John Dow

The upcoming theme park to rival Sea World and other tourist attractions? I prefer to remember it as the place of quiet reflection and contemplation it was established to be 😐

Bah... it's just another day at this end of the journey 🙂

For the next few hours in MSFS (and I think anytime in Rex Weather or similar if you set the date and time) there is some great opportunities to enjoy some mountain flying in MSFS, using something slow and low. If you see this before the winds die down (they are from the west at maybe 100km/hr) try starting a flight at Thames and climb up into the hills to the east and fly along the ridges and then try to fly back to the west without sinking into the ground. I managed it OK in the Optica and the C152 but the Curtis Jenny just didn't have the power and I had to fly down into the bottom of the river valley and even then the small hills that were left were too much. Or start at say Te Aroha and fly north and feel the side winds pushing you to the east. Quite extraordinary. It certainly brings home how much more realistic MSFS is than what I used to fly in!

In this case it's not an upgrade, it's new build. If you have the original it will continue to be what you paid for. If you want to have the new layout and graphics, you can choose to get it or not. Orbx airports have always been released as point in time products, some developers choose to update or upgrade. But this is a new build that was a result of a major change to the airport, and as I understand it, because of the unique nature of the location, it required a fresh start.

Yes. From what I hear the tories have lost much support in the local elections.

My guess is that they're not in a position to answer your questions re GB South. A lot of the work depends on the whims of developers, and the devs who worked on the other GB sceneries might have other projects they're working on. From a business point of view it's a Catch 22, they can't promise the scenery will be developed, but they can't rule it out either. So, a statement from Orbx that they can't tell whether they GB South will be developed but is still on the wish list would leave you in the same position you are now.

If you google landing competitions you'll see many competitors who can land and take off in a fraction of this helipad, but the biggest factor is a suitable headwind. I don't know what the wind was blowing when the real world landing was performed but I bet it was a steady headwind of at least 10 kts

No response? Perhaps it's because this is the Orbx flight simulator forums. You'd do better to find a web development forum to ask your questions.

Some morphing (Alaska for example) is because Asobo/Bing uses different imagery for different LOD tiles. So, when the sim was developed, a particular imagery was used for all the different LODs, then updated imagery was introduced but often only for the LOD that appears as you get close. I suspect it's a failing of procedures in the updating, the developers might not even be aware of the problem. That's my assessment based on what I see in the sim, quite prepared to be corrected if anyone knows better.

Suspension of disbelief and moving on from imperfections are mandatory for maximising the flightsim experience. I see some thing I don't like, I just ignore it and move on. I mean for every thing like statics that can be addressed, there are a hundred other things needing the ignore factor. Look down, there are cars disappearing and conflicting. There are image footprints with no buildings or clutter on them. There are aircraft flying around that are just three lights flashing. There are clouds that appear from nothing. There are areas of scenery pasted in from a store of landclass textures. There's inflexible atc all aspects of the flight. So for me, lack of a chosen parking space is only one of a number of factors that need to be ignored to enjoy the sim to the maximum degree.

Rex have a weather add-on for msfs but honestly the live weather in msfs is good enough for me 90% of the time. But... Rex weather has a series of scenarios such as approaching cold front etc which work well on flights longer than local jaunts, last time I tried I think it was an hour in GA to complete the sequence. Might be YouTube examples?

Orbx is not a single entity as you might think, it's a collection of developers who retain some say in how their products are offered (as far as I know anyway) so a 'normal' business model might not work under the Orbx structure. (this is my interpretation of how Orbx is structured, I might be wrong in which case I am happy to be corrected)

As a beta tester I know as much as you until a product appears in the testing area! And nothing for MSFS has yet appeared. But a lot of the modelling is transferable between sims I believe so I would expect that at the very least it is being assessed, but of course it needs to be picked up by a dev or a team within the Orbx sphere.

As a beta tester I disagree. I've been simming forever, beta testing for over a decade, and it's expectations that have changed more than Orbx quality. Yes there are differences between sceneries, because different developers have different priorities, and access to detailed information varies between airports, but overall standards are as high as they always been, with some concessions to the constant changes as updates are introduced regularly.

I think you misunderstand the nature of Orbx as a flightsim development company. Orbx started out as a collection of talented designers who took on scenery projects and shared resources but each designer had a project or a share in one, but there was no requirement for anyone to take part in any project. And so it is still. Developers are offered projects, or developers bring projects to Orbx, but if no one puts their hand up to be part of a project, people are not 'assigned' except maybe for some minor aspects. Given the amount of work that would be required to get up to speed and then complete LC Asia, and the existing market for P3D, the return would probably be measured in cents per hour for the dev. The fact is, LC Asia exists, in a format that leaves the old LC standard for dead, it's called MSFS and it's included in the sim along with the rest of the world. Technology moves on, CD replaced vinyl and cassette tapes, DVDs replaced VHS snd Beta, MP3 replaced CDs, streaming replaced DVDs, and so it goes on. Similarly, MSFS scenery out of the box is replacing the LC products, that were the best in their time, but no longer make the grade.

Orbx doesn't 'get' other developers to make sceneries. There's cooperation in the marketplace but only to a point. If YMML is do-able, someone will do it, the fact that it hasn't appeared yet either from Orbx or any other developer indicates there might be issues that make the project unfeasible or impossible as a commercial product.

The development of an airport depends on many factors that all come together. It's not as easy as someone waking up one morning and deciding to develop an airport and a couple of months later out pops a product that satisfies a wide range of users, including recent expectations of terminal interiors. By the time everything comes together, bugs ironed out, MSFS changes dealt with, etc, it's probably going to be a year long project, that might return cents per hour on the time spent. The airport might well say sorry, no photography of the airport allowed. Lots of factors control airport development, until all the pieces come together, a project can't be expected to proceed.

You can point the P3DV5 scenery library to the location of your V4 files, and you can then fly in the V4 scenery from your V5 installation, and see what works and what doesn't.

This was mentioned in testing but the most up to date imagery we could find showed there are no aircraft type markings at the stands. This shouldn't be a problem when no airbridges are there as alignment isn't so critical. Aircraft are always marshalled in so for authenticity you should have a marshall crossing arms where he/she wants you to stop.

Never heard that. Polygons is a clear difference from scenery.

I'm away as well until next week. The screenshot request looks like it is for something else, it mentions mesh which doesn't apply to a helicopter.

I imagine that Orbx may not have enough info at this stage to make a call. Orbx have always been industry leaders in offering free upgrades despite the inherent costs, and would I'm sure continue the practice if possible. But they also need to consider the costs of constant upgrades and for XPlane's diminishing market share it may prove too much. I must point out that that the products that have been purchased for XPlane 11 continue to be compatible with the version of the sim that they were purchased for, so there's no denying that purchasers have received exactly what they paid for. XP11 can still be used, therefore the products have not been superseded or devalued. In this case I expect Orbx to not release any statements of intent until they have enough information to make a decision one way or another.

For X Plane yes I've seen something in the pipeline.

Guess it's part of the as real as it gets mantra. In the real world you have a logbook that you fill in after each flight,manually. Maybe that's what you need to get back to.

Hey Jon, sorry to hear that, you've been a real asset to the community, and from what you say you'll be continuing, just more informally. Glad you are sticking around!