John Dow

Stand by, we're testing at the moment and spikes seem to have disappeared along with some other improvements to the mesh.

Yes I often prefer no PG but in other places PG is a must. Canberra is one, otherwise the tower on the mountain becomes a grain silo! And at 1500' agl the detail is fine.

I disagree with that assertion. I think it is purely a response to the changing landscape of Orbx as a multi faceted flight sim company. Orbx startef out as a semi-amateur collection of hobbyist flight sim developers and enthusiasts. As time went on, opportunities arose for developers to generate an income for their skills. However, much of the income and consequently, a few talented developers were lost as the wild west nature of the internet allowed piracy and sharing to bypass normal economic protocols. Then, a number of brilliant minds conceived and introduced Orbx Central which has largely prevented intellectual property theft of Orbx products (as far as I know anyway). Orbx remained an insular company, this new innovation was for the benefit of Orbx, until other companies noticed its success and sought to safeguard their intellectual property in the same way. And, for many firms, accessing Orbx Central to distribute their products without the need to design their own robust security has been an attractive option. However, this has led to the Orbx forums slowly evolving into something they were never designed to be, support forums for other developers' products. Not overly so but still, the creeping changes were becoming more and more obvious. Hence the decision to change the business model for support. It has nothing to do with loyalties and members' help etc. As far as I know, It's purely a result of unsustainability of the old model and the need to adapt to the future in a way that is commercially viable for Orbx.

Completed and ready for testing means for the beta testers I think...

I just loaded flights at YSSY and YBAF in the DHC6 and flew over the CBDs. My observations: Sydney. No CTD, the flight was normal but frame rates were down, and there were some duplicated scenery items, such as the Sydney Tower , Anzac Bridge, and no doubt several others that locals would be able to identify. However, if you want to fly around Sydney away from the CBD, the City Pack is worth retaining if you want the extra or more accurate buildings in the other business centres. But overall I'll be disabling the Sydney Cityscape until a compatibility fix is released. Brisbane. No CTD, but awful frame rates over the CBD. Definitely recommend disabling this city pack until a compatibility fix is released. The MSFS version is quite acceptable for normal flight operations in the Brisbane area, where 1500' agl would be expected.

Ok I'll check and see. I don't recall any ctd but I will double check

They are. There might be small issues, which are being looked at, but from my experience a normal flight over the scenery won't show any major problems.

Lots of little bugs cropped up, I'm sure you understand they need to be corrected, then tested, sometimes the fix introduces another bug, that needs to be corrected, then tested. And so on, until it's ready for release.

Sorry I wasn't suggesting Orbx based any decisions on what other firms are doing. I was simply trying to put a bit of market context into the mix. If one company announces that it is finding it difficult to get a return on P3D development it doesn't take a giant leap of logic to assume it's across the industry.

I tested the Melbourne scenery last night. With Photogrammetry on I took off from Essendon in the Optica and flew at 1200' over and around the city. The mix of PG buildings and the Orbx modelled buildings gave an excellent representation of the city. I saw a couple of melted structures, the most obvious being the crane in the middle of the CBD, but all the important buildings were the modelled version, and PG filled in the gaps. If your PG is very bad you might have a bandwidth issue, and also don't expect to fly at a lower than legal altitude of 1000' plus, because the scenery is designed as a background to a flight, not an architectural representation of the city. If I get the chance I'll grab a couple of screenshots tonight and add them to this post.

They work together, though there may be minor issues with duplicated buildings or conflicts. You can have the Orbx scenery active and fly around, if you see errors you can uninstall it until Orbx release a compatibility patch if required.

You can have it installed and see if it shows any noticeable problems. Some users report they haven't seen anything major as they flew around. If you see conflicts or duplicate buildings you can uninstall it until a fix is released, the sceneries still look good in the WU 7 versions.

I'll have a look later but I seem to recall that the Melbourne scenery looked good without photogrammetry on, as most of the landmark buildings are modelled, and the generics in between are OK unless you are down low looking for a specific building. And in my experience, when you do get down low and slow with PG on, you're mostly disappointed anyway.

If you have FSUIPC 7 you can assign individual slope to the axes, I use it on all the Asobo aircraft to lower the sensitivity, and just about every aircraft flies well enough now. Another tweak is to go into the aircraft's folder and find the flight model.cfg file, where you can find the flight tuning section, changing stability and sensitivity values can help, and another cheat is in the airplane geometry section, where reducing or increasing the size of the elevators, ailerons etc can help a flight model. Obviously you need to back up any files that you modify in case you break it!

P3D weather is always a compromise. The advice is generally to try to set a date where the snow cover you desire is displayed, and if you can't get snow cover automatically generated it may be necessary to manually set the weather. I can imagine that at latitudes lower than 40 degrees, there wouldn't be much expectation of snow covering the ground, certainly I wouldn't expect to see snow settling below about 45 degrees, and regular annual snow cover closer to 50 degrees (exdept at higher altitudes of course).

It works fine for me, though the photogrammetry does make it a bit less smooth so I turn it off when flying around the KBUR area. In answer to a previous post I tested the airport area with Van Nuys active and without, and performance was similar. My conclusion then was that it's more likely to be an overload due to other addons in the area, a complex airliner, or settings too high for the complex scenery.

Probably a matter of no-one knows, the market is constantly changing so I doubt it's possible to commit to anything. If the demand is seen to be there then True Earth regions may be further developed, but with MSFS now having introduced a 'True Earth' over the entire globe, the demand for the other sims is probably insufficient. As far as your original question, you can run True Earth with those other products, but you may find the sim loads faster etc if you do untick them in the scenery library. Uninstalling is not required.

There's a great program called Netlimiter, allows individual program limits. So for instance you could set the limit for Orbx Central to 3MB/s while MSFS still gets full throttle. https://www.netlimiter.com/

Many many threads here show that d/l speed problems are almost exclusively (like 99%) in the network and outside Orbx's control, and while the odd user has problems there's no problems for anyone else reported. Generally problems seem to sort themselves out after a day or so.

I've got the 3060ti running MSFS and P3D at 4K (3840 x 2160) and I rarely see less than 30fps anywhere, and I'm locked at 30 fps in P3D. Your card will be about 10-20% better performance than mine.

In MSFS select YSSY as your airport, select your plane and select Go Flying. Head north from YSSY and you'll see Sydney City and the Harbour Bridge etc, and go exploring. There's no actual entry in MSFS for the Sydney Cityscape, so Sydney Airport (YSSY) is where you start.

Australia will look hardly any different across most of the country, because MSFS doesn't need a True Earth product for photo scenery. There will be some cityscape improvements and I imagine some airports, and of course some of the more iconic tourist attractions. I'm hoping the joke that passes for an airport tetminal at Canberra will see at least a little bit of love.

I use a program called Tree Size Free that quickly and graphically shows me disk usage. Easy to identify where leftover install files etc are hogging the space.

At this time of year I doubt it's a priority item. Particularly as it is something that appears to have originated in an update by LM. Fixing problems like this is not just a matter of running the batch and then uploading the files to Orbx Central. As is the case in any computer environment, fixes have to be tested under multiple scenarios and users, and if there are multiple fixes they all need to be combined in a patch.

Search for similar topics to do with files not extracting. I know Nick has suggested fixes but I'm not able to remember what they are. Something to do with the disk space and scratch disks that the download needs to write to, typically up to 3x the size of the download.