Orbx released their new Orbx Central application about two weeks ago. The Orbx team has been happy with the many performance improvements it has brought. However, they are also aware that some users have experienced an upgrade that did not go as smooth as the team had hoped for. Many users took to the Orbx forums to out their frustration, ask for support or report the issues they found. In an update provided by Orbx a few days ago, the team is giving an overview of the current issues with Orbx Central, and what they are doing about it. They have also updated Orbx Central with some fixes to some of the reported issues.
Issues
Despite the extensive beta testing the Orbx team did, they are aware that the launch was not as smooth as as they had hoped for. The team is also aware of the many issues that people have reported, and though not all of them are answered personally, they are read, and the team is working on identifying them and fixing them in priority order. The team has identified the current list of known issues, and listed how they will fix them.
Orbx Vector Control Panel and AEC Tool
The Vector Control Panel currently installed with Orbx Central is having a number of issues. Ranging from not identifying the simulator properly, to not being able to scan custom add-ons that are using the add-on.xml method. These issues will be fixed in an upcoming update to Vector. And not only will these issues be fixed, but the team is also reporting a whopping 80% decrease in the time the AEC tool takes to scan your add-ons.
Global openLC
Another major issue with Orbx Central is the fallback texture location that Prepar3D is using. Orbx will work together with Lockheed Martin to resolve this. This issue causes autogen misplaced on top of default textures. It will also show default textures in between your Orbx Global textures, as Prepar3D, for a yet unknown reason, is not using the Global textures but default textures instead. This issue can be fixed manually by either installing Global BASE though FTX Central v3, or by uninstalling and re-installing it through Orbx Central v4.0.6 or higher. This version of Orbx Central will again default to installing the textures inside your simulator rather than outside of it, replacing the default textures.
Library Insertion Points
Another often heard complaint about the new Orbx Central is the library insertion of the add-ons. For many, this has become a chore, as they have lost a lot of control of where Orbx products will be layered. Often, products need to be layered below or above other add-ons in order to ensure compatibility. The Orbx team will work in improvements to this, so that users will have more control of where the Orbx add-ons will be inserted.
Orbx Central v4.0.6 update
Despite these issues, the team is very committed to Orbx Central. The v4.0.6 update incorporates some fixes, stability improvements and adds some features that users have been requesting on the Orbx forums.
Installing
Users will now be able to install products into a custom library, created by Orbx Central, as well as direct installation into the simulator folder. This is much like the way it previously worked in FTX Central v3. There are a few exceptions to this customisability: Orbx Global BASE, Orbx Sun Valley and Orbx ObjectFlow 2 all have their own requirements and as a result, the preferred installation method can’t be chosen.
Migrating
A big question that people had after upgrading to Orbx Central was whether or not they should migrate their add-ons. Many people chose to start migrating all of their add-ons, whereas this was not the intention Orbx had with their new Orbx Central. In this update, before you migrate an add-on to a library, Orbx Central will show an explicit warning that states that migrating is not required for Orbx Central compatibility, and the Orbx team recommends you do not migrate if an add-on is working fine.
There are a few other improvements: scenery ordering will now providing an extra step to explain the on-boarding flow of scenery layering, and Orbx Central v4.0.6 now has Unicode support to prevent issues for people that had non-English characters in their scenery.cfg. The team has also made some more stability improvements to this update.
