Alex Goff

There's really no words that can encompass the volume of work and the dedication Neil put in. Neil did his work by hand, every one of his airports was worked over by him personally, there was no automation. I worked with Neil a fair amount during region development, he cared deeply about his creations. Every model I provided him, he expressed gratitude for the effort and that he could use it to create a better airport for our customers. We had a lot of email exchanges and Skype calls along the way, Neil was a caring and thoughtful man, he spoke about his family often. A little bit I knew about him, Neil was also an amateur radio operator, he talked to me about this a couple times, he had worked at a radio station for a while and maintained his license. I went and found his license, his call sign was K7NH. Another fun piece of info I found while searching, Neil was interviewed by a local paper in September and had his photo taken while walking on a trail: https://www.heraldnet.com/news/links-no-longer-missing-along-interurban-trail-in-lynnwood/ Neil was modest about his work and didn't bask in the spotlight, but he set a new standard and created an impressive legacy. It has been said a couple times already, but Neil's work is unparalleled and by the sheer reach of it, Neil should be remembered as one of the all-time greats. Rest in peace, Neil.

Hi, I worked on KCGX, we did not include any additional navigation database materials outside the simulator for it. Within the simulator it exists as any other airport does, Meigs never had any ILS and there were no onsite VOR/DME. There are ATC frequencies for the tower and ground control. The airports data should match what is published for late 2001: http://web.archive.org/web/20011223061754/airnav.com/airport/kcgx

If you're talking about [root]\Texture, autogen textures get installed into this folder. Most of them have "FTX" or "ORBX" at the start of their titles, I think some others may not have this convention though. In [root]\Scenery\World\Texture is where all of the ground tile textures and corresponding autogen files are installed to.

Hi Andrew, Two things control snow cover, the seasons definition file and local precipitation and temperature. The seasons definition file is a grid where each tile has a season defined by month and with the options of spring, summer, autumn, mild winter, and hard winter available. Hard winter includes the snowcovered texture variants. In our regions where we've updated the seasons definition file, it's based on altitude and average temperatures throughout the year. If the weather in-sim is snowing, it can override the current season and ground tiles will get snowcover as well.

In the terminal interiors I modelled (Meigs Field and Homer) it took roughly two days to do each, and both were contained on a single texture sheet with polygon counts similar to a single static aircraft. Essentially, minimal time and effort and resource usage. Less than modelling a unique aircraft anyway. After release, neither interior attracted much attention and most of the notes were on how to disable it. After KCGX I intentionally excluded the terminal interior from Bar Harbor and never saw any mentions of this. To me, the market has spoken pretty clearly and instead of terminal interiors I put more effort into surroundings and the apron area. Although for some reason parking lots get a lot of attention and I spend much more time there than I did a few years ago.

It's been a while, but looking back through my files I see that a v1.01 was released for Meigs Field including an updated APX. It looks like this is the same APX that is included in current builds on FTX Central. The APX I have on file has a width of 10m which I think was intended to widen enough for AI and ATC to register, but not so wide as to pop out from under the ground polygon. Could you check that this is the APX installed? Orbx_KCGX_APX.bgl

Hi Marc, Skagit Regional is an older airport that relies on the underlying photoreal terrain for the runway markings and texture. It will never display as well as a newer airport, but some things to try: Make sure "Texture Resolution" in the display settings is set to 7cm Use a ground detail map that mimics asphalt or concrete, versus one that displays grass. I'm not certain why the tar and cracks are not displaying, I think those are library objects.

The infrastructure that the fullterrain.com URL is own, is down. Update your bookmarks to orbxdirect.com which is the official site now, fullterrain.com just redirects there.

The old fullterrain.com domain is hosted on the same infrastructure as OZx and FlightSimStore, which are down with issues. It was set to redirect to orbxdirect.com when we launched that storefront in 2016, so now is a good time to update bookmarks

Hello, We don't have any projects in the work for this area right now.

TrueEarth Netherlands is completely covered with photoreal terrain, which always displays over top vector and landclass terrain. Within the region, Vector will not make any difference.

Hi David, I split your post into it's own thread in the X-Plane 11 support area so it doesn't get lost in other posts. Our X-Plane devs will be able to assist from here. Regards, Alex

Hi Patrick, A couple reasons I can think of, it's hard to say for certain which of these is most applicable: The area around Hammerfest is barren, the ground textures are almost completely covered in snow. In comparison, the area in your screens in Alaska is a mix of forest and bare rock. The forest texture has shadows, variety of snow color on the trees, some bare tree trunk visible, and bare rock that is not the color of the snow. Generally forested land has a less pristine appearance than bare snow. Norway and SAK share a number of textures, particularly forest, so if you check out the forested areas of Norway farther south I would expect it to look more similar. Weather, the Hammerfest shots look like an almost completely clear sky, it looks a hazy and maybe some lower cloud cover around SAK Angle of the sun, based on the aircraft shadows it looks like the angle of the sun is lower in SAK than it is in the Norway screenshots. From memory, the snow ground textures used on the runway and apron at Homer are completely white (255,255,255) or within about 10% the value. They have a little transparency in them so some of the darker asphalt does show through.

I don't have the exact number of staff at Orbx, we fluctuate with new testers and developers regularly. Right now I believe we are around 70 including developers, testers, and other supporting positions. Airports are developed concurrently, usually by one, two, or a small team of developers. Even in solo work though, there are contributions by other developers assisting with specialized tasks like AI, APX work, geospatial data, and use of models from our libraries that have many contributors.

Hey Caleb, The region colors are sort of groupings, and the colors themselves are based on the region. We haven't used them in a little while, but from memory it's something like this: NA Blue: PNW, PFJ, SAK - blue for the cool and wet climate of the northwest NA Gold: CRM, NRM(?), NCA, SCA - gold for the drier interior and desert areas AU Blue: coastal Australia, wet and temperate AU Red: outback and western AU, dry and well, red AU Green: northern subtropical Australia AU Yellow: drier southern and south-central Australia. Some of these colors translated into the regional boundaries used in the KML files, other regions got different random colors just to stand out in Google Earth against other regions.