Orbx FTX Pacific Fjords

Orbx’s FTX Pacific Fjords
DR JOHN LATTANZIO
O
rbx are justly famous for their FTX
products, which have now covered all of
Australia, and Pacific Fjords (hereafter PFJ)
is the latest in their North American offerings.
Their first choice for this continent is the Pacific
Northwest, one of the most beautiful areas on
the planet, covering parts of the USA and Canada.
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This is their third product covering the northwest – the earlier ones
are Pacific Northwest (PNW) and Northern Rocky Mountains (NRM).
I have included a figure which shows how these three products
together cover a huge area of some of the most beautiful scenery on
Earth. Further, PFJ is designed to interface smoothly with FSAddon’s
Tongass Fjords, previously written by many of the same people now
involved in PFJ. With all four you can fly over a huge and spectacular
area. But for now lets stick to PFJ itself, which covers an impressive
300,000 square kilometers (or over 120,000 square miles).
CPM. V15I2
2/10/2011 12:36:33 AM
Firstly, what is this FTX stuff? Most importantly, it is not photoreal scenery. That takes up huge amounts of disk space. It has the
advantage that it is accurate, but it often looks flat or unconvincing.
Sometimes it looks great, but not always. I have not been able to
work out why some is great and some is lousy. I am guessing its
related to how much tweaking is done of the product to make
it compatible with FSX. But the idea of FTX is simple: use the FS
system – landclass, textures, autogen etc – but with these designed
to be far more accurate for each region. Details can be found on the
FTX website at http://fullterrain.com/about.html. In practice, they
develop custom landlcass, terrain mesh, autogen, coastlines etc,
using vector-graphics for many of these features so that they look
good from any distance. For PFJ (and all of the FTX North American
offerings) you should use a mesh resolution of 5m, which gives you
lovely crisp mountains and undulating hills. FTX also recommends
7cm textures for PFJ to get the best results.
AREAS COVERED IN VARIOUS PRODUCTS.
These different features are designed specifically for each region
and hence they look just superb. They do take up quite a lot of
space – the Pacific Fjords installation requires over 3Gb for example.
Another advantage is that often you do not need to use autogen
at all. The terrain textures have trees with shadows etc included
and look very good without autogen, in most cases. I did tests with
zero autogen and full autogen and in many places there was very
little difference in how realistic it looked – but there was up to 50%
difference in frame rates!
So once it’s installed, what do we get? Firstly we get “FTX
Central”, which is a program to load textures. It provides access to
the FSX default textures when you want them, as well as loading in
the FTX products for whichever region you want to fly (currently,
Australia or North America). It also provides easy access to all the
FTX documentation and control panels (eg for their many beautiful
airports). It also comes with two weather themes, the same two
as included on the earlier FTX PNW and NRM offerings, but if
you did not buy those, you get them here with PFJ. You also get a
Google Earth guide which shows you the area included as well as all
airports, seaplane bases, and special points of interest, like fjords,
glaciers, mines, sawmills, military antenna arrays (!) and more. The
US Forest Service maintains many cabins in remote areas, which can
be hired for private use. Getting there is half of the fun, literally!
And finding them is also quite a lot of fun in the PFJ scenery. Load
up an amphibious Beaver and start searching – although you can
cheat and get the latitude and longitude from the Google map if
you have no scruples!
FTX CENTRAL IS US
ED TO SWAP BET
BETW
WE
EEN
EN FTX
REGIONS AND TH
E DEFAULT SECEN
ERY
THE MAIN RUNWAY AT STEWART RUNS DOWN THE VALLEY
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LOW AND SLOW IS SPECTACULAR HERE!
MOUNTAINS AND LAKES ARE THE ORDER OF THE DAY
PAKX KETCHIKAN HARBOR - TRY DOCKING YOUR TWOTTER
As you can gather from the introduction, the Pacific Fjords covers
a wide variety of scenery. There are fjords and tiny islands, with
hand-placed coastlines which make them much more believable than
usually seen in FSX. There are of course huge mountains and deep
valleys, glaciers and lakes, forests and small towns. You really will get
the most out of this scenery if you take something with floats or skis.
Apart from the lovely detail in the mountains and the land, there are
little details throughout. Just around each corner you might find a
small town, rendered in 3D with a port and boats. I saw many birds
circling fishing boats, for example. This added a lovely touch to the
towns. Landing a float plane and then tying it up to a jetty is more
fun than it should be. Exploring the highly detailed harbors is actually
a lot of fun. Details abound, and draw you into the adventure.
There are lighthouses, flashing buoys in the harbours, water navaids
etc. This is a very rich environment and it adds to the immersion. I
guarantee you will have a ball flying around PFJ!
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I renewed my acquaintance with the DeHavilland Canada Beaver,
in float, ski, wheel and tundra wheel varieties. It’s ideal for this
scenery (get the Aerosoft one, not the default). I also spent hours in
the Aerosoft Twin Otter, again with wheels and floats and skis. Being
larger this one takes more maneuvering in little valleys and is more of
a challenge. But it can climb more quickly which is often a nice virtue
to have in this region of the planet, where a steep mountain can
creep up on you unexpectedly!
Some of the airports are at fairly high altitude, and this will test
your flying skills. Don’t forget to lean your mixture during run-up,
and don’t load the plane with more fuel and other weight than is
really needed! Otherwise you will find yourself wishing you had
taken an aircraft with good short field performance (did I mention
the Beaver and the Twotter?).
There are many things to do in the area. Ferry some people to one
of the many ski-lodges in the area, or to a US Forest Service cabin
(if you can find it!) Take a ski-plane up to a glacier or try landing
with floats in some of the small lakes in the high country. Make sure
the lake is big enough for you to take-off again! Fly low down in
the valleys and track the rivers – but watch for sudden dead-ends.
And when you have done all of that, change the season and do
it again. The difference between flying low on a hot summer day
and traversing the high country in winter is quite enormous. It’s a
challenge for your flying and engine-management skills. And when
you have done all that, why not take a helicopter to some of the
many helipads included? Seriously, there are many hundreds of hours
of enjoyment included in this scenery. The limit is your imagination.
CPM. V15I2
2/10/2011 12:36:36 AM
Are there any performance issues? Of course there are some – if
you turn everything up to maximum and fly a complex aircraft, then
you too could be the proud owner of “Out Of Memory” errors. I
downloaded a free program called MaxMem from AnalogX, which
monitors the available memory while you are running FSX. When the
free memory starts to decrease, just go and decrease your scenery
detail. I was able to avoid all problems this way and adjust the
scenery detail to give me the maximum I could handle at any given
time. As I said earlier, the FTX scenery also looks good with zero
autogen, and that can save you a lot of memory also. Some of the
pics were taken with zero autogen but you probably cannot tell in
the small figures in the magazine. Either way looks good, thanks to
the work of FTX. In summary, unless you have a very old and underpowered rig, you should be able to run without serious problems.
Orbx give excellent product support, which you will know if you
have any of their software. And the manual provides a few pages of
advice on how to get the best from your system settings. They have
also added a section on compatibility with Ultimate Terrain X, as well
as Ground Environment X. In short, they are compatible and superusers can get details from the support forums.
ORT IN THE DISTANCE
KETCHIKAN TOWN AND AIRP
Overall, this is just excellent scenery. If you have either of the other
FTX offerings for North America, then this extends your flying area
dramatically. It is true to say that there is nothing dramatically new
here, and it is similar scenery to FTX PNW and FTX NRM. But it is all
done so well, that even the less spectacular regions of the scenery
look so realistic that you are drawn into the whole fantasy. Add the
large number of detailed regions and the goodies you can go and
find, and you will find yourself challenging and extending your flying
skills and, above all, enjoying your virtual life in the PFJ world. And
isn’t that the whole point? 4
LET’S JOIN THE HOLDAY MAKERS AT BOB QUINN LAKE
NICE VIEW OF GREAT GLACIER IN WINTER
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