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FTX/Orbx and P3D V2
I thought I'd post this incase any of you were wondering about FTX Regions and Airports working in P3D V2 Like I was. From Orbx CEO John.....
Hello everyone,
I've been reading various websites, forums, blogs and generally absorbing the "buzz" around the imminent release of Prepar3D 2.0 (P3D2), and I feel it is important for us as a company to set expectations for our customers about the level of compatibility of our very large library of products.
Regions
All our regions will be compatible, but they will require new installers to firstly get their patch level consolidated to current versions, and then to add P3D2 option to the installer to make them FSX/P3D1/P3D2 ready. We will make these region installers a priority.
Concurrent to that we are now adding the FTX Global 3D lighting and improved performance to all our regions. For example, many customers are now able to experience YMML at 30FPS with autogen maxxed using this new tech, so we won't be making new consolidated installers until each region has the new lighting installed. So please bear that in mind - this is a process that will take some months, please don't expect all our regions to be instantly upgraded and P3D2 ready when Lockheed release the new sim. AU SP4 has been done, and NZ North/South is next, followed by PNW.
FTX Global
We will make a new FTX Global installer which is FSX/P3D1/P3D2 ready. We have already got this working during P3D2 testing so we'll ensure that is a priority for the release so at least you have a base level of Orbx available for P3D2.
FTX Global VECTOR
This will be FSX/P3D1/P3D2 ready from release. We expect release just before xmas.
FTX Global openLC EU
This will be delayed until January. The reason for this is the sheer amount of manual work we are investing in to ensure we produce the absolute definitive landclass for all of Europe, which is a big territory. That said, we will begin beta testing of openLC EU in the first week of December. Believe me, it will be worth waiting the extra 4-5 weeks because I know you guys want particular countries in Europe to look their best, and we're making unique textures for each climatic area to achieve this. openLC EU will be FSX/P3D1/P3D2 ready out of the box.
Our 66+ airports
This is the big one; not a trivial project at all. Firstly, most of our airports will work fine in P3D2, but of course there are literally thousands of objects and iterations of how they are placed, across all these airports. There is also the issue of baked-in ground shadows at every one of them, something we need to consider as no longer being needed for P3D2 with its vastly improved shadow system that has little to no FPS impact. So one of the things I will be asking our developers to do as parallel project(s) is to create unique versions of the photoreal ground imagery that removes the "baked" ground shadows and then add an airport control panel item called "Disable baked-in ground shadows for P3D2".
In this way, we give the choice back to you to have the ground shadows active or disabled. At the same time this work will allow all developers to revisit Orbxlibs and perhaps update their use of PeopleFlow2/CreatureFlow and also vegetation. Once again, this is a process that will take many months, if not the bulk of 2014 for us to complete. But you have my promise that we will update all our airports (all 66+ of them) to take advantage of all the P3D2 features.
Then there are some problems with a few airports. We have a few instances of terminal buildings not displaying or vegetation not quite working correctly, and this comes down to our ObjectFlow DLL, which is still being ported to P3D2. We are facing a few technical issues with that code but I am committed to getting that resolved because a lot of what is unique about Orbx airports relies on ObjectFlow to be working correctly.
So again, please bear with us as we make these changes, invest in new code, update our object libraries and do the work that is necessary. Whilst we are 100% committed to P3D2 as a strategic platform for our customers, you must appreciate there is quite an investment in time and resources to update such a vast library of products.
NOTE: All new airports not yet released will be P3D2 tested and ready.
Why was this work not done before now?
Simple: until P3D2 was in beta and we had a chance to examine it and its code etc, it would have been foolish of us to pre-empt any changes we should make. We also have been logging a lot of bug reports to Lockheed and worked with them on DX11 shader issues including fixing the FTX Global lights so that will work out of the box from day one.
I hope this puts things into perspective for you: we are 100% behind P3D2, are actively testing all our products and will roll out brand new, fully patched installers for FSX/P3D1/P3D2 for every single product over the coming 6-12 months.
Meantime for those of you who are desperate to "port" P3D1 versions of Orbx products to P3D2, I am sure we can provide interim information to assist in the community finding solutions until our official installers arrive down the track.
Yours in updates http://www.orbxsystems.com/forum/pub...ault/smile.png
Regards,
JV
System specs for all my screenshots and videos: Macbook Pro 2012 Retina | 512GB SSD | nVidia GTX560m 1GB | Bootcamp-Win7 64-bit with BlackViper Win7 services settings | 2880x1800 LCD Panel | FSX SP2 untweaked except BP=0 & Highmemfix | Latest nVidia Drivers and Inspector settings for basic AA/AF | Half-vsync and FPS unlimited but locked to 30FPS using Inspector external limiter | Custom REX clouds & FEX water | FSWC Paul's Settings | ENBSeries my "Purple Haze II" settings | Using "Building Storms" or "Orbx Weather 2" FSX weather themes, or OpusFSX weather engine. For some selected FTX Global screenshots I may use third party landclass or mesh addons from other vendors and will declare what they are. For FTX Global videos I don't use any third party addons except clouds and water.
