YouTuber and flight sim personality, Froogle, has today taken to YouTube to express his concerns over a conversation he has had with Orbx CEO John Venema. The conversation first started when Froogle mentioned in his recent news round-up that the recently released Southampton Airport for X-Plane originally stated on the product page that it required TrueEarth Great Britain South. John replied to the video via a comment thread with the following statement:
There is no requirement to purchase TrueEarth GB South to install EGHI Southampton. Had Froogle read the product page properly he would have seen the “For the best experience…” text which makes it clear TE GB is not mandatory. We also offer a 40% discount for people who bought EGHI for FSX/P3D.
This was quickly replied to by Froogle with a screenshot showing that the product page had originally said that TrueEarth Great Britain South is in fact required. Since then, the product page has been changed to read “For the best experience, Orbx TrueEarth Great Britain South should be purchased and installed prior to using this airport.”
This then prompted Froogle to make a video dedicated to how on all Orbx product pages, it says to community members that airports “require” either a region or a FTX base pack.
Upon seeing the video, we reached out to Orbx for a comment. Aimee, Marketing & Community Manager, from the team replied with the following statement:
“We list regions as requirements for our airports because using airports without them may produce results below the Orbx quality standard.”
She then goes onto say, “EGHI Southampton may functionally work without TE GB, however it wouldn’t meet our standards. Visual anomalies such as missing or misplaced forests, trees, and buildings may occur as well as shoddy blending – because EGHI was designed to seamlessly blend with TrueEarth, not default XP scenery.” Aimee finishes her statement with, “We wouldn’t ever write anything on our product pages that would result in one of our users having a low quality experience, hence the region requirements.”
This is just a brief version of the forum post on the Orbx support forums posted a couple of hours ago. It echos what was said above, but for the benefit of the community, I’ve copied it down below.
— Orbx Forum Statement —
Lately there has been some confusion about our products and whether or not regions are required for airports to work. For those of you who are familiar with Orbx you know that above all else, we are committed to bringing you the best quality scenery products for all major simulation platforms. In order to do that, we primarily offer three kinds of products:
Base products (Such as FTX Global and Vector for FSX/P3D): Rather than build our scenery experiences on default FSX/P3D landclass, we have created overlays in the form of base products which provide a more accurate and stable base for your simulation experience. These are global, and enhance the entire world.
Regions (Such as NA Southern California or TrueEarth GB): These regions provide a more detailed experience for large areas. Regions can include hand placed buildings, landmarks, and trees which more accurately depict the place it is meant to represent. In the case of FSX/P3D, these regions are designed to sit on top of and seamlessly blend with our base products. You can certainly use them without, however you may experience anomalies inconsistent to what we would otherwise consider Orbx-quality visuals.
Airports (Such as EGHI Southampton or KSBA Santa Barbara): These are smaller hyper-detailed areas designed specifically to sit on top of our region products. When we develop airports we use the data from the corresponding region to build upon rather than default scenery as that will give our customers the best experience. These airports blend seamlessly with the content.
Because we pride ourselves on delivering the complete Orbx-quality experience with all of our products, we will always indicate that airports are designed specifically to work with their corresponding region. Of course anyone is free to try to use them without, however visual anomalies may occur such as those listed in the Southampton release post.
I hope this helps clear up any confusion!
TL;DR: We list regions as requirements for our airports because using airports sans regions may produce results below the Orbx quality standard.
— End —
We’ll continue to watch what happens and if any further comments are made from either side. Leave your thoughts down in the comment section below.
