Introduction
When we approached Orbx systems about reviewing FTX AU Gold and
maybe an airfield, John Venema, the founder and lead developer
of Orbx Systems, really came up trumps and suggested a featuring
several airfields that would demonstrate the many facets of their
expertise and products, that way the viewer could really get the full impact.
This first review features the bedrock of the FTX range, the
region pack.
After quite a few weeks of enjoying the scenery interspersed
with operating system upgrades and re-installation of FSX and
FTX etc. I feel I have now got
a sense of what it's all about, hopefully I can share my
experiences with
you here.
What I intend to do is work from the ground up so the underlying
landclass and terrain of the FTX region pack first then the
individual features of the airports in a later review.
One thing I have found in my research is this is nothing short
of religion for these guys, there is a large community formed
around FTX, you will find freeware airports to download as well
as themed liveries for default and payware aircraft. Indeed, the
first thing I did after installing FTX Gold, was to download and
install the freeware 76 metre resolution terrain mesh "Holgermesh"
developed by Holgar Sandmann. This actually covers the
whole of the country, not just this region.
At this point, I must state that the shots below are featuring Holgermesh
in the FTX shots and
REX2 environmental enhancements in both the default and the
FTX shots featured.
So, what is Full Terrain Experience AU?
FTX is basically a depiction of the underlying landclass.
Landclass, or land classification, refers to the generic scenery
tiles that are displayed when flying in the MSFS world.
Each tile in the landclass represents the terrain for a 1 square
kilometre piece of the Earth. The type of tile is varied and can
be used to depict forest, urban, desert, or farmland etc.
What Orbx have done is taken this a step further with ground
terrain based on aerial photography sourced at 15cm/pixel
resolution and re-sampled to 1m/pixel tightly integrating
hand-placed custom landclass and in many areas, polygon
landclass to define individual parks, towns, golf courses, rail
yards in much more detail.
Combined with accurate roads, moving traffic, 3D lights,
hand-made coastlines, lakes, rivers and vertical obstructions
(TV towers, wind farms, lighthouses, chimneys, power stations)
The autogen is hand positioned to within 1m accuracy, which
makes all trees, buildings and other objects perfectly
positioned on the ground.
Finally, full seasonal colour support is thrown in for good
measure.
AU GOLD Territory
Picture courtesy of Orbx Systems
I will be flying in the Gold region, this is the smallest of the
region packs but probably one of the most interesting. On
their
website
Orbx Systems confirm this and quote:
"South East Queensland is in fact a VFR flyer's dream and sports
some of the most enjoyable terrain to fly over in the simulator.
Crammed full of small airfields and with a very diverse
geography, you'll experience rainforests, the outback,
hinterland ranges, lush rural landscapes, spectacular tropical
waters and countless islands to explore, all with that typical
Queensland look and feel. Visit Brisbane International Airport,
the city and up along to the Sunshine Coast. South you'll
discover the vibrant Gold Coast and rich pastoral farming areas,
all superbly rendered with their unique crops such as bananas,
tobacco and of course, sugar cane."
Finally, it is worth mentioning that there is a very decent
demo available for
download
,
this covers part of the Blue region with the entire state of
Tasmania with no limitations, this will give you a good taste of
the software.
Installation and
set up
As I write this review, the individual regions are available as
a download from the
flightsimstore.com
or as a download with DVD backup for a small extra charge.
However, the complete set of 4 regions is available on DVD right
now. Make sure whatever you buy that it is the
latest SP3 version.
Prepare to download a big file, the Gold region weighs in at
786Mb but for scenery that is not so bad nowadays. When
you install the product it will only install to the same path as
your flightsim with no options given, bear in mind that any
future FTX airport add-ons will have to be installed into the
same place so check you have plenty of spare capacity as you
will need it.
When running the installation I was aware of a script running
that was probably notifying the FTX Central interface and the
FSX scenery library of the new layer.
 FTX Central GUI |
 FTX 3D Lights Tweaker |
 Scenery Layer Tool |
After the installation is complete the FTX Central GUI
runs, here you can opt to use the custom Orbx trees, set
insertion points for your scenery levels, run the FTX Aero tool
to add custom textures to an installed FTX airport's environment
or the 3d Lights Tweaker. The system creates
multi-coloured lighting for all roads in urban areas and major
roads in rural townships. The lighting system is also
implemented with the autogen in the textures themselves.
As part of FTX Central you get easy access to the user
manuals, I like this option a lot and now there is no excuse not
to read the *** manual! Seriously though, there is some good
information in there. Ideal and suggested display settings
and a hint to run the
system in full windowed mode rather than full screen mode.
I tried both and didn't notice any performance gain on my set up
so I kept to my favourite full screen mode.
For the more advanced and confident simmer, a couple of useful tweaks to the FSX.cfg is also suggested such
as adding:
[TERRAIN]
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=2000
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=1700
That helps to bring down demand on your CPU and is well worth
doing, a lot of FSX simmers will recognise this from the early
days when tweaking was king, for me, with FSX SP2 running,
performance is so much better now but every little bit helps!
Flying
in AU Gold
Ah! the bit I have been waiting for, this
should be a VFR flyers dream? The main difference between
landclass
and photo scenery would normally be in recognising local features;
photo scenery by its very nature should be totally accurate but
it is also so flat and life-less.
So the team at Orbx have included custom autogen, complete roads, rail
roads, trails
and tracks for accurate VFR flights. One
thing the default scenery doesn't give you is a believable,
life-like view out of the window. From reading how
Orbx
assimilated the purchased terrain and photo data taken by
themselves in chartered aircraft, I would say this would be as accurate as landclass
could get.
My first impression of FTX was I only had just started flying in
full colour after years of rather drab default textures! My
first flight was in rich pastureland which in the default sim would
really only be dull and uninteresting, just see below! FTX
AU Gold is different,
a lot different. There are roads leading to isolated farms and
running hundreds of miles into the distance. I can see custom buildings
and trees populating the landscape.
There is a random, but probably accurate, patchwork of fields which in themselves varied tremendously.
I could detect very little, or no repetition in the scenery.
I was surprised to see shadows from trees and houses, this could
well be down to the use of licensed aerial photos to produce the
textures. There are vast plains that reach far past the horizon
illustrating beautifully what this country is all about, large
distances and diverse scenery. A GPS is absolutely necessary
for long distance flights or else you can
easily get lost in the outback or mountain ranges!
Roll mouse over image to see before and after images (Allow time
for image to load)
I ventured out to the Gold Coast, in the
default scenery there is usually very little detail along the
coast lines, pictured below was the best I could find. It wasn't
until after I installed this scenery I realised the use of the the
default coral water colour is vastly over-done. I
remember trying out the FSX demo that flew around St Maarten and
I thought I was watching a cartoon with bright, light, blue seas.
AU Gold has tamed this and made the inshore waters look more credible with
patches of lighter water rather than all of the inshore waters
being azure.
AU-G has added beaches and better, more defined coast
lines. The landclass leading from the coast to the inland
areas blends nicely rather than being the same for hundreds of
miles. There are some extra outlying islands to explore
but nowhere to land so make sure to take the seaplane if you are
planning to land!
Before and after of a coastal region, better colours and more
detail.
Moving onto the urban areas, it is stated that a lot of work has gone into more accurate placing of houses trees and roads etc. Gone is the monotonous, irrelevant default autogen and in with the topical and interesting autogen. Below you can see the difference that this makes to the city of Brisbane. In the right hand shot, you can see what a change there is to the position of the cricket ground, and the 2 shots were taken from the same place. Also note the 3D lighting taking affect.
Brisbane before and after |
See how the cricket ground has moved |
Roads, Rails and
Rivers.
When flying in the default scenery I don't really take much note
of the roads and rivers, I know that in notable areas the sim does place roads and rivers in roughly the right area but in
outlying areas the placement appears to be random.
With AU-G,
I found myself following rivers and roads almost to their end as there is so much to
discover, it is easy to lose track of time as the scenery will
draw you into places you didn't know you wanted to fly to, very commendable in my view. The road textures look good, I think the
addition of trees lining the roads in the rural areas and the
street lights in the urban areas help to define the major roads
and at night add another point of light.
The rivers, although accurately placed, had no special features
that I could see (What features would you expect? ...Ed)
but were of a truer colour. As the rivers meander through
the countryside they are crossed by bridges where the roads
passed over.
Rail tracks shoot off from major conurbations where they have rail yards
out to the outlying townships, they were adequate in my view but
not as noteworthy as the roads.
A random shot of country roads, note the trees following the
same path
Night Vision
Come sundown, the cities come alive and the 3D
lighting comes into its own. As mentioned above, the street
lights follow most of the main routes and from the air form
distinct routes you can make note of for future night flying.
At night, the lighting takes this the scenery to another level as well as
the replacement textures do in the day. If you cast your
mind back to what the default FSX night textures look like, you
will remember splodges of lighter texture on the ground
depicting night lighting and civilisation. Not here, you
get points of light raised from the ground with a nice halo you
defined in FTX Central after installation.
Night
in the city, DVD and Roo Burger anyone!?
Performance
Personally I had no issues. I
have my FPS pegged at 25 using a 3rd party frame limiter called
FPS Limiter (Funnily enough) this allows me to set my FSX frames
to unlimited therefore not choking FSX whist controlling what my
screen can display without stuttering. My FPS It did not drop
below this and maintained a smooth flowing flight throughout.
If you have an older PC there is no reason why you cannot get
this add-on to run smoothly with the help of the supplied manual
after all all you are doing is replacing your default textures.
Verdict
With FTX, the replacement for default textures
has come of age. There are other similar programs out there
but they need to learn a few lessons from Orbx Systems
before they get my vote.
The performance is excellent and the results are stunning,
roll on the implementation of the USA and Europe.
I have really enjoyed flying down under, I think this add-on
is rather special and stands out from the rest, for this
reason I am going to award it my best mark so far for
scenery, 9.5 out of 10.
/Joe Lawford
  |
System Requirements
|
|
|
|