StormVR6 Posted November 18, 2012 Share Posted November 18, 2012 Hello all, I took a flight from Fairoaks to Bournemouth last night, amazing experience. There were parts of the flight that just felt like England. Great stuff! Unfortunately, during a brief fly-by of my local area, I did notice some sloppy autogen/road placement. Roads placed by Orbx were clearly offset (some by significant margin) to the underlying aerial photo, and autogen houses looked as if they were simply plonked near enough to where they should be. You know how it is, once you notice something is not quite right you go looking for it, well I do! lol! And yep, after a little look about, there are many urban areas where homes and roads are not accurately placed, they're close but many semirural areas just look messy. To show what I mean, here is a shot taken over Brooklands (or, at least, where Brooklands and it's surrounding commercial/business areas should be)....... From that picture (yes, I know, it's not one for the gallery ) it's clear to see that not one placed road actually ties in with the actual (aerial photo) roads. The houses lack any kind of uniformity, too, although that's being picky. To me, it looks like the aerial photography is chopped up and placed within a vicinity, but it's been unintentionally rotated by some degree, thus not lining up with placed roads. The thing is, this kind of thing seems to be happening quite a bit over the EU ENG scenery. Obviously trying to work with a massively intricate (150,000 miles?) English road network must be a bloody nightmare, but there is a significant amount of roads and houses that, whilst near enough, do look lazily placed to the point where it would probably look better if the base photo wasn't there at all. This perception is only strengthened by what I've seen after many hours of flying over the awesome NZ, Australia and PNW scenery. All of which look far more tidy than EU ENG. I haven't flown over Australia or New Zealand in real life, so I can't vouch for the FTX accuracy - and knowing my country extremely well may be why I'm noticing stuff that may well be apparent within the Oceania scenery. However, EU ENG, accurate or not, in my opinion is not as refined as previous packs. I take no pleasure in saying this, but much of what I've flown over looks comparatively unprofessional. I don't know if you guys go along tidying up areas for future patches, but if Orbx intend for EU ENG (and upcoming UK/Europe packs) to shine as brightly as their previous work then something needs to be addressed. It's still bloody beautiful though, flying over my home country on an Autumn day. With the right add-ons - and a bit of work from myself - EU ENG can, and often does, look outstanding. Thank you and God bless you, Orbx and SIM720. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sam Hudson Posted November 18, 2012 Share Posted November 18, 2012 This is not photo scenery therefore no vector road will match up with the landclass tiles you see underneath. This has been the same throughout all non photoreal projects ever for Flight simulator! Glad you are enjoying the product however! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StormVR6 Posted November 18, 2012 Author Share Posted November 18, 2012 Thank you for the swift reply and also for clearing that up for me, Sam. It's possible that because I know England so well I'm just picking up on stuff that I know isn't right. Like I said, I've never flown over the real Oceania, so what I see in FTX Oceania is, as far as I'm concerned, how it is. However, leaving accuracy aside for one moment, parts of EU ENG still look messy compared to my other FTX scenery; maybe the aerial photos are just too busy in areas to yield a clean finished look? Ultimately though, you've (SIM720) done a grand job, pat yourselves on the back. God bless you mate. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Capnsully Posted November 18, 2012 Share Posted November 18, 2012 Hey I'm seeing quite a lot of comments in the internets of a similar nature. It's great that the UK locals can finally start to compare their local areas to a sim. Wasn't possible before. Remotely, other than for photoscenery that is 2d. Remember, it's $40. For all of England. 5 seasons. far more intricate than a wilderness. It's Not $160. Unless you've done scenery development yourself, it's difficult to fathom the enormity of the task just completed. Us Aussies have had Orbx for years and know its not perfect. It's impossible to be. And if it was, modelling all streets and houses as per the maps, you'd need 3 pc's to run it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grumpyrocker Posted November 18, 2012 Share Posted November 18, 2012 We have been able to do it before because Ultimate Terrain Europe X covers the area and offers many of the features of FTX - albeit in a way that mostly uses default textures. And we got most of Western Europe for that. Right now I think both products are as accurate as each other - in that they get some things more right and more wrong than the rival. One hopes given the small area of FTX that ultimately this will become a much much more accurate representation than the similarly priced Ultimate Terrain offering. To the OP - yes roads from textures never usually match up vector road networks. This is a limitation of Flight Simulator itself. However you may have spotted - as I have - that some of the towns and village aren't at the place on the road network where they need to be. This can be fixed, and I'm sure it will be. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Venema Posted November 18, 2012 Share Posted November 18, 2012 What we are witnessing here is simply a parochial desire from UK customers to see their local "right" and they are getting the rude awakening about a landclass-based scenery product - you'll never ever see your house in the sim, your local pub, supermarket, industrial estate etc - simply because landclass tiles are 1km x 1km squares and as a result it is impossible to get it as accurate as a fully-photoreal product. Our customers in AU, NA and NZ have also had to come to grips with this issue, and I can understand the disappointment for sure, but you need to understand the limits of FSX and a landclass texture title based solution. The reason you love PNW and Australia is because you have taken it for granted that what you saw is what was there in real life. However the reality over those areas is the same as what you're seeing over England now. Again, welcome to the limitations of FSX and landclass based systems. How else did you expect Microsoft to cover the entire world like they did? With town and village textures the Hampshire team made the call to leave some roads and high streets in the textures themselves which has its benefits because it looks better, but has the downside of the road system cutting through town and village textures. However this is a conundrum that faces every single landclass scenery product, even FSX default. You need to set FTX Central to "Default" then go and fly over your local area again. Apart from MS getting completely wrong, you'll also find their road system cutting through roads and towns and villages in the default textures. Guess what? They had the same limitations as we did Just a reality check though; we've never made any claims about achieving the total accuracy you get from photoreal products. Let me summarise the pros and cons and how we can make it better: PROS VERSUS PHOTOREAL - Much smaller hard disk requirements by a huge amount - Much faster loading times - Fully annotated with 3D objects; houses, trees, landmarks - Fully seasonal textures; summer, winter, spring, autumn, hard winter - A more realistic and consistent colour palette and crisper textures - Full night lighting - Moving traffic - Easy to extend by adding HD airports and photoreal areas of interest, all colour matched to FTX CONS VERSUS PHOTOREAL - You can't see your house in the right place - Missing many unique points of interest that photoreal has - Lower FPS due to full autogen - Er, not much else .... HOW WE CAN MAKE IT BETTER - Get feed back from our customers about specific "obvious" faults and missing towns and features - Fine tune the landclass placement - Add landclass polygons to specifically force villages and towns to be in the right places (lots of work, but can be done) - Add new types of landclass textures to cater for missing features (i.e. power station underlays with coal piles etc) I hope this helps explain things a little better. Please note we are not surprised at your comments, nor offended or unhappy. We fully expected these comments and we've been there and done that many times before with Australia, North America and New Zealand. Rest assured our products do get better with time and the positive input and feedback from our customers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bruce Thompson Posted November 18, 2012 Share Posted November 18, 2012 Well read you and understand I think JV, but I have just had a flight in my area , Yorkshire, and see rivers missing or just stopping , roads that just end in the middle of nowhere, roads that drop down to the level of a river then rise up on the other side, roads that cut fields in half, traffic that turns round at every bridge, railway lines that disappear or just end, villages where there aren't any and missing villages where they should be. While zooming in I noticed buildings floating in mid air also. I have never noticed these problems with PNW, PJF. NRM, etc ,am I missing something or doing something wrong? I will take photo's and post them here in the hope that some of these problems can be resolved. Regards Bruce. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Venema Posted November 18, 2012 Share Posted November 18, 2012 Yep Bruce, that's what we need to see, specific examples of issues affecting areas you are familiar with, Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StormVR6 Posted November 18, 2012 Author Share Posted November 18, 2012 Thank you for enlightening me, John. Much of what you said has confirmed my thoughts. I still think some of the placement (autogen) looks untidy though. Maybe NZ (which I think is epic) was simply too uniform for it's own good? I suppose the comparatively irregular look of autogen placement definitely gives England that rugged, lived-in feel and appearance. In which case, bloody good job! Seriously though, John, there was always going to be an element of anticlimax around the eventual release of EU ENG, wasn't there? Us English will continue to expect too much from most things in life, maybe that's why most of us always look so bloody miserable, lol! Orbx/SIM720 have given me the best possible virtual experience of flight over my wonderful country, and I'm extremely happy with it. Thank you and I look forward to the rest of the UK. Mark. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lucevan Posted November 18, 2012 Share Posted November 18, 2012 John As a UK flight simmer I think what you've all done is wonderful. I would prefer to see some of the towns better defined, but I appreciate the problems and the amount of work required. The combination of FTX and REX Essentials has given me an experience I would not have expected a few years ago. Many thanks Peter Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg Jones Posted November 18, 2012 Share Posted November 18, 2012 Hi Bruce, Just to add to John's reply - be sure to start a new post in the support forum as this will enable us to keep track of your specific issues when we come to address them and ensure that nothing gets left out. Also when taking screenshots of problem areas make sure that the lat/long coordinates are visible in the shot (Shift-Z). Cheers, Greg Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StormVR6 Posted November 18, 2012 Author Share Posted November 18, 2012 The combination of FTX and REX Essentials has given me an experience I would not have expected a few years ago. Ain't that the truth?! Last night I was stunned by how authentic my EGTF > EGHH looked and felt whilst flying in my Duke Turbine. It was wonderful. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grumpyrocker Posted November 18, 2012 Share Posted November 18, 2012 What we are witnessing here is simply a parochial desire from UK customers to see their local "right" and they are getting the rude awakening about a landclass-based scenery product - you'll never ever see your house in the sim, your local pub, supermarket, industrial estate etc - simply because landclass tiles are 1km x 1km squares and as a result it is impossible to get it as accurate as a fully-photoreal product. I was quite sad to see this response John. Yours is a straw man argument. I haven't noticed any posts here complaining that our "house in the sim, your local pub, supermarket, industrial estate" isn't in the scenery. Trying to deflect people with this kind of comment really isn't fair to your customers. I see plenty of posts saying that there are major errors in landclass placement - a genuine problem with this release. Choosing to argue with an issue no one has raised does no one any favours. not least ORBX. Again as I've said elsewhere referring to the FSX default scenery to compare this release to is spurious. You aren't competing with the default scenery for customers' money. They already have Flight Simulator installed already. ORBX is competing with products such as Ultimate Terrain. That is who you have to do better than, not the original developer of Flight Simulator X. Ultimate Terrain may not have as much granular details as ORBX usually offers in its products. Certainly in the hundreds of square miles around where I live there are villages not featured due to their small size that ORBX has decided to feature. However the difference is that in the Ultimate Terrain scenery the villages and towns that are included ARE IN THE RIGHT PLACE and match the location of the UTX own vector roadways. This is not a "limitation of the simulation" as keeps being bandied around here. Ultimate Terrain right now, despite covering a much larger area has the towns, villages, roads and railways located more accurately than EU ENG. It may not be as pretty - unless one invests in a texture product such as Ground Environment X - but it is more accurate. And that's something many of us didn't expect at all. I'm sure there are a few UTX customers here that bought EU ENG precisely because we've been WOWED by THE BRILLIANCE of your other products John and expected EU to be a quantum leap over the UT product. Certainly in the case of PNW it is miles better than Ultimate Terrain. I've been a professional (in that I get paid for it rather than any judgement of my ability) videogames journalist for the last 14 years and I've seen plenty of software that's failed to live up to expectation in that time. I've seen promises broken. I also have a fair handle on the abilities and limits of software and technology. I'm sorry to say that EU ENG doesn't live up to the promise and has some glaring errors that I wonder how they got through development and testing. Anyone with a map to hand could have flown around southern and south west England and seen that the roads and towns/villages don't match and that it's the latter that are in the wrong place. And then there are the variant road colours and road junctions that don't even match each other. Again I've seen some folks here say you can't expect your own street to be right, but despite your post no one is asking for that. What I would like is that someone at ORBX checked, cared, whatever that the towns and villages in many places are placed in the wrong location and not in the same place as the roads. It's not a limitation of the sim, they are in the wrong place. And it makes me sad. Sad that people try to explain this as a limitation of FSX, sad that ORBX products - of which I've invested over £100 in - are usually better than this, sad that no-one spotted this in development, sad that no one spotted it in testing, or sad that in the end someone spotted it and didn't care enough to fix it. If it didn't matter where these things really are then you could have recreated the map of Mordor and sold it to people around the world as a fair representation of a place they have never visited. But did you not think some Brits would buy it? And was not your aim to actually get these things right? I expect you did. You have in your other scenery. You've set very high standards. Award winning standards. And rightly so. But not so here. Now I don't expect my road to be in the game (the vector road past my house actually is). And anyway I've no vested interested in this place. I'm from hundreds of miles north and have only lived here six months. But I've lived long enough to know hundreds of square miles of this area in EU Eng is just plain wrong. And for all I know the whole country suffers from similar problems. Though I've seen fewer such problems in the north west. The reason i raise them about this area of Dorset and Somerset is because I've driven enough around here recently to have a good memory of the place. But honestly, all it takes is a map and an aerial view in FSX to spot all this stuff - didn't anyone do this in testing? It's so obvious when you see little roads networks of villages and meanwhile the village is a mile away up a hillside. Now I've paid my money. I don't want a refund. I'm happy to wait for the software to be completed - though in the meantime I'll be using a rival product. But what I'm not happy about is being deflected with nonsense about this being the fault of FSX, or unrealistic expectations of customers, or being told I'm moaning because my local pub isn't in the software. It is plain insulting. One might expect it from loyal fans of the products, but not from the developer. Now I've been nice and shown screenshots and pointed out errors - errors over hundreds of square miles that frankly really shouldn't have made it through the beta - I want to help, I want the product to get better. But if we're being told we're just moaners wanting our "local supermarket" in the sim, ie being completely misrepresented and insulted, then I'm happy for this to be my last post. I'll discuss these issues in my day job instead and wait eagerly for the patches that hopefully fix what increasingly (the more I fly the more I see) unfinished and sadly shoddy product. Good luck with it John, I honestly am rooting for it to get fixed. (though not in the Aussie sense) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fly2012 Posted November 18, 2012 Share Posted November 18, 2012 I wonder if you at Orbx would be able to program your own flight simulator software. Free from all the restrictions you have to face now. A dream would come true. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StormVR6 Posted November 18, 2012 Author Share Posted November 18, 2012 I was quite sad to see this response John....... Well, I suppose that post saved me saying it. I agree with you, Harry. Although I may have just joined you in the lions den. Oh well, God is with me. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Revenant Posted November 18, 2012 Share Posted November 18, 2012 I agree with you, Harry. Although I may have just joined you in the lions den.Hey, I'm also here to keep you company folks... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StormVR6 Posted November 18, 2012 Author Share Posted November 18, 2012 Hey, I'm also here to keep you company folks... They're going to feed well today.... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Grumpyrocker Posted November 18, 2012 Share Posted November 18, 2012 Haha. Listen I've had death threats for videogame reviews I've published. Seriously, Lions I can cope with. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
fly2012 Posted November 18, 2012 Share Posted November 18, 2012 If they really did such a bad job i'm glad i could resist to buy it. Will wait for a patch. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Venema Posted November 18, 2012 Share Posted November 18, 2012 14 years of gaming journalism experience Harry? Cool then you understand completely me locking this topic. All points are taken on board, and we admit to some warts being in the product, our apologies. Please do continue to make specific posts about issues anyone has with the scenery and we will add it to the remedial work schedule for future patches. Your feedback is very much valued but this thread has run its course. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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