announcement Orbx 10th Anniversary - The History of Orbx Series - Parts 1-7

[John Venema]

The History Of Orbx – Part 1/7 – Early FS forays

 

As part of the 10th anniversary celebrations and the week-long sale event we're having, Ben suggested I should write a series of articles on the history of Orbx. I thought it was a great idea so here goes nothing. This will be quite a personal walk down memory lane.  I'll add a new chapter during each day of the sale event.

 

So where to begin?

 

Before Orbx, before VOZ, before anything that had a public face, I was mainly a flight simulation enthusiast. I had always been fascinated with aircraft and flying.

 

An Aviation Family

 

As a young boy in the early 1970's my father would give my mum a break from the kids by taking all his sons (about six of them at home at the time) to the newly built YMML Melbourne International Aiport which had an observation deck at the top of the terminal. We'd sit there for hours planespotting and trying to imagine where all those aircraft had come from and were going to.

 

My parents brought my siblings to Australia from Holland in 1971 and they flew back to the Netherlands every few years. Every departure and arrival at YMML was a major event for us, and they would always treat us to new boxes of Lego and Dutch licorice when they came back! I loved being at airports. In my later IT career decades later I would spend 300 days in one particular year flying around the world for my job. At one time I had over a million frequent flyer points.

 

My father was involved in aviation with the Missionary Aviation Fellowship (MAF) and had experience in flying in Cessnas around Australia. His love for aviation rubbed off onto his sons because three of them ended up with their PPLs and one became a CFI. Many thousands of hours of stick time is shared between them.

 

Me? I was the dreamer of the bunch, never doing more than playing with flight simulators from the pre-FS1 module for the Apple II called A2FS1 by Bruce Artwick. This allowed me to model the trench run scene from Star Wars and I thought I was at the pinnacle of 3D animation at the time! Then came FS1, colour graphics on the PC and various iterations of FS2/3/4/5 etc until I sort of lost interest in the mid 1990's. 

 

 

Rediscovering Flight Simulator

 

Then in 2000 I rediscovered Flight Simulator again in the form of FS2002 and I began to resume interest in the hobby. When FS2004: A Century of Flight was released in July 2003 I began to collect aircraft and scenery addons, admiring the skills of those early developers and gaining an appreciation for bush flying. I loved Bob Bernstein's Orcas Island and Harvey/Monroe - the little details made the airports seem like microcosms and little universes. I would spend hours looking at the detail and doing circuits. Then I discovered Holger Sandman's early projects both payware and freeware - amazing stuff like Misty and Tongass Fjords and Glacier Bay and many lovely other sceneries around B.C. and Alaska, the early Ultimate Terrain series by Allen Kriesman, great little airports by Bill Womack - all legends of the hobby in my eyes.

 

I became quite the flight sim hoarder, downloading hundreds of freeware addons, scouring forums, buying every new aircraft and scenery that my budget would allow, filing everything into neat folders and filling up hard drives with a vast collection. Each new acquisition would give me the pleasure of discovering something new and admiring the authors’ skills. My morning coffee at work would involve reading forums, product reviews and looking for more destinations to visit. 

 

 

BEV

 

It was during this time of enjoying flight simming again that I stumbled upon a guy called Stephen Stever sharing some amazing new ground textures for FS9 on the Ultimate Terrain support forums. I commented on how great the screenshots looked. At the time he hinted it was a personal project and they were just some "alpha shots". I sent him a PM and told him if it ever went to beta I'd be keen to help out. Sure enough, he replied a little later and after a few teething problems with logins etc, a crew of about 12 people assembled in a private forum called "AREA 51".

 

So the BirdEyeView (or BEV) project was born. Stephen was  great texture artist, but had very little clue about sales, marketing, forums, websites or generally a business model at all. Being a sales and marketing executive for IT companies, I set about organising things in the background, creating little logos and banners and working a (lot!!) of hours in my spare time. Here's one of my early creations, a forum signature image for the testing team  

 

 

So BEV occupied an enormous amount of my time and I'd often be found at work editing textures, logos, website, and testing - much to the dismay of my bosses!  Eventually after finding a work colleague of mine to code a switcher app, we had some sort of a product on our hands and the website began to take shape and interest grew in the product.

 

 

KoorbyGen 

 

Because Stephen was using standard FS9 autogen building textures I set about sourcing building textures, learning the autogen SDK, editing texture sheets and creating a whole new set of autogen, which I dubbed "KoorbyGen" (my forum nickname has always been koorby for many years). Koorbygen textures are in fact still used in Orbx NA regions, believe it or not. That's because I had created HD textures four times the resolution of FS9, not knowing that would be the native resolution of FSX some years later.

 

 

In fact you can still download KoorbyGen from AVSIM  

 

 

 

 

BEV ended up using my KoorbyGen for its North American products which was released just before I left the team, because real life got in the way and the hours I was spending on BEV were getting too crazy. I learnt so much from the experience though and generally had a great experience working on a project and seeing it come to life. I also learnt that FS development could be a huge time sink and you needed discipline and structure to make commercial releases, or relax a bit and make freeware stuff.

 

The first release of BEV

 

 

The BEV website

 

 

So after BEV I sort of lost interest in flight simulation for a while, I needed a break.

 

Of course, a bit later I decided to begin my PPL and began lessons. The problem was, FS9's depiction of my local area in Australia looked like the Gobi Desert so trying to practice my navs and circuits was a joke.

 

What happened next is for part 2  tomorrow .....  

 

 

 

[John Venema]

The History Of Orbx – Part 2/7 – The VOZ Era

 

After the intensity of the BEV experience I decided I would tackle making my own personal set of ground textures covering the southern part of Australia so that what I saw in the sim during my PPL procedural practice bore resemblance to reality. I took my time, gathering source imagery from whatever sources were available at the time (not a lot!) and getting to grips with the FS9  terrain SDK. Slowly but surely I learnt the ropes and my photoshop skills were getting better each day. In fact, I didn’t even use Photoshop but rather, a $99 photo editing program called PhotoImpact 10 which had most of the features of Photoshop but was extremely simple and intuitive to use.

 

Still frequenting flight sim forums at the time, I decided to share some my work-in-progress shots which got a lot of interest, so much so that I created a quick little website and forum so people could follow my progress. Pretty soon a bunch of FS enthusiasts from Australia and around the world began to gather and provide comments and feedback. At this point I made a decision there was some merit to what I was doing and that I would make it a freeware project. Key figures who emerged at that time were Jay Kae who from the outset was invaluable in helping to set up proper hosting and infrastructure knowing we had a LOT of interest in the project. Others included Matt Tomkins who had also created freeware textures for Australia, Ross Casey who was a signwriter in Queensland and handy with a mouse, and guys who wanted to help with testing.

 

We need a name for the project so I came up with Vista Australis (“a view of Australia”) which before long we shortened to VOZ. After a bit of design work we had a logo, a colour scheme, a new website and one of the fastest growing forums in the FS community. All this and I hadn’t even finished the project yet!

 

Here’s a look at the VOZ website around the time of the first release:

 

 

Here is the very first VOZ trailer I made in 2005, a few months before we released.

 

 

By December 2005 we were still in beta and the Xmas break was fast approaching, but the anticipation was so huge we decided as a team to release a not yet complete version named 0.99

 

We released VOZ on Christmas Eve, the day my family went on a camping holiday on the Australian east coast. I recall checking my phone every few hours to see how the downloads were going and was astonished to see it pass 1,000 in less than an hour, then 10,000 - 20,000 - 30,000 - it was an incredibly satisfying period for the VOZ team after years of hard work.

 

VOZ went on to become possibly the most downloaded freeware scenery series in the history of flight simulation, surpassing millions of downloads over its lifetime from version 0.99 to the final build version 1.8.

 

At some point during all this activity and hard work sometime tapped me on the shoulder and said "what if you had charged a modest fee for every copy John?", and it got me thinking that with all the talented guys I had assembled to help me with VOZ and a bit of funding we could actually try making a company and trying to have a go at a commercial version of VOZ. I dubbed it "VOZ Pro" and began to court financiers and find an office to build a team.

 

 

The kindling of the fire was lit. In May 2006 I sat down in my study and thought of a name of my new flight sim software company. I thought “what do you call a company that wants to cover the *whole* world in TEN times the detail we did with VOZ?”. I came up with Orb (the whole earth) x (ten times the detail). An hour in PhotoImpact later, the Orbx logo was born.

 

The next day I registered the company name. I was still working full time in IT sales and marketing, but the grand adventure had begun ...

 

Part 3 tomorrow!

[John Venema]

The History Of Orbx – Part 3/7 –Birth Of A Company

 

So with my Orbx company registration certificate proudly hanging on my study wall I began to think about how to project the image of this new entity, all the while juggling the commitments of a rapidly growing VOZ user base and expansion of its features with my full-time career in IT.

 

The first mistake I made (and I've made many of them through this journey) was to create a "corporate image" of what Orbx was going to achieve. I took the credibility we'd achieved with VOZ, added a few product names like VOZ Pro and VOZ PRO Melbourne and added a bunch of corporate speak and random photos to the website, thinking this would impress potential investors:

 

 

 

A second iteration of the website did not fare a lot better; I was now embracing big concepts like 'aerospace' and 'innovation', 'visualisation' - terms I was picking up from visiting trade shows and pitching the company to aerospace giants like Thales, BAE and government bodies like the Air Force and Navy. I assembled the best and brightest from the VOZ team and began to create a demo scenery for the Basic Flight Training School (BFTS) in Tamworth, New South Wales. This was the place where cadets went to be schooled in single engine trainers and to find out if they had what it takes to graduate to Pearce AFB in Western Australia to train in fighter jets. I had a defence staff inside contact who was convinced that simulation was the future of defence training, so I invested a huge amount of my personal time and money creating a hugely ambitious rendering of the whole city of Tamworth and BFTS in FS2004.

 

 

For all the corporate bravado we showed (and in fact we really outdid ourselves with Tamworth), the demos to BFTS fell flat and none of the big aerospace companies wanted to talk to us beyond our demos because frankly, they'd never heard of an 'Orbx' and we were just too insignificant and small to bother with. I began to realise that my strategy was all wrong. I had gotten a big head from VOZ and thought I would conquer the aerospace world with our amazing technology built on FS9, but I had forgotten the one thing that had made VOZ what it was - the flight sim enthusiasts and the community around it.

 

In 2007, after spending most of 2006 courting the big boys I regrouped and decided to focus on the consumer market, the grassroots of flight simming. A VOZ user called Nick Kranenburg who was a Virgin Australia exec at the time, was also building a B737 simulator company and he really liked what he saw in our terrain and textures. He introduced me to what ultimately became Orbx's angel funders and first shareholders. After the better part of six months getting contracts and agreements signed I had funding to build a team and create something new. We bundled FS9 Tamworth as freeware which became the first Orbx product to be released.

 

Here is the very first Orbx preview trailer, made in FSX for our Tamworth project:

 

 

The second mistake I made was leasing a fancy office in Melbourne's 'Silicon Alley', choosing a shiny building on St. Kilda Road right next door to Intel, Oracle, CA, and across the road from Symantec, the company I was working for at the time. In fact I leased the office and began hiring decorators and buying furniture from IKEA before I had even resigned from my job! Crazy stuff eh?  I convinced Matt Tomkins to join me as the first hire and shortly after Martin Henare also joined. We had a fancy corporate video made about how we were going to change the world. The seed money we had obtained was being burnt at an alarming rate on rent, furniture, wages, PCs, software and more.

 

Microsoft had released the brand new Flight SImulator X on 13th October 2006, a massive improvement over FS2004 not only from the point of view of embracing new emerging PC hardware and graphics cards, virtual cockpits, better weather and ATC, but also vastly expanding the variation of textures and increasing the resolution of ground terrain textures from 256x256 to 1024x1024. This was the big increase in fidelity I had been waiting for! Matt and I set about learning the new SDK and mapping out our first region which was going to focus on the south east of Australia. We created a new forum for Orbx and soon enough many VOZ users joined up, eager to see what we were doing next. The alpha preview shots began to be pushed out.

 

 

On the 6th of November 2007 I hopped on a plane across the Pacific to attend DevCon 2017, an event organised by AVSIM and Microsoft Game Studios to show off the shiny new simulator and all the third party developers that had embraced it. I setup a projector and a laptop on a table at the end of the Microsoft stand and just sat there pootling around our Lilydale demo area in the Extra 300S. Pretty soon I had respected developers like Bill Womack pushing me out of my chair to have a go, mesmerised by our textures and the sense of 'being there'. I had a constant stream of people just ogling at the screen. I knew then we were onto something, our alpha build was already captivating enough to get attention like that.

 

 

It was at DevCon where I met Holger Sandman, Allen Kriesman, Bill Womack and the late Jon Patch for the first time. I felt in awe of these guys. I was surrounded by flight sim royalty and they invited me to dinner with them! I offered Holger a job with Orbx not long after the conference, and later on Bill Womack would develop some of the finest most characterful airports ever to grace a simulator for us. Bill and I remain great friends and we catch up at conferences over a good drop of bourbon regularly. (With Allen Kriesman joining Orbx in late 2017 it sort of feels like we're getting the band back together  ).

 

At that event I had a meeting with the Microsoft ACES team and told them the new demographic for flight simming was the 'explorer'. I shared my passion and vision for creating amazingly immersive bush flying experiences. I talked to them about animated people walking around, moving trains and cars, grass waving in the wind, the sounds of birds and industry being heard - years before these became a reality in the sim. I think they listened to what I had to say about the weaknesses in the FSX architecture and this was borne out in Microsoft Flight some years later. A great start to a new era that was scuttled by short sighted execs who shut the door on third party developers. A huge shame, but I believe Lockheed Martin have done a sterling job with that codeline since those days, wouldn't you agree?

 

So we had a company, a vision, a talented texture artist, an airport designer and a legend of the FS community on staff. Time to knuckle down and make some product ....

 

 

 

 

[John Venema]

The History Of Orbx – Part 4/7 – Orbx R&D Phase

 

I came back from Devcon encouraged by what I'd seen; the beginnings of a thriving third party developer community. Matt and I had up until then only assembled a basic alpha build which we demoed at the conference with basic autogen annotation and mainly focusing on the SE corner of Australia.

 

With Holger now on board we had an expert in the understanding of the FS9 terrain infrastructure and we rapidly learnt the expanded functionality on the FSX SDK. I gained a concession from Microsoft who allowed us to use a "switcher" app to swap certain control files in and out of the sim depending the modification we had made to autogen descriptions and the terrain config files. This gave us the flexibility to reverse engineer some of the internal undocumented features of FSX and expand on the number of available land class types.

 

 

Crunch Time

 

It was crunch time. We worked hellacious hours; there was an IKEA sofa bed in the office which I camped on many nights, working to the wee hours and getting up with the dawn. There was so much autogen annotation to do we roped poor Martin into helping, dragging him away from his YMML work. We established a workflow and soon enough we had a constant stream of new ground textures to use for the landclass team. We recruited more and more developers to help out with the landclass, coastlines, object placement and more. Holger worked his magic on the vector data, road systems, railways and water bodies. A lot of the early work was painstakingly done by hand. If we had the tech and tools of 2018 at our disposal then we would have doubled the speed of development for sure!

 

We published more and more preview screenshots and video and our forums were burgeoning with new members eager for the release of VOZ Pro.

 

A preview shot over Launceston, Tasmania

 

 

Publishing the Product

 

At some point in the development cycle I looked at co-publishing via Aerosimulations UK, the company behind Flight Environment  (FEX) and through their online store, flying to London to sign a partnership agreement with Peter Wilding.  Sadly the partnership faltered before it  really got off the ground, despite best efforts from both sides. We had planned to name our new product Flight Terrain X but we ended up calling it Full Terrain X once we decided to self-publish.

 

Peter Wilding and I signing and announcing a partnership agreement for FTX

 

 

Without a publisher and no online store,  I called Adrian from flightsimstore.com and flew him down from Sydney to Melbourne and signed a reseller agreement with him. We had a near-finished product and a reseller; now it was time to polish the beta and get it ready for sale. The crazy hours continued and our learning curve was steep. We had team members from all around the world working almost round the clock getting FTX finished.

 

Finally at the end of 2007 we announced the release timeframe as 'early 2008' and because the task of covering all of Australia was just too daunting a project, decided to split the country into four regions based on the climatic conditions in each quadrant. Thus AU BLUE, GOLD, GREEN and RED was born.

 

 

 

Release Day - 6th March, 2008

 

As we were finishing off AU BLUE the team began work on AU GOLD concurrently and beta testing cranked into full gear. We chose the 6th of March as the release day and boy - what a day it was! We did the final compile, built the installer app and then uploaded it to Adrian's servers in Sydney. In those days internet speeds were fairly slow so we anxiously watched the clock until the upload finally finished and Adrian built his now-famous FSS Wrapper. The day dragged on as final preps were done and about 7pm or so Adrian hit the switch. We had released our first ever payware Orbx product!

 

We grabbed some beers, set up a TeamSpeak call and watched the sales tick over as we all congratulated each other. First a trickle, then a rush, then a huge demand on the servers as different countries of the world woke up to find AU BLUE on sale. We stayed up long into the night and breathed a big sign of relief. We'd done it, we'd taken the first step at introducing something special into the FS community and we hoped it would sell enough to keep our small company afloat.

 

We had used up all of the seed funding to get to this point and the office rent was due the next week with an empty bank account .....

[John Venema]

The History Of Orbx – Part 5/7 – Regions Are Born

 

So with AU BLUE out of the door we followed it up with AU GOLD two months later in May, GREEN in September and finally the RED outback region in November. It was an incredibly busy period for us and the learning curve was relentless as we unlocked more land classes and created new autogen for buildings in different climates. 

 

The team was growing, and I have to pause now give credit to the amazing guys who worked so hard to bring the ambitious Australia project to fruition. I've taken a snapshot of the Orbx website around this time so you can read some of the bio's of the staff (click on the image to enlarge it for clearer text).

 

 

Some of the standout performers was Ross Casey, who singlehandedly created the *entire* Australian coastline of thousands of kilometres BY HAND! He began to complain of RSI in his hands, the poor fella. Around the same time we began planning airports designed to compliment the Australian landscape so new blood came into the team, like a young Jarrad Marshall who already had acclaim creating some iconic Western Australian airports through his company Westsim. He released Jandakot in November 2008 and the rest is history. Martin also worked tirelessly with me through 2008 to get YMML finished. I spent quite a few days at the airport taking photos from every place I could, and I almost got arrested by the Australian Federal Police one day! I was determined to have as many unique textures in the project and even by today's standards YMML feels very true to life with almost no synthetic textures in place.

 

A shout out too, to the beta team at the time, some of which are are still with Orbx today. Their scrutiny of the beta builds made the developers refine their work until we were happy with the quality we could offer to customers.

 

So Orbx had to make a splash in the flight sim community. We began to place bold and brash adverts in various printed magazines, announcing our presence to the world and setting the bar very high for other companies to follow. I'm sure this must have raised some eyebrows around the place, but as a marketing exec I'd learned a long time ago that when entering a market you had to show no fear and be a leader, always. But I also knew if you were going to make bold claims your product had to survive scrutiny and deliver on the promises made. So Orbx has always been about quality over quantity and we never caved in to deadlines, only ever releasing stuff  'when it was done'.

 

 

During this phase of Orbx I was spending most of my time developing, working on autogen annotation, texturing, photoreal ground terrain - any tasks that needed doing. I am not a modeller so I am always impressed by any developer who can turn photos into 3D objects and Orbx attracted some of the best in the business.

 

So with all these regions finally getting out of the door, we needed lots of airports to add even more life to our terrain...

 

[John Venema]

The History Of Orbx – Part 6/7 – Airports

 

Our goal was always to create a layered approach to the total immersion solution. First came the landclass based regions, then ultra-detailed airports sitting on top of them. Later on we would add cityscapes and other POI addons. 

 

I was adamant that from the outset our airports would not be lifeless static creations. The earliest releases focused on the quality of the airport precinct terrain and beautifully detailed modelling. Then came volumetric 3D grasses (Cessnock debuted that tech). Then we added sounds, like birds, industry, traffic and more. We added default 3D people models from the FSX library at first, but every month I would challenge our team to go one step further. Russ White joined the team after he astonished us with his aircraft repaints; he worked alongside Martin to complete YBBN Brisbane, the texturing of which is still a hallmark in airport design. I pushed Russ's skills further to branch into animation, so we saw PeopleFlow1, moving grasses and trees, butterflies and moving cars and trucks - Fall City is still one of the most immersive experiences I've enjoyed in a flight simulator. In VR it's like playing a Call of Duty level.

 

An early rendition of the Orbx FTX website, with airports being the focus at one point

 

We kept introducing new tech like the various Flows and a revamped PeopleFlow2 (which was motion captured using two Xbox Kinects). The FS community responded with their wallets and our airports became the prized little jewels inside the regions and the dream I had in my mind and shared with Microsoft years before was slowly becoming a reality.

 

I am immensely proud of all the airport developers that have been a part of the Orbx team at some point, many of which have gone on to start or join new development companies. I never lament the loss of an airport developer because I firmly believe we need to be training the next generation of young people to keep this hobby alive. I took punts on young lads like Misha Cajic and Jordan Gough. Misha was only 15 when he published his first Orbx airport and my goodness how he has matured into a great talent! When I hired him I told him one day he'd have his own company, but first come and learn the ropes with us. At the other end of the scale, we're age agnostic so it really is fantastic to see retirees like Larry Robinson produce such little gems of freeware like he does, and people like Chris Clack and Neill Hill who even in their later years do such an amazing job with the region airport upgrades and our freeware releases.

 

 

Freeware is in our blood

 

I am also a firm believer in freeware, because after all Orbx was born out of a freeware project and it's important to give something back to the community who is in essence funding our livelihood. So Orbx can proudly say we are one of the most prolific developers of quality freeware in the world, and we will continue to do so. Only last week we released the freeware Refuge Cove which many publishers would be happy to charge for. VOZ spawned the fantastic AussieX freeware team who went on to produce perhaps thousands of scenery files, aircraft repaints and much more. It is still a thriving community today.

 

Freeware is also an excellent route for aspiring developers to join the Orbx team. We are much more receptive to anyone who approaches us with one or more published freeware projects under their belt, versus somebody who just wants to join and be taught.

 

So from 2008 through to 2012 Orbx released dozens of airports and expanded the regions to the US, Canada, NZ and then onto Europe with  England, the UK and beyond. There was one thing lacking though; a global solution to fill out the rest of the world while we played catchup with regions.....

[John Venema]

The History Of Orbx – Part 7/7 – Global Series And Beyond

 

2012 was an eventful year for me personally, with my 26 year marriage coming to an end, then relocating to the UK and despite Orbx's momentum, the company not being in a great financial shape. I do pride myself on one thing though; Orbx has no debts, has never borrowed from a bank and has never failed to pay any invoice on time (usually well before they are due).  With an expensive divorce behind me and living on the other side of the world with an empty personal bank account, it seemed like I needed a reboot and a refocus to get the company back on track. I thought about how to expand our offering to beyond just regions and airports.

 

The most logical thing to do was to repurpose the five years of R&D in terrain textures into a global product. As I was musing about how to achieve this,  something remarkable happened. An Orbx user posted some screenshots on our forums where he had combined textures from a bunch of Orbx regions and created a whole new super-region, mainly to cover eastern Europe where he lived. Of course he was not aware this was against our EULA so I immediately contacted him - not to threaten legal action but to offer him a job. Eugene is a rare talent and has the chameleon-like ability to adapt to new methods and technologies like he's breathing air. So in secret as a side project without telling my staff, he and I set about creating FTX Global.

 

 

Going Global 

 

FTX Global sounds like an easy thing to do; throw all our textures into a big bucket, swirl them around and out comes a mega world-covering region. But with anything covering such a vast area there comes challenges. We needed to unlock not dozens more land classes, but hundreds. We needed Global to 'play nice' with our regions and their customised system files. We needed thousands of new unique textures to depict terrain in all corners of the world. And we needed to convince our customers that Global was something they needed.

 

So that is where the now-famous unified LClookup came into play. It took a lot of painstaking reverse engineering on Eugene's part to get all the pieces to work with each other but slowly but surely it came together. About 14 months after we began, the FTX Global Base Pack was released - and boy did it strike a chord with our customers! Now there was a way to get the Orbx regions look and feel for the entire planet. It wasn't a perfect solution of course, but it certainly made a huge improvement over the bland and dated default terrain of FSX and P3D.

 

About the same time as FTX Global was released we struck a deal with the guys from PILOT'S in Austria and licensed their vector product which they helped to enhance further and package it as FTX Global Vector. It was released in December 2013. Not content with just texture and vector products, we saw the need for better worldwide landclass. So the openLC series was born out of that and soon Europe and the US began to look closer to our full-fat regions

 

 

The Ben Factor 

 

Around this time I received an email from a young guy who had started university, criticising our website as being clunky and high maintenance. Instead of telling him to p__ off, I had to agree with him! As the CEO I was still editing the site by hand - it was made up of thousands of images, didn't use XML and it had become clunky an cumbersome.  Ed Correia had to hand craft new thumbnails, headings and graphical elements in PhotoImpact each time a new product has due to be released. The solution was easy -  I offered Ben a job and in the time since then he has finished his Computer Science degree and we've had the benefit of continual revisions of the Orbx website, the introduction of FTX Central and OrbxDirect and countless other invaluable apps and tools behind the scenes which the developers and management rely on every day.

 

Ben McClintock joined Orbx in 2014 and introduced a new web design language to Orbx.

 

 

The site continues to evolve, each time finding ways to cope with an ever-increasing catalog of products and sim platforms

 

 

FTX Central and OrbxDirect

 

Ben's talents as a coder really came to the fore with FTX Central. I had always wanted to create a simple and easy-to-use front-end to the Orbx products, sort of like how the Steam Store works. I mocked up sketches and conceptual ideas and he began coding. Matt Davies worked on the GUI elements. Fast forward to 2018 and FTX Central has evolved from a simple way to manage Orbx addons to a front-end to the OrbxDirect store. I set Ben a goal - customers had to be able to purchase a product with just a few clicks -  and after a few years of continual development we finally got there when we opened the OrbxDirect.com online store in November 2016.

 

 

The combination of our own online store deeply integrated with an easy to use management tool has really been incredibly well received by our customers. With faster internet download speeds becoming prevalent it is entire possible to use FTX Central to decide on a new Orbx product and have it purchased and self-installed onto your PC completely automatically within literally minutes! This was a revolution to many customers who hated dealing with ZIP files, extractors, download managers, serial numbers - the whole cumbersome approach that basically got in the way of enjoying the hobby.

 

We've probably made it too easy and many customers on the forums seem to refer to terms like SWMBO and 'Her Indoors' or The Good Wife when trying to explain their addiction!

 

Of the new products coming, I am very excited about our Netherlands project and after that PNW. To fly over the beta is like nothing I’ve experienced before, especially in VR. It sometimes is hard to discern from reality at certain altitudes. The sheer amount of objects we are cramming into the scenery is like nothing before it, it truly is a game changer!

 

We have some very cool airport projects coming and some long overdue destinations. 2018 is set to be a great year indeed!

 

So here we are in 2018 and I hope you've enjoyed a little bit of my self-indulgence in sharing the journey that got us here. I know I have left about 90% of the story untold, and to be honest the cast of characters is large and varied and I apologise to the many amazing people that contributed and didn't get a proper mention. There are guys on the team who have been with us through much of the journey like Chris, Neil, Wolter, Tim, Andreas, Maurizio, Sascha, Ken and Alex;  new talent like Tore, Marcus, Finn, Richard, Frank, Scott, Jordan, Thomas and Richard. Then we have our amazing support and screenshot team like Emmsie, John, Nick, Doug, Richard and Matt. Our beta testers are too numerous to list here but their contribution is absolutely invaluable. I could probably write a book about the whole saga truth be told. It has been a decade of highs and lows, success and despair, good times and bad times, but mostly it has been ultimately fulfilling for many people, and I hope I've been able to add to the enjoyment of many people's love for this hobby.

 

 

The Future

 

I've posted our 2018 roadmap last December:

 

I think with 115 screenshots, new tech and platforms and a lot of new challenges we are taking on including some exciting new concepts for regions you will soon be able to experience, you probably get the picture that we are not resting on our laurels and taking a breather for the next decade.

 

 

Future star gazing, the end of the sim platforms

 

Indulge me a bit here. I spent a lot of time in my IT career presenting future trends to CIOs and in 1999 I predicted that by 2009 people would be using touch screen smartphones to do internet banking and video calls. Those executives that did not laugh me out of the room and invested in infrastructure early had e-Banking apps ready for the iPhone in 2007. I am a voracious reader; I devour biographies of successful entrepreneurs, companies and businessmen and spend a few hours a day reading fiction, non-fiction, e-News and trends. You're never too old to stop learning.

 

So what does the future hold for our hobby and for Orbx? Let me try to forecast a little and give some insight into the next decade.

 

Firstly we will see VR and AR finally become mainstream and affordable, with cheap wireless 16K resolution headsets becoming the norm and sold for not much more than a smart phone. You will have a least a 220 degree field of view (FOV) with 8K+ resolution per eye, weighing a few hundred grams and using haptic feedback gloves as input devices. You will 'feel' the yolk as you hold it, feel the resistance from levers and switches and be totally immersed in the flying experience. For those who get motion sickness from VR there will be flexible 5mm thick wrap-around 8K or 16K monitors spanning about 10 feet in diameter. Nvidia will continue to lead the GPU war with cards so powerful they will make todays Titan-X look like a bundled on-board $5 Intel chip. The CPU will be less relevant versus the GPU as APIs mature to offload more and more physics and terrain handling to GPUs.

 

Flight simulation engines will become more efficient and the interim platform winners will be the ones that are the most tightly coded and embrace new modern technology and systems without dragging the sim to its knees. Sim companies that don't foster a healthy third party developer community from inception will lose out (remember the MS-Flight debacle?). Flight sim addon developers will become increasingly platform-agnostic and new tools will emerge to compile content across many simulators and operating systems at once. The consumer won't be locked into a single sim, but will pick and choose addons for all his installed sim platforms to suit whatever mood they are in for the flights they want to do. And they will be most loyal to publishers that make buying choices easiest and provide support across the most platforms.

 

The days of fan boys devoted to a single platform will die quickly as more and more new sims enter the market. There will be no guarantee that the darling favourite sim of 2018 will be the dominant platform of 2028, not by a long way. Simmers will become more fickle about which sim they use, even more so than some of the flip-floppers we see posting on forums today about how they switched away, and then switched back.

 

The new minimum frame-rate will be 90FPS. There are kids less than 14 years old today who will be CEOs of companies that introduce remarkable new simulator engines and technology this coming decade and will uproot and disrupt the status quo of the our industry. The simple rule is: 'adapt or die'.

 

Eventually the actual flight simulator engine will be marginalised and not relevant anymore. It will be all about the content which will run across a bunch of different simulators. The best performing most open standard sim will be the most commonly used. Closed proprietary platforms will die off. It has always been about the content. There is a reason we guard our IP so diligently at Orbx; all those assets can be used on future platforms without knowing what those platforms are today. Orbx's value as a company is not how many sims we support, but how many assets we produce that will eventually run on anything.

 

A lot of Flight simulators will be cloud-based; meaning you will install a small base app and all the content you need and addons you purchase will be kept in the cloud and delivered on demand.  A huge scenery addon won't be loaded all at once, but streamed on-demand based on your FOV, current position and distance to horizon. You will have multiple accounts from various vendors in the cloud and a standard FS addon format will likely emerge based on Vulkan and DX12 APIs or some other emerging 3D standard, terrain, weather and physics tech.

 

To get an idea of what on-demand cloud based simming is today, trying using Google Earth's flight simulator mode or the Google Earth VR version and you'll see what I mean. It is total immersion and you can jump to anywhere on the planet almost instantly and zoom from the stratosphere to street level in seconds.

 

You will run some sims on your smartphones and view them wirelessly on 8K VR headsets using haptic gloves, pretty much anywhere on the planet or in aircraft, trains, boats or in your car (which will likely not have a steering wheel anyway).

 

By 2028 1-terabyte flight sim scenery addons will be the norm, and that is because PCs and other smart connected devices will have 30-50 terabytes of storage with five times the transfer rate of today. This storage will use new forms of memory far more dense and efficient that the type being used now. Battery technology will mean incredible power in handheld devices that only need charging once or twice  a week. Internet download speeds will be multiple Gb/sec in 50% of western world homes, and mobile data will be using 6G technology with 500Mb/sec almost anywhere on the planet. Texture sizes for terrain will likely be 2048 or 4096 in size and new satellite imagery will be so clear you will make out newspaper headlines on cafe tables.

 

The distinction between flight simulator and first person games will blur. You will be able to combine time in your virtual cockpit to time in your virtual car, house, land-based missions, water based missions and massively multiplayer worlds where flight is just one aspect of the experience. If you think we are in a simming golden age now, you ain't see nothin' yet!

 

Does this all sound too fanciful? Save this text somewhere and read it again in 2028, that's my challenge  

 

 

What about Orbx? What will it look like in 2028?

 

Well I can safely say I won't be its CEO, and apart from still being a shareholder, I won't be involved in the running of the company on a daily basis. By then I would have handed the mantle and vision onto the next generation who will have fresher ideas and sharper minds and business agility than me. I will likely be sitting on a boat in the Med somewhere, enjoying the sun, or exploring the world somewhere. I'll be almost 65 and well and truly retired. Because I am a serial entrepreneur (I have been involved with starting five companies here in the UK since I moved here in 2012, and I own one and am a part owner of two of them), I am sure I will have fingers in many pies and always keeping my mind active in that respect.

 

The FTX brand will disappear, replaced by a unified Orbx brand. So FTX Global becomes Orbx Global and so on. The new Orbx Central will have intelligence added to scan your host device for any sims installed and will configure itself to offer addons that run on them. You will be able to have Orbx addons from the cloud and download them on-demand when needed. You will be able to pull up Orbx Central mid-flight from inside your virtual cockpit, then buy and install scenery for your flight destination in real-time, ready for you to land there.

 

Orbx will likely be a publicly listed company by then, still be very much cloud-based but have actual bricks and mortar offices in almost every continent and have a staff of well over 100. Many of you will be shareholders in the company and enjoying dividends and feeling part of its future. It will have a board and management team of both old and new faces and will have released perhaps another 500 products across probably 15 platforms by then,  including VR, consoles and whatever new mediums are available.

 

The changes in Orbx have already begun with the FTX brand slowly disappearing from the website. Management changes will begin from the middle of this year so stand by for some announcements from FSExpo 2018 in Las Vegas. Better still, why not come and join us there and chill with us for the weekend? It's our annual pilgrimage to relax and chat to customers and drink a few bourbons  

 

If you've stuck with me all this way - thank you. It's been quite an exercise this past week digging into my fading old brain cells to recall some of the history, and it's made me smile, frown and experience a mix of emotions with the walk down memory lane.

 

Last words: Thank you. Thanks for making Orbx what it is today and your continued loyalty and support. Long may we be able to serve you..... 

 

[Scott Harmes]

Great intro in to your history in flightsim John.  It's always amazing to look back at where you came from.

 

I remember the viewing deck at YMML well.  Every time I visited the airport I would head up there.  I'm pretty disappointed it's no longer there really, although there are plenty of other good plane spotting areas dotted around the surrounds of the airport.

 

Cheers,

[robmw]

Funny thing is this really doesn't seem very long ago at all to me 

 

I got into flightsim with FS2002 but things really took off for me with the scenery and textures for FS9. I used Koorbygen, BEV and GEX and liked all of them. The lineage of the BEV and Koorbygen textures is what got me into FTX in the first place, along with the work of Holger which I loved in Misty and Tongass Fjords and Glacier Bay and some of which made their way into the FTX regions.

 

Coming right up to date it's great to see Allen Kriesman doing some work for you. I've always liked UTX and mix and match certain elements with FTX where possible but it wouldn't have been so easy with XpressSim so the new cityscapes are very welcome.

 

Looking forward to the next part...

 

Rob

[Benny]

On 02/03/2018 at 10:54 AM, John Venema said:

Of course, a bit later I decided to begin my PPL and began lessons. The problem was, FS9's depiction of my local area in Australia looked like the Gobi Desert so trying to practice my navs and circuits was a joke.

 

Nice story and it's so true. I can relate when I was also doing my PPL, but I think It was when FS 95.

 

The funny thing is I was aware of ORBX around 2008 but was not convince Australia???????????? ha ha. then I bought AU Blue in 2010

 

Ben

[JoseCFII]

I still have BEV for FS9. It was a wonderful addon that transformed the fs9 textures. I had no idea that you were connected to the addon.

[Anthin Delahunt]

That was so interesting.Looking forward

to next one.

Thanks for sharing.

Anthin.

[Bram Stikkel]

How great to read, your father was involved in the - also today still very alive - work of Mission Aviation Fellowship !
I do use my homebuild flightsim cockpit and the scenery of FTX Global, Tapini and Jacksons International, to make people experience the work of MAF.
As hobby and for fun and to promote the work of MAF.
And the Orbx scenery of PNG is of an amazing beauty ! 

[Stillwater]

Great stories of your life, which meanwhile has influenced many other people´s lifes. I am keen on reading more, John!

[Rob Abernathy]

Been right there with you JV, all the way from BEV to VOZ .99   Great story and looking forward to more of it.

[vegasjon777]

Its great to see what can become of an entrepreneur who is driven by their passion for something! Great things do come from it! Thank you for sharing your story with us John!

 

Jon

Las Vegas, NV

 

[DunRingill]

Just realized I've been a member since March 17, 2008. Ten years go by fast... 

[Sundog]

Man, I remember waiting for VOZ to be released; damn, I'm old. At the time, I considered it the best set of textures around for a whole continent. That wasn't too long after I had returned to flightsim. I had played it once in the late 80's or early 90's on a friends PC and wasn't impressed by the green pyramid mountains. I remember thinking, get back to me when the planes look like planes and at least the windows are transparent!

 

Then I was playing a lot of online aerial combat sims from the mid 90's to the early 2000's (MS Fighter Ace (Devil Dogs Squadron), some Air Warrior (Merc-Sheep) and Warbirds, the WW2 plane sim from Janes (Anyone remember the deer that ran across the runway that you could actually shoot?),  then to Aces High (VMF-111 Devil Dogs/MAG-33) and IL-2. My wingman through all of that, Jimbear, stopped by my house a couple of times when he was in Chicago and he gave me his copy of FS9, because he thought I might like it and he wasn't using it. I was like, "FS, really?" But I tried it and was amazed at how much it had progressed. Once I found all of the add on forums and websites with free downloads, every week was like Christmas with new releases. I also enjoyed it, because I found Combat Sims were stressing me out, as I was a terrain team creator and leader for one of them and the training officer for our squadron and it had become a whole 'nother job for me.

 

But FS9 and the VOZ releases were just alot of fun to fly around and explore. It's at the point now, where Orbx is my flightsim, and if another add-on isn't compatible with Orbx, it isn't compatible with my FS installation. Thanks for the stories, so far, John, it's great to see how far you guys have progressed and how much further you're still pushing the terrain envelope in flightsims. I'm really glad I don't have to switch regions anymore and FTX Central has made managing everything so much easier. Keep up the great work.

 

Ken

[beargrylls007]

Can't wait to read rest of the story, I discovered orbx few years ago, now during this current sale I have 3 more airports to buy, I love the Australian scenery and airports and enjoy flying to my local airport with ORBX, thanks so much for making this happen.

[paddler]

Fascinating story and I look forward to each coming part. I came to flight simulation late in the game with FS9 but it all really got exciting when FSX and FTX came along. I always wondered about the name Orbx and was never quick enough to make the connection on my own. So glad that you are giving the detail that you are John in this description. 

[riverreveal]

Having just invested a load of money on Orbx products - I am finding these stories extremely fascinating and are making me engage with my purchases on an even greater level.

 

For someone who is relatively new to flight simming, but not new to pc gaming and often free modding communities, this is quite important in breaking down, what was on my part, an initial scepticism about commercial 3rd party developers.

 

Great work guys and gals.

[Sir Ash]

Thank you for this series John! It has been amazing watching this company grow since I first got into flight simming and discovered the AU regions in 2008.

 

As someone with the four core sim platforms, I look forward to what more Orbx will bring to the different platforms along with other companies. I think you're very right to say that support for third-party developers in a flight simulator is important. Truthfully, it's Orbx that got me into AFS2 and the original Project X announcement that convinced me to give XP11 a go. I'm really hoping there will be some development with third party addons for FSW this year. I desire for FSW to become a strong replacement for P3D; having the same ESP engine but tweaked in more forward-thinking ways. I say this mainly as I still believe in the importance of landclass-based scenery, as good-quality photoreal scenery for all parts of the world still seems to be superbly difficult to achieve for many different reasons.

 

Some of your future predictions are quite interesting, especially the "streaming" prediction, which is becoming a norm across media. I'm hoping we will have far better internet in Australia by then though. Even loading up Google Earth 3D scenery can take quite some time.

[rmk83]

That was pretty cool to read! My first memory of Flight Sim was probably in 1995 and the graphics weren't too great. But it was super fun to control a plane with the keyboard! LOL. I have been in and out of Flight Simming since and still wrestle with committing the time that's necessary to have an enjoyable experience and be fluid in the cockpit. Always love coming back to certain sights and seeing what is new in this world though. Congrats on the success and the awesome products.

[Sundog]

It's interesting what you say about the future. Back when FSX was just a rumor, I was telling my friends that FSX shouldn't be a flight simulator, it should be a world simulator; or more precisely, based in one. To me, that's the next step, which I think is what you were saying. Some company will make a world simulator that you can fly planes in if you want to, drive cars, etc. But I think it should also have the possibility of having a history slider to change it as far back as we can go. Fly over Pangaea if you want to,  or let a school teacher use it to teach geography or show an AI simulation of migration, a specific battle from history, etc.

 

I also think modeling tools need to change. As an engineer I worked in AutoCAD for years which is directly related to 3D Studio Max (Just 3DS now?). In engineering, we use solid modelers now (Solidworks and ProE where I work) and they are so much easier to use than the old 3D software and they have all of the physical properties built into them already. My point being, there need to also be new ways of getting content into these new systems as well.

 

Thanks for the seven part series, it was informative and also brought back many memories.

Ken

[tom]

A great read ..... been there the whole way. 

 

A hobby that gained real life thanks to Orbx. May things just get better and betterer.   Cheers

[John Venema]

On 3/13/2018 at 1:43 AM, Sundog said:

It's interesting what you say about the future. Back when FSX was just a rumor, I was telling my friends that FSX shouldn't be a flight simulator, it should be a world simulator; or more precisely, based in one. To me, that's the next step, which I think is what you were saying. Some company will make a world simulator that you can fly planes in if you want to, drive cars, etc.

 

Those sorts of experiences are almost here now. The Crew 2 will be released this year and covers most of the USA. You can go anywhere you want in cars, motorbikes, aircraft, boats and more:

 

 

If you can imagine this on a global scale, running on VR from a smart phone, I think it will happen well before 2028.

[Sundog]

Oh, that's awesome. Thanks for the heads up.

[shortspecialbus]

Battery technology is the one thing I'm not so sure you're going to be right on.  We're running into walls on that, especially with size, and while there will be some breakthroughs, I think the power consumption needs are going to outstrip battery ability to keep up in the short to medium term.

 

It may have to go sideways, sort of like CPU technology did when it more-or-less hit a GHz wall for raw speed.  At some point heat just becomes a thing you can't get rid of fast enough.

 

I read an article on this recently, and I'm trying to find it, but of course I can't.  Either way, thanks for the read!  I've been off the forums for a bit because of life getting in the way so I'm just seeing it today.

 

-stefan

[John Venema]

https://www.pocket-lint.com/gadgets/news/130380-future-batteries-coming-soon-charge-in-seconds-last-months-and-power-over-the-air

 

[Richard McDonald Woods]

I am confident that many new techniques will be discovered that will make batteries much better than at present.

Slow recharging should not be a major difficulty for devices that will deplete the charge slowly, for example in computers.

To me, the fundamental problem is the ability to support the demands on electrical supply systems to charge batteries quickly, for example for transports.

[BrianV]

This has been great reading with the 7 sections on the history and future of Orbx and flightsim, and also on how to run a dynamic SME, and growth, in a fast changing environment. It has only been little more than a decade so it is amazing to see how Orbx has grown and renewed repeatedly thanks to JV and the talented team. I only took up P3D little more than 3 years ago after seeing the Orbx PNW demo and now with the latest photoreal series to be launched, I am sure we have exciting times ahead for flightsim and for Orbx. May the next decade be just as creative, visionary and wonderful.

[bvdboomen]

On 13-3-2018 at 3:25 PM, John Venema said:

The Crew 2 will be released within a week and covers most of the USA.

Seeing this makes me think, what the heck are we doing in our sims? We should throw away all current engines and start using these kind of render engines ASAP now!

[chumley]

"On the 6th of November 2007 I hopped on a plane across the Pacific to attend DevCon 2017....."

Always knew Australia was a long way from anywhere but this is ridiculous 

"Internet download speeds will be multiple Gb/sec ......"

Not in Australia. We have the NBN 

[johnnycrockett]

Great insight and read into the history, thanks John!

[oldboy43]

I built my first scenery from ORBX on March 8, 2008. It was AU Blue Temperate South under FSS0003878. 10 years has passed and ORBX has become a world-class aerospace scenery company. Thank you JV and the team of developers for great work.
Sincerely
Karoly

[ba43]

Thank you John,

 

I am proud to say I've been a loyal customer and supporter of your work since the BEV days and VOZ. Return to Misty Moorings is able to create small wonders based inside the ORBX regions and Global areas. I know that our work wouldn't be possible if not for the beautiful areas of the Pacific NW and Alaska we call home. 

 

I look forward to meeting you and the rest of the team at FS Expo 2018 in a couple of months.

 

Brad

[CPCCEO]

Thanks for that John!  It was an awesome read  

 

Bruce

[jpreou]

Really enjoyed reading that. Thankyou and well wishes for continued future success.

[Airwolf]

Wow - what an amazing read.  Thank you for sharing your story in depth, loved every part of it.

 

 

[harf4ng]

Thanks for all those information.

Seems that what is planned for 2028 is already present at some extent... when I installed your software yesterday, I was surprised that it didn't ask me where my xplane software is.

It surprised me so much that I went into my xplane folder to check if the sceneries I got (freeware for now, to test them) are there... and indeed they are...

 

From years I always wanted orbx to come to xplane, when I still was on XP10, as your sceneries look so stunning, I really want them. I'm a GA pilot student, I love helicopters too, so I love low level flights, and with current sceneries, low level flight is less beautiful than high level ones. This is why I want orbx to come on XP. Sad to me it never happened...

 

And now, now dreams come true, and I thank you deeply for that...

 

Still wonder what will be the first payware scenery I should buy for XP11 for a small GA plane pilot like me, or for helicopters...