this be out in time for Thanksgiving so users have the long weekend to enjoy this?
No and probably no. We'll release the Mac version within a day or so of release and it will still be a manual download and scripted decompression. We have not yet finished coding FTX Central for MacOS so until that happens it will be a little cumbersome, sorry. I know this is not ideal but we're doing the best we can being MacOS newbies.
We hope to have this released for November, but as it goes with large projects, it may slip into December.
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With the passing of our dear Orbx team member Neil Hill, this part of the forums have been renamed in his honour.
To read Holger's fitting tribute and also thoughts from the community, please visit here:
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Neil will be sorely missed; his energy and enthusiasm put many of our younger team members to shame. His legacy will live on through the untold countless hours of enjoyment he has brought to people arriving at thousands of airports worldwide.
Even though Neil never regarded himself as being old, if the community agrees we’d like to rename the Old Coots Club the Neil Hill Memorial Lounge.
RIP Neil, our dear colleague...
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Inside Orbx_B_GB_South_TrueEarth_Overlay, there are two folders "roads" and "roads_t". The "roads" folder is the textured roads that are inside X-Plane and are enabled by default. The "roads_t" folder are the transparent roads. To use transparent roads, rename "roads" to "roads_x" and rename "roads_t" to "roads".
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17 hours ago, Admiralty013 said:
Hello JV, if i may, i'd like to make a suggestion in regards to AIRPORTS and only airports. The current naming standards that XP uses is ICAO - Airport common name. Those of us who make/improve/download gateway files are used to using this format, and many (not all) designers use it as well would it be possible (*yes i'm sure it will be a pain in the rear) to swap the naming of AIRPORTS ONLY to follow that format? While I fully understand asking us to not rename folders since it will cause issues it would be nice to have a single standard used when it came to airport scenery. As an example I've cut a bit of my ini out this is a Gateway scenery, an AS scenery, 2 Orbx and finally one from SFD (MrX6) Using this format would maintain the prexisting format, yet allow for your automatic updating. And again i'd like to mention this is for airports and airports only having Orbx in front of TE and other non airport scenery is fine because it groups them together and if a manual adjustment of the ini is needed makes for an easier time in locating them.
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/EGPF - Glasgow International/
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/EHAM - Amsterdam Intl/
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/EIDW - Dublin_1_Volumetric_Grass/
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/EIDW - Dublin_2_Parked_Cars/
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/EIDW - Dublin_3_Street_Lights/
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/EIDW - Dublin_4_Roads/
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/EIDW - Dublin_5_Scenery/
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/ENHA - Hamar_Flyplass Orbx/
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/ENOV - Orsta_Volda Orbx/
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/KABQ - Albuquerque Intl Sunport/Thanks for the detailed suggestion. I have passed this onto Tony and the team for consideration.
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Renaming the Orbx folder names is not a good idea. This will break the automatic patching of updates and bug fixes by FTX Central, which will be looking for specific folder names. This will lead to more support issues in the future when updating fails.
Please don't rename any Orbx scenery folder names.
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Naturally they will. When using VR you should try to maintain a constant 45FPS frame rate.
There are a number of tools you can use to assist with VR, so search these:
3jFPS-wizard11 - https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/43281-3jfps-wizard11/ - automatically reduce scenery details to keep a constant FPS.
Oculus Tray Tool (you can reduce or disable the supersampling easily with this) https://forums.oculusvr.com/community/discussion/64871/latest-release-for-oculus-tray-tool
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4 hours ago, daveangel said:
can I asked where HD trees might sit in the order, or if trueearth ignores their presence which I suspect is the case.
We use our own custom tree textures in TE GB.
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6 hours ago, FastNeatAverage said:
Is the exclusion zone thing not something that you can fix? GBPRO worked fine for me in terms of this autogen issue. I'm also yet to find a single airport apart from the payware Heathrow that this works for.
No, we can’t go and fix other developer’s airports, that is not our responsibility.
Can you cite specific examples of third party airports which are affected?
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Make sure your scenery library order is as per this post:
You cannot have X-Plane 11 running while using FTX Central, so ensure you exit the sim.
Finally, to confirm the roads are set to transparent, check that inside Orbx_B_GB_South_TrueEarth_Overlay, there are two folders:
roads
roads_x
If you have those then you will see the transparent roads in most places. Please note that you will still see the X-Plane default roads for motorway on/off ramps, bridges and some other areas.
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Hello all,
We have noticed some screenshots and videos with missing buildings, trees and housing. To truly experience TrueEarth Great Britain the way it was designed we recommend to move the Number of World Objects slider all the way to the right:
Additionally, there is no need to set Visual Effect, Texture Quality and Antiaiiasing all the way to the right. Doing so will cause performance issues in the sim. The settings above provide for excellent quality but also smoother FPS.
We will add this into an update of the user guide ASAP.
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Hello all,
Some customers are reporting that FTX Central is not placing the Orbx TrueEarth Great Britain entries correctly in scenery_packs.ini
If these entries are not in the correct location, you will experience the following issues:
1. Certain London landmarks like The London Eye, Tower Bridge etc, will not appear. These are default Laminar objects.
2. Certain Gateway airports will not be displayed correctly; instead you'll see TE GB facsimile buildings in place
3. Other scenery elements will not be correctly displayed.
Fortunately the fix is very simple and straight forward. You just need to ensure that the Orbx TE GB folder entries are BELOW Global Airports and Landmarks London, as shown below.
QuoteSCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/Global Airports/
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/X-Plane Landmarks - London/
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/Orbx_A_GB_South_TrueEarth_Custom/
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/Orbx_B_GB_South_TrueEarth_Overlay/
SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/Orbx_C_GB_South_TrueEarth_Orthos/Please note that some third party airports may be missing the required exclusions. This is not an Orbx problem. If an airport designer does not use a proper exclude for the airport boundary then it is possible our scenery layers (and any other scenery layer) may interfere with the airport.
If you experience interference from TE GB at a third party airport and the scenery layers are as per above, please contact the developer and request an exclusion to be correctly added.Update 18-Oct-18: We will add exclusions to all affected airports by incorporating fixes contributed by FlyAgi in the topic below, and also adding our own fixes for missing exclusions. In this way we can patch TE GB in a coordinated, official way via FTX Central. Thanks for your patience in the meantime.We do apologise for this inconvenience and Ben is aware that further development of the FTX Central code is required to overcome every iteration of customers' scenery_packs.ini
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Here's a tip for those wanting even more realism when flying over TrueEarth Great Britain,
In FTX Central, open the Control Panel for TE GB:
Select (x) Transparent Road Textures as the option (no need to confirm the action, the change takes place immediately).
Your will then see the X-plane synthetic roads replaced by actual ortho roads from the source imagery. There may be exceptions such as motorway on/off ramps or bridges etc, but for the most part it looks more natural. Keep in mind these roads will not be as high resolution as the synthetic ones, but it does provide a more natural look.
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Press Release – For Immediate Release
Toowong Australia - June 19th, 2018
Orbx sponsors Max Bird Racing
Orbx is pleased to announce our sponsorship of young 18 year old racing prodigy Max Bird.
Winner of his class in the Dubai 24 Hours and recently a race winner at Thruxton UK, we are thrilled to have our company's logo on his Ginetta GT5 race car!
Max is a professional racing driver currently racing in the Ginetta GT5 championship and hoping to progress into British GT in 2018/19. You can follow his season at his personal website to see his results and important updates. http://www.maxbird.co.uk/MaxBirdRacing/ . Be sure to follow his FB and Twitter feeds to get live updates from his events!
Max and the Orbx logo at full speed at Silverstone last week
Orbx CEO John Venema today said "I've known Max for a few years now (we train at the same gym) and after being invited to see him race at Thuxton recently where he impressed me hugely with a spectacular race win from 8th place on the grid, we agreed that Orbx would be thrilled to provide a modest sponsorship to support the rest of his 2018 season"
"Max shows a maturity and level head way beyond his 18 years and I am confident he will have a stellar racing career ahead of him".
Max's history
Max started karting at 8 years of age racing at local kart tracks Camberley and Forest Edge, building up a good selection of trophies. As a father and son team he first raced at a National Level in 2010. Max continued racing at a club level in 2011 becoming vice champion at Forest Edge, and taking 4th in the club championships at Shenington and Whilton, before joining Fusion Motorsport for 2012 to compete in S1 and Formula Kart Stars. In this final year as a cadet, Max took a number of podiums and fastest laps at National level before moving onto Mini Max in 2013.
Competing predominantly at National level Max was 10th in the S1 Mini Max championship, after achieving a number of top 6 finishes. For 2014 Max moved to Rotax Junior Max and again competed in the National S1 championship, finishing 12th overall once again achieving top 6 finishes and fastest laps during the year, including at the Britsh Kart GP at PFI. After winning the prestigious TVKC karting championship for Junior Rotax in 2015 Max entered car racing in 2016 competing in the highly competitive Ginetta Junior championship before moving on in 2017 to the Ginetta GT5 championship where he finished 4th overall after 1 race win, 4 second places, 2 third places a pole position and 2 fastest laps.
Max says "2017 was an extremely good learning year for me as I had a 1st in the opening round of the season, then followed by 6 further podiums across the season and also 2 fastest laps and a pole in the final round. A productive learning season with limited testing to ready for the 2018 campaign."
Max’s aim is to become a professional racing driver and race sports cars worldwide with his ambition to compete at the Le Mans 24 Hours.
Some of Max's races are broadcast on UK television when the Ginetta championships joins the BTCC races. We hope our sponsorship will provide funding for to have a successful 2018 and move to a higher level championship series in 2019.
Good luck Max, and we'll be watching your performances keenly and of course enjoy seeing the Orbx logo whizzing around the circuits of Europe!
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We have now launched our new OrbxDirect store which is live and ready for you to register a new account.
An easy step-by-step visual guide has been posted here:
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On 18/10/2016 at 5:56 AM, Bassman said:
If it is not a rude question, how much was JV's latest laptop? and was it a special order with selected components or an off the shelf unit? I know this could be asked in John's post however I think it s relevant to this new post also.
http://www.affordablelaptops.com.au/contents/en-us/p3170_msi-gt73vr-titan-pro_GT73VR_6RF-025AU.html
Five grand Aussie. No special order, I wanted the model with the GTX1080 inside and it came with 1.5TB of SSD/HD and could drive a 4K monitor at 60Hz so that's all I needed.
Gaming laptops always cost twice as much as equivalent desktops, but they are so much quieter on a desk and best of all, they are portable and self contained, great for trade shows and demos etc. This unit is so quiet I only hear the fan kick in if I am flying very dense scenery with lots of 3D models and autogen. For day to day work it's completely silent.
If you want a smaller unit with only a slightly slower CPU, the new Razer Blad Pro with GTX1080 is about as good as it gets: http://www.razerzone.com/gb-en/gaming-systems/razer-blade?utm_campaign=WW-The New Razer Blade 5-B5 Brand Keywords&utm_source=google&utm_medium=cpc&utm_content=UK-Systems - Laptop&gclid=CLnw4Krs_M8CFXAA0wodYpMHLw
Welcome to Goodwood! (XP11)
in Orbx Preview Announcements, Screenshots and Videos
Posted
That is likely Chichester Cathedral.