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.

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.

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.

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.

Hi Bill, If you only fly in regions, OpenLC will not add anything within the region, they already contain their own much higher detailed landclass and textures.

Hi Ian, We've had a couple spam accounts crop up this week, this one has been flagged and content removed. Thanks for the heads up

Yes, FSX and Prepar3D are still our biggest platforms, we'll be making products for them for a long time to come.

A typical method is to utilize layers, one layer will be made up of orthoimagery sliced into tiles at whatever the ortho resolution is. Above that will be hi-res tiled asphalt/concrete, then layers for lines and markings which are also tiled, but tiled across lofted planes in the shape of the markings. Then there is a decal layer for small details like cracks, other damage, drains. I don't really know what the resolution of them would be, whatever looks and feels right. For these resolution consistency is more important than high resolutions.

Usually the best quality available is what we use, for an airport the minimum viable resolution is around 50cm/px, and for regional surroundings around 1m/px. My own preferences are 10-30cm/px for airports and 60cm/px for surroundings. Ultra-high resolutions like Bella Coola are done using hand made textures, since most orthoimagery caps around 3cm/px. Tiled textures can be much higher resolution than this, so they're used for high resolution overlays in runways, taxiways, and aprons. At 4096px resolution you could have detail well under 0.5cm/px.

I knew a smart group like this wouldn't take too long