John Hargreaves

Looks great. I did one of those Classic Wings taster flights in a Tiger Moth from Duxford a couple of years ago and it was a great experience. I think it would be nice to recreate the memory.

This looks like it will be a lot of fun in a helicopter - does it come with any helipads or landable surfaces?

Fascinating stories there thanks for posting this. Bunch of ordinary blokes doing amazing work.

How many times have any of us had a technical issue, popped into the support forum and found that it's a common issue, read the fixes and sorted it out ourselves without ever having to bother any Orbx staff? I'm in agreement with the posts above - whatever knowledge base is readable in the forums will soon be out of date and Orbx will likely be bombarded with repeat requests that could have easily been cleared up by other forum members.

I had problems flying from EGLC, bought from Orbx. Sim crashed if I started the flight at the airport, but if I started the flight in mid air it loaded, and I was able to land at EGLC. I have the London scenery, Orbx EGLC, and run with photogrammetry off. I cleared out all the recommended files and had several hours crash free flying on a blank community folder with no addons installed.

Just to be clear, do you mean reinstall the city pack, the whole sim or both? Thanks

If you really want to appreciate the detail in the Orbx scenery, I'd suggest the Bell 47G from Flyinside. You have to really fly it though, you can't just sit back and let it fly itself. But if you want to gain an insight into just how much work goes into Orbx scenery I've not found anything better - the visibility is second to none. The London city pack+ EGLC and the Sydney City/airport make for some fantastic low and very slow flights.

I've settled on PG=off and use the London pack, it works great. The scenery is really crisp and sharp, maybe has that flight sim/computer game look rather than the naturalistic subtlety you get with PG, but the London PG is pretty poor imo, and it spoils the immersion when flying low in the Bell 47G, which is by far my most preferred aircraft.

Helipads?

You should also check out the Bell 47G from Flyinside, it's on another level flight model-wise. Future's looking good

I think I'm resigned to turning off PG in London for now, it's really immersion breaking to see all the crumbled buildings. I had a lovely dawn flight in the Bell 47 at 200' all along the river and through the city yesterday, and performance was fine. Personally I think it's a better experience with the autogen buildings, and the Orbx London scenery is excellent, I really like it.

Looking good for a v0.1, can't wait to have proper helicopter support in the sim, all that fancy scenery is wasted at 30000'

There's nothing to touch photogrammetry when it comes to giving real living atmosphere to a city, but in every city I've flown in the sim the hero buildings all look the worse for it compared to the general city sprawl. Sometimes the custom buildings stick out clumsily such as St Paul's cathedral. The holy grail would be a seamless mix of photogrammetry and custom where the custom blends invisibly. That would improve performance too as the photo buildings clearly have far too many unnecessary polygons, hence the melted look. The default shard building blends pretty well I think, and I really liked Orbx London when we could use it. I guess blending the two types of scenery is a relatively new technical problem, and devs will only get better at it, but I'm looking forward to the revised London city pack.

Absolutely top tip - I was struggling with the Seattle scenery; Orbx Central had updated the pack but it was still terrible with distortion and objects missing. I tried this and it fixed my issues.

Image is showing for me ok

I've just done a delete of the rolling cache, turned photogrammetry off and on again and reloaded default London, which now looks significantly better than it did 24hrs ago. It still looks a bit shabby and dirty (hey, it's London) but the post nuclear holocaust look is very much improved. There is talk on the MSFS forums about getting poor quality photogrammetry data due to overloaded servers, which is then cached on your own PC so it keeps looking bad, and this seems to have some truth to it.

As of today London city causes a crash for me, as does Leeds, but Seattle and London landmarks are ok. Came here looking for answers and fortunately found them

From experience with alpha testing, this was one of my main worries, that certain glamourous locations looked great, but many cities just weren't recognisable enough. These city packs will really help to bring the sim to life. Default EGNM has a row of victorian terrace houses along the edge of the ramp, looks very nice, but slightly out of place.

I think this is just what MSFS needs to bring some of the locations to life - their version of London is, limited, shall we say. Shan't mention Washington DC. It would also be a fantastic opportunity for Orbx to show some love for the helicopter community,. If ever a product was made for helicopters and VR it's MSFS. Please give us some helipads so we can get low down and close up.

That's great to hear, no helipads makes it a slightly pointless purchase if that's your main type of flying. Sure you can use the normal airports, but there is something unique about being able to land right at the centre of things. Great to hear that heliports are coming, Tony W is our favourite developer

I think that is a good solution, looking forward to sp1.