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Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Orbx FTX Global Architecture Explained

FSX/P3D. Due to an ever increasing number of questions regarding FTX Global compatibility with other third party add-ons, particularly mesh and landclass, John Venema has posted several illustrations explaining the products architecture. Hopefully, this will help to ease the mind of some. See inside for the illustrations.

Please note: I am only posting the illustrations, I highly suggest that you visit the actual forum thread as well. In the actual forum thread, John provides an explanation for said illustrations.

Default FSX layers - note the default textures are 5.6GB:
 
FTX Global layers - note the FTX Global textures are 6.8GB:
 
See the actual forum thread with detailed explanation - click here
 

16 comments:

Mason Dominique said...

T'was the smartest thing to do.
Crystal clear.
Dom

Anonymous said...

Nice, thanks for making this more clearer.

Anonymous said...

Looks like a Preempted excuse for all the OOMs this package will cause. LOL.

Mason Dominique said...

Kindly disagree,
So far, the best combination i experienced for OOMs is :
PMDG NGX + ORBX PNW + FSDT CYVR

Anonymous said...

so Third Party addon scenery will bleed Thru Orbx???

Unknown said...

It looks to me as if third party scenery add-ons will sit on top of the FTX Global base.

Mason Dominique said...

I was only talking about an explosive combination...
Dom

ALX WNT said...

Dont forget PMDG NGX + ORBX AU + ORBX Canberra combo

Anonymous said...

The way I understand the graphic, the problem with third party scenery that has to access the default autogendescription.spb is going to remain, as OrbX replaces that file among others, with its own...
Unless they adopt the entries of the default file...
Don't see how this will work. At present, you have FTX EU ENG active, and you lose autogen on SkiathosX for example...

AE

Anonymous said...

Orbx & OOM go in the same sentence a lot these days. I still remember YBBN. That was one of the worst performance scenery ever released. Even slower than CYVR.

I can't believe they screwed Skiathos. Is that true? I never bought England because it didn't look much better than stock.

Unknown said...

Screwed Skiathos?? 29Palms did an amazing job on Skiathos? Not sure how Orbx comes into play at all?

Anonymous said...

'Orbx' screwed Skiathos by messing with the autogen. Skiathos looks great.

ie..
Quote: At present, you have FTX EU ENG active, and you lose autogen on SkiathosX

Anonymous said...

you know..I can dig AU SAX and perhaps NZ but I feel I've come at a lost with EU. I haven't flown into Skiathosx but plan to in the next two flights. I'm deleting / removing EU and ingto GEX (very Dense ag to enjoy UK2000 and others)

Anonymous said...

As it stands currently, OrbX uses its own version of a few global files, one of them being the autogendescriptions.spb... if you have FTX Central, open up the Autogen directory in FSX, then switch from a default region to any one of the OrbX regions, you will see the files being switched.

This affects certain addons with custom autogen descriptions as I understand it. With FTX EU enabled (which you may want for, say, a charter jet flight from Birmingham to Skiathos, displaying FTX England on departure), you will have no autogen on Skiathos other than the hand placed 3D objects, which are not autogen.
It appears that the autogen descriptions for 29Palms' scenery are going to be added to the FTX file, given the relationship that exists between OrbX and 29Palms, which I applaud. Here's to JV and Lars, working together to give us the great experience... looking forward to Southampton!
I prefer FTX EU ENG to any other I have seen, as I generally like the idea of the plausible terrain as opposed to photoreal (like Horizon GenX) for several reasons I do not need to go into here. FTX EU ENG gives me the impression I am flying over England, more so than with GEX Europe, which is, in itself, a great package as well.
The great thing is choice. There is the photoreal of Horizon, then FTX, then GEX, all catering to slightly different customer types. I just hope that the interoperability of FTX will improve over the months to come, be it through changes to autogen descriptions or some other method.
Life is good in FSX World!
AE

Anonymous said...

Orbx should mess with those file!!! I had to uninstall England. Don't miss it.

John Venema said...

FSX has serious issues when it comes to the use of a select few global control files that cannot be localised to custom addon scenery folders. Why they allowed custom textures, landclass, vector and other local files to be recognised and not these autogen control files is anyone's guess - it was very sloppy design back from 2006 and it has been the bane of our existence from day one.

Yes, I know you can edit and merge .spb and .xml files if developers share them and talk to each other, but we don't live in a perfect world where we're all one happy dev family and use a common merge toolset. (I wish).

However we have merge entries from Earth Simulations, Aerosoft and 29Palms into our current set of autogendecriptions.spb and default.xml so that our EU series will not affect their custom autogen when England and Wales are enabled. For FTX Global we're extending this to include all our older FTX regions as well.

Until the FS dev community can establish a universal merge tool or a live repository system to merge all third party addon entries, this is not a simply problem to fix.

Orbx wrote white paper for Microsoft years ago telling them how to de-globalise these crucial files but it fell on deaf ears for the now-defunct Flight. We have submitted the same research to Lockheed for P3D 2.0 and we hold hope that a simpler system of localised control files will be enabled for that new platform.

In the meantime, any developer who wants us to add their custom entries into our files used by FTX Central only needs to email us. We can't do more than that.

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