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UK / Ireland photoreal regions coming to XP, AFS2 and FSX/P3D!


John Venema

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9 minutes ago, riverreveal said:

 

I would be up for that idea. Orbx could leave the global products out of it and make the subscription purely region/airport based. Heavily biased opinion as I own all the global product range and now want all the upcoming photo scenery!

 

£10 - £15 a month, would equate to more than I would spend in a year (as I am a buy in Orbx sales kinda chap) but much easier to justify to the Mrs!

 

.........well, possibly.......

This may be worth to debate, but one clear statement: I'll be out of the game with any type of subscription. I try to avoid subscriptions wherever I can.

 

Kind regards, Michael

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You know what? I'm currently downloading P3D. I wanted to skip to X-Plane only for the possiblity of photoreal scenery, but if you offer this for P3D in the future I'm back to P3D and I guess I will be a "Multi-plattform-simmer...MPS" :D

Are there plans for people who want to stick with multiple sims, that they can get a discount if they already bought a product for P3D and want to have it also for XP, AFS 2 or FSW?

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Nobody is saying that subscriptions have to be the only method for buying Orbx products - the regular pricing could continue alongside a subscription service for those who want it.

 

Personally, I spent quite a lot on Orbx products a few years ago when I was initially building my sim setup, but now that I have all the regions that I want, I've hardly spent anything on Orbx in the past couple of years. Now I'm looking at branching out into new sim platforms but am being put off by having to essentially pay again for the same products (not just from Orbx BTW) - in this new era of multiple sim platforms, paying for the exact same product three times over will be a no-go for many. In addition, a subscription service would allow Orbx to be able to count on a regular stream of income year-round.

 

Subscriptions are the way software is going these days - I got tired of having to shell out for new AV software every year, and a new Office suite every time MS updated it, especially when you have to pay extra for every device you install it on. Now I'm on a multi-device subscription plan for AV and Office, which gives me access to new versions, and I'm very happy with it.

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Fantastic news! This will essentially be like the real thing and much easier to navigate. I wonder about the technical requirements. Clearly we need good HDD / SSD drives for photoreal with seasons. Any indications or advice that can be shared? How much space may it take up compared with the current regions? Will it require faster CPU / GPU or should it run and load equally fast as existing products? For FTX regions will it be possible to switch between photoreal and landclass in FTX central or can the two not co-exist? Although, from the looks of it, I I may not even want to switch back to landclass :)

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35 minutes ago, Sniper31 said:

I definitely do not want a subscription service. If I have to obtain my software through subscriptions than that will end it for me.

Yes i am with Sniper , no subscription for me.

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2 hours ago, riverreveal said:

Amazing news!!

 

Any rough ideas of what the install size of a 5 season photo real scenery will be for a region the size of England? Has the Netherlands install size been announced yet?

 

 

 

one of the developers said, that a photoreal germany would take about 120 GB of disk space, so compare the size of the countrys and you will probably have an idea what size you can expect for England or the Netherlands. :)

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4 minutes ago, Aceone said:

one of the developers said, that a photoreal germany would take about 120 GB of disk space, so compare the size of the countrys and you will probably have an idea what size you can expect for Engald or the Netherlands. :)

 

Thanks for the info.

 

I need to invest in a bigger SSD. Actually, make that many bigger SSDs...!

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If I'll need a multi-terabyte SSD for the UK and Germany I'll get it. This is THE chance. I'd rather start eating less, if required.;)

 

Kind regards, Michael

 

 

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Definitely! From my experience with X-Plane photoreal scenery it's all about of fast loading big sized textures, so much space, 16 GB and more RAM, Videocard with 8GB VRAM and a big m.2 SSD would be highly recommended to enjoy it.

I am very excited how the performance will be, because I think Orbx has the knowledge and techniques to let it run as smooth as possible even on weaker hardware.

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3 minutes ago, Airtrooper said:

 

WOW!!!

Anyone having ever made photo scenery himself either for X-Plane or AeroflyFS knows the orders of magnitude. There's no way around, either you want high detail or not. You just can't compress a high-resolution UK into 10 GB.

 

Kind regards, Michael

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8 minutes ago, pmb said:

Anyone having ever made photo scenery himself either for X-Plane or AeroflyFS knows the orders of magnitude. There's no way around, either you want high detail or not. You just can't compress a high-resolution UK into 10 GB.

 

Kind regards, Michael

 

Indeed. Been there, done that. I'm a photogrammetrist by trade (amongst other things). I also make photoscenery for FS.

 

I think you missed the point of my "Wow"... I was surprised it wasn't bigger! :D ;)

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25 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

120GB for all of Germany probably equates to 1.2m per pixel resolution. Personally, I would be looking for 0.6m per pixel, and I don't care how much disk space is required.

 

Interesting.

 

I was assuming it would be the same as the current standard of 25cm for orthophotography in the UK, at least as far as BlueSky, GetMapping and others go... if not the new standard of 12.5cm. Can anyone at Orbx confirm? 1m photoscenery + autogen is already out there, at least as far as the UK in FSX was concerned (not P3D/XP11).

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5 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

120GB for all of Germany probably equates to 1.2m per pixel resolution (considering that the Horizon England & Wales photoscenery is around 80GB). Personally, I would be looking for 0.6m per pixel, and I don't care how much disk space is required!

I think ORBX will be clever enough to make those regions high-resolution where it's required, but not all the same. Even I do this when I make scenery for AeroflyFS2.

 

Kind regards, Michael

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3 minutes ago, Christopher Low said:

12.5cm per pixel is hardly the "standard". That is incredibly high resolution for photoscenery, and would take a colossal amount of hard disk space for entire countries (particularly if you want 5 seasonal variations).

 

25cm orthophotography is available for the whole of the UK and has been for a while, to the extent that much is now being superseded by 12.5cm. I work with it on a daily basis. Note the distinction between orthophotography (input) and photoscenery (output). I only mention the former, not the latter.

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Yes, I was thinking more about the standard for flight simulation purposes. To be honest, just having photoreal scenery of the UK that has consistent resolution and colour saturation would be a massive improvement over the PlayHorizon photoscenery. I have the brightness and colour saturation levels in P3D down to 45% and 40% respectively, to try and "hide" some of the more obvious flaws (both in colour and texture quality) of the PlayHorizon scenery.

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These regions will be 1m/pixel resolution downsampled from 12.5cm. There is no way the consumer FS market could cope with regions at higher resolutions, nor could our online store infrastructure cope with the delivery bandwidth and costs. I can assure you that 1m/pixel resolution is more than crisp in the sim, all our Netherlands preview shots have used a lower resolution 2m/pixel during the beta stage and it looks stunning.

 

Consider that moving from 1m/pixel textures to 25cm/pixel textures is sixteen (16!!) times the texture size and GPU memory requirements. Just not even feasible with today’s GPUs and storage. And you don’t want to wait 15 minutes loading a flight either ....

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I use 1m/px for the surrounding of airports (otherwise lower resolutions) and this looks excellently in AeroflyFS2. I understand higher resolutions certainly would be fine, but we should recall the destiny of Eathsimulations with their ultra-high resolution scenery  (60 or 30cm/px) - which no one bought in the end.

 

Kind regards, Michael

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If I could just add my little moment of thrill to the other hordes.

 

Thank you to everyone who came up with this, thank you too to the extremely talent modders and thank you to those I've missed out.

 

Naturally, being a Kiwi the putting together of our close relationship with the UK and Ireland means so much to us down-under.  I'm absolutely thrilled with this announcement.

 

Regards,

Jim

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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7 minutes ago, Ken Terry said:

John, any chance these large files could be shipped to customers on disk or a USB chip.

The DL times will be very long and may be prone to interruption requiring a restart.

Cheers

Ken

 

Yeah for huge sceneries that could be real nice!  And if it would be possible to have EU and US distributors maybe to save on shipping cost and time?

 

At least FTX Centeral 3 looks like it has packages broken down into smaller chunks, so interrupted downloads aren't like having to start all over (at least thats how it looks if you tell it to save a local backup of the package when you install it).

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I've said this before, but England just didn't rise to the level of say PNW texture-wise. This will finally do it justice and am thrilled! I too would favor just summer first if that means we get it sooner (using P3Dv3). Alaska and Hawaii would be awesome as well. Thank you John and Orbx Team!

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I'm yet another who votes for a summer season only at the start.  Alaska, for instance, is probably better in summer and winter, talk of 5 seasons, to me anyway, is a complete waste of time when Orbx modders could have moved onto something else.

 

Could someone please clear one issue for me.  When you mention the UK and Ireland for P3D that will also include FSX I hope.

 

Jim

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6 hours ago, riverreveal said:

 

I would be up for that idea. Orbx could leave the global products out of it and make the subscription purely region/airport based. Heavily biased opinion as I own all the global product range and now want all the upcoming photo scenery!

 

£10 - £15 a month, would equate to more than I would spend in a year (as I am a buy in Orbx sales kinda chap) but much easier to justify to the Mrs!

 

.........well, possibly.......

As long as the montly payment is an option only. It can otherwise really become expensive as years go by. The monthly payment option would fit some customers, and the rest would continue with the actual system, depending on their needs.

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11 hours ago, John Venema said:

 

That is actually a good idea! We could possibly release Summer only for FSX?P3D then offer season packs later.

 

 

 

There are always surprises around the corner Derek ;) 

Always ready to wait, as long as  different seasons are eventually offered. Flying is so interesting when there is a possibility to change the seasons. Thanks for all your efforts!

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8 hours ago, Pete H said:

Alternatively, maybe consider a monthly subscription model, which would give the user access to the entire Orbx catalogue, for all sims, plus lifetime updates/upgrades? I'd be interested in that too.

 

I do hope that Orbx will consider the subscription model. It potentially offers many advantages for both sides, including a consistent cash flow for Orbx, smoothing out the peaks and troughs between major product launches and whether a sale is on or not. The customer can always be sure of being up to date without any fear of product obsolescence.

 

This is the business model very successfully pioneered by Adobe with its Creative Cloud concept and I see no reason why it can’t work in the flight sim space, especially as Orbx now has its own direct sales channel.

 

I see it not as a way of saving money, as such, but more a method of being able to devote a set monthly budget for add ons and a way of sampling everything this wonderful developer has to offer, of course. 

 

I think the subscription model becomes even more relevant as this exciting new generation of scenery is rolled out, offering customers a seamless and viable upgrade path.

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