Crom UK

Yes it is available and even with the apocalypse style photogrammetry, London is looking really good now

The only CTD's I've had seem to be related to 3rd Party addons (Not Orbx or their partners I should note) and whenever the Sim has failed to load, that is stuck at the loading screen, removing items from the Community folder has resolved that. Using the addon linker I did place the scenery and airport from one modder in specific files as per the structure and layout I prefer. Every time I tried to load the sim after that it stuck at loading. It was only when I reverted to a layout which kept the files in the same structure that the issue was resolved. And a similar issue happened with a mod I forgot to remove when Asobo added the same airport but as a handcrafted version. Again you can easily uncheck the mod in the addon linker which removes the links in your community folder and just restart the sim. The mega livery pack is massive and covers regional airlines I'll probably not want, so again I have a liveries folder, by aircraft type in addon linker and just load the ones I think I want to see in that session.

That is a very good point about using the Addon Linker to only load those addons, scenery, airports that you want to use in that session. With a regional scenery layout you can just load up Europe or the USA for example, in the addon linker, instead of everything in your community folder which saves loading times.

I'll try and answer some of these, this obviously is my understanding and how it seems to work for me. Other people might have a different view. If the internet is down - Yes you can still use it but as far as I am aware, you loose access to the photogrammetry and the Azure AI which gives you the autogen building types. I've seen this when after a patch I found myself with the data offline and it did not look great. I'm not even sure if you get the Orthos, to be honest I cannot remember. There is a free mod called Addon Linker which I recommend. You can install all your addons and custom scenery in a folder away from your community folder and the linker just creates links to your files. This for me is great because a lot of the freeware is poorly named and you often wonder what the hell it is, this mod allows you to sort your addons and rename them. So I have a folder called Scenery and in that is regional and country scenery. I have a folder for airports and that is also broken down the same way. So how does that help with updating the sim? Well you launch the mod and remove the links with one click and that stops them being loaded. I do find that Sim updates can break the addons which can then lead to CTD so if you are unsure which addon it is you can easily remove them all to you find the culprit. I have X-plane and MSFS on Steam and the stats there show twice as many MSFS users per week than X-plane, ok X-plane (and MSFS) is undoubtable bigger outside Steam but I'd image there is a lot of MSFS active users and that will grow with the launch of the XBOX version later this year. Asobo have said multiple times that they see this as a 10 year project and Microsoft recently came out and said, how like HALO, MSFS is important to them Finally if you buy an Orbx addon you don't have to do anything with the default scenery. However if the default airport is a handcrafted one then some people recommend that you uninstall the handcrafted airport in your content manager OR you can edit your Content.XML file and change the active="true" to Active="false". I've not tried the second option, I have DD's EGGP (via Orbx) and I uninstalled the new Asobo EGGP via the Content Manager and that worked for me.

Hi Adam, So if you remove Orbx's EGLC do you get pink textures on the default version? If not could someone at Orbx look at Adam's screenshot and identify what is the texture name which is being used where the pink areas appear? Either Orbx are using their own texture there and that is maybe corrupted, or they are calling a default texture but either way I would have thought that they could confirm which texture it is. As an FYI I was following a thread on the official forum which I believe you posted to as I'm seeing pink textures on a freeware airport, but only at a distance. I found two folders where the textures were and renamed those folders. Starting the sim I noticed a hell of a lot more pink textures because for some reason the Sim did not download the missing textures and I could not find the option to force it.

I blurred it to protect their identities...

Whilst taking a screenshot for the May competition I noticed that the airport visitors are only there between 09:30 and 18:00 (slightly after airport operations have finished) and they appear to not like the rain either. Never noticed that before at any other airport, admittedly never looked for it before either.

Plane spotting lunch at EGCK Caernarfon

Please see this post. Digital Design's is not part of Orbx but a partner and using Orbx as a marketplace just as you used SImMarket as the marketplace to purchase the airport. Orbx are therefore a reseller and you cannot transfer your purchases between resellers. Orbx Central is for items purchased through Orbx the reseller. However for Support issues you still have to go direct to Digital Designs.

There is quite a range of opinions and sometimes vitriol on the official forums which makes me feel how lucky I am that I've had limited problems with MSFS. I had a couple of CTDs during the beta and performance was not great on glass cockpit planes, so I upgraded my PC ready for release. Since then I can honestly say that any CTDs have been caused by items in my community folder, usually following a sim update. The Mooney caused crashed if you clicked on certain controls rather than using the mouse wheel to rotate the button but that was soon fixed, although it should be noted that anything purchased from the internal marketplace seems to take an age to update when patches or new versions are available. Certainly it makes me glad that I purchased all Orbx and their partner products through Orbx Central. The amount of bitterness there was over the London Landmarks because an issue with the Marketplace delayed the release of the update. Mine is a Steam version whereas a friend bought from the MS Store and he has been plagued with problems and regrets buying it from there. On several occasions the installation has disappeared and he has had to download the whole sim a few times. I've said elsewhere that X-plane 11 was the first sim that I actually played for any length of time but that was only after I messed around with first Ortho4XP and then eventually spending £90 on the Orbx TE GB packs. After that I was hooked and spent even more money on airports, planes, weather upgrades, weather injectors, graphics reshaders and eventually a bigger SSD to store all that. At the moment MSFS is meeting all my sim needs, there is the whole world on download (still need some Orbx love) but saves you so much drive space. The lighting, colours and clouds can be stunning sometimes and my system with its 1080ti runs a mixture of Ultra and High. In VR I drop the detail but it is still jaw dropping. Currently I'm eagerly awaiting the Northern England regional pack from Orbx as I want the area I mainly fly in to be as good as the Orbx TE series was for me. But otherwise I'm enjoying every flight, every new vista and currently cannot see myself going back to X-Plane 11. Now X-plane-12 we'll have to wait and see.

I think that will depend on what photogrammetry updates Bing are doing. If Bing continue to update their 3D cities this should filter down to MSFS2020. Google is so much further ahead in this respect but even they don't provide full coverage. So until then there will be a need for POI packages. I'm sure as a Microsoft partner Orbx will have to be informed of the plans to update Bing as it would not make commercial sense for Orbx to release a Landmark pack for a city soon to be replaced with PhotoGrammetry scenery. There is supposedly monthly updates for MSFS and we may see any Bing updates coming through those

I don't see why not. I'd recommend buying and installing them through Orbx Central, that looks for your MSFS2020 install location and can download them directly there or to a library location of your choice. If for instance you purchased a Steam version (as an example) at a later date, I'd imagine that you can then download your purchased files again via Orbx Central or from your library and install them in MSFS2020 under steam.

Based upon 3D cities in Bing maps and the current release of videos for MSFS2020, I doubt that full TE packages, as currently available for X-Plane and P3D, are needed in the new sim. Certainly the Photogrammetry or 3D cities negates the need for them. However although the Blackshark.ai is doing a great job it appears to need a bit of help when it comes to bespoke buildings and Orbx's Landmark series seems to fill that gap nicely. I've been asked would I uninstall X-plane once MSFS was out and my response was no, due to the amount of missing VRPs and POIs in MSFS which are all in the Orbx TE scenery I own. For me if I wanted to fly by charts or over a landscape I knew I want it to be as accurate as possible. Unless the same landscape in MSFS is by Orbx or Photogrammetry then I think I would be disappointed. Again I'm really exited about the Orbx Landmark series. A recent video on Youtube showed London missing all but one or two important Landmarks which are now in the Orbx screenshots. If the MSFS game files launch in a similar manner to Sea of Thieves, a game MS recently started selling on Steam, then you will be asked to sign in to you XBOX account each time it launches, allowing the multiplayer functionality and access to the MS cloud files. I'm sure that addon content purchesed via either MS or Orbx will be detected as part of the installed content within the game and launched regardless of your purchase being Steam or MS. Since the launch announcement I've agonised for days over which edition to buy and had come to the conclusion that the aircraft were not worth the additional cost as they did not seem so different and therefore I would be really paying for the addtional airports, not that I was bothered about the majority. The Orbx airport announcement was greatly received as I can spend the extra money on airports I actually want. Bring on EGCB please