Following on from Chip’s review here, I’ve managed to film an epic TWO PART review.
Feedback on this new style of video is welcome – I like the ‘live’ feel, even I don’t know what’s gonna happen next! It can be a bit disorganised (ain’t life so) and ‘Chaos’tic. If enough people say they like it, I’ll keep it up. If not, I’ll stop.
AN IMPORTANT QUALIFIER
You will see that my ‘setup’ is far from perfect. My windows install seems to be experiencing weird HDR artefact issues. The CRJ-200 that I have fallen back in love with again has a strange missing PFD issue that needs fixing (my fault I’m sure, as I recently dared to install some windows software that overwrote the C++ 2010 redistributables).
So in the first part, I show some horrid frame-rate issues, that most likely are NOT the scenery’s fault. It does push my PC quite a bit, but I can’t blame the talented Drawbridge Designs team. The second part has me flying a less hardware intensive plane, I experienced much better performance. With xp10′s beta run, we should all see improvements along the way, so I’ll keep revisiting. Either that or I’ll throw a 680 & Haswell at it next year!
Update - The devs have confirmed that the ‘misalignment’ of orthos that I report in the vid is not a misalignment, rather a bug in XP10.10 b4 that reveals the joins in the ortho. It looks distracting to me, but it’s not the dev’s fault, nor should it affect any decision to acquire. It’ll only get better.
Those with reasonable PCs should definitely buy this scenery. It is beautiful. It is at the leading edge of scenery design. The artistry is worth the price, just a few ‘opportunities for improvement’ that I’ve noted.
Please support the development of new X-Plane scenery to fill our world with places as pretty as this (yes, Chip and I both paid for the scenery ourselves). Gettit from X-Aviation here.
Episode I
Episode II – “Attack of the Phlegm”
I will start buying more addons for X Plane when they fix the horrible performance. I get bad fps while both my CPU and GPU stay at a low utilization levels :/
Keep up the videos!, its great to see commentary’s up in the x-plane world. Tomorrow I shall buy this scenery
Thanks for the support Tyrone!! If you have any questions, head on over to X-Pilot.com and post them in the forum.
And it is truly amazing. Cheers !
The ‘Early Morning Throat Clearing’ surely brings a new dimension to live video reviews … one up on FS Break ??? :lol
Simon,
Thanks for the kind review.
Regarding the orthoimagery, rest assured that countless hours were put into getting the images placed as well as implementing the new shader technology. We filed a bug report with Laminar and hope to get the visible seam issue resolved in an update. The team felt that so many other things overshadowed this issue so we shipped it. Many of those things were pointed out in your review.
The interior of the boarding terminal was modeled at the last second. We felt it added value to the asset. We would’ve loved to have modeled the interiors of the main terminal but it just wasn’t feasible for a whole host of reasons. The only thing I’ll say is that scenery development is all about compromises and trade-off’s. We all hope for a day when we can have it all. I will say that moving forward, we plan on doing more interior modeling in the future.
In the end, we delivered a frame-rate friendly scenery packed with detail (we have 4K textures waiting to be added for even more detail) and we couldn’t be happier. Rest assured, things are only going to get better.
Thanks!!
Cool Hylan, ah I wondered if the ortho border was a bug. Everything is so perfect generally, it struck me as a glaring error. I know what scenery work is like, youre always improving things. Congrats on a great scenery, look fwd to seeing more!
You said a mouthful in mentioning “compromises and tradeoffs.” I just wanted to add my impression of how superbly you managed that. As you pointed out, you cannot add detail everywhere so the choice of where to add detail is the essential art of scenery design. As with painting realism, the key is to add detail where the eye is going to look for it and that causes the mind to fill in other detail subconsciously.
To some degree, one can logically guess where the mind will look for detail. When one passes a window, there is a natural tendency to look inside. Most of the scenery that I consider to be truly detailed at least models the interior of the tower. The level of interior detail doesn’t matter much but it surprised me at how important I considered seeing something inside.
Really though, knowing where to put the detail is the essence of art and can only be determined by looking at a scene as an artist. For instance, I would never have guessed how important the quality of the power poles is. They jumped out of the scene and I was taken by an odd feeling of familiarity. It was so strong that I wondered if the power poles and transformers in the US were recognizably different from others. That feeling of familiarity caused my mind to fill in other details because I felt like I was somewhere I’d been before. (I live about a hundred miles from Wilmington and have been there)
Another nice detail is the brick in the main terminal; I actually had the impression that it was made from Sanford Brick. (there’s a lot of iron in Georgia clay) The metalwork under the cover of the front of the terminal, the no parking signs and the flowers were also notable.
The size of the airport doesn’t matter to me; this is high-quality payware. Actually, that doesn’t matter to me that much; your airport is a work of art. I have the impression that this is one of the most detailed airports I have but some of that detail has to have been filled-in by my mind because this scenery doesn’t require much RAM and only modestly hits framerates. Thus, your tradeoffs cost very little because when the complexity is added artfully, the mind fills in the rest.
Thanks for the compliments!!! We’re real proud of the power poles. Tom Kyler (development team member) did a masterful job putting all of that together. Not for the faint of heart I’ll tell ya:)
The brick was a source of great frustration for quite a while and I’m glad you’re happy with the results. I’m not looking for any new airports with brick…and I’ll just leave it at that!!
Thanks!!!
Great to hear that you’re ok with it coming out that Tom’s helped you. Well done Mr Kyler. You can tell I loved those poles too, nice touch. Some of the lights were lovely and intricate too. The bricks – I bet you had fun lining those ones up! Bland concrete, albeit marked and weathered, will be next I’m sure.
I enjoyed it enormously!
Hi, I’m having the same issues with the CRJ. The pfd screen are died, don’t konw why, I can’t fly this plane!
I just found this useful thread with Cameron’s mentioning 64 bit and memory issues. And I thought I was immune! Looks like we just need to wait a little more.
http://forums.x-pilot.com/index.php/topic/3305-crj200-startup-problem/#entry36377
Video reviews is an interesting idea with promise but the first attempt falls pretty far short of the quality of your writing. You put a lot of thought into what you write. You always consider carefully what you write, emphasizing the positive aspects of everything you review, and yet I can generally tell when you don’t like something. You are an excellent writer, which is one of the reasons this is my favorite sym-site.
On the other hand, the video dialogue is clearly improvised and has none of the organization and nuance of your writing. The density of important information is much lower than in your writing, with a lot of extraneous commentary. Watching you fly the CRJ wasn’t bad but little more than trees was visible from the cockpit so it didn’t seem like the review started until you got out of the cockpit. Even after that, the comments stated preferences more than they conveyed the kind of analysis in your writing.
Video reviews have great potential as they combine visuals with the words. However, rising to the level of your writing will probably take more work than writing. I would suggest that you write the review first, independent of any visuals. Then you could record video that exemplifies the writing. Once the video was shot, I would add the soundtrack separately, couching the written review as commentary on the visuals. That’s much more work than simply writing but it would ensure that quality of your writing shows in the video review. Hopefully the amount of extra work would diminish with practice.
One other thought. If you want to combine flying with closeups of the scenery, you could tour the scenery in a helicopter. That’s my favorite way of viewing new scenery.
Thanks for the suggestions K. I don’t want to repeat all the written stuff though, it’d be very boring for those who’d already read the review. But yeah, I could’ve picked a slower plane with better visibility. Yes helis are great for scenic tours.
I feel these 2 beauties were made for another, I’d imagine they’ll be perfect within six mths or so.
Hi, Simon,
I’ve just had a look at these videos. The “live” side of it may be nice, however, as someone promoting X-Plane it’s got a catch-22. You have left yourself with static audio and some negative commentary/knocks on the scenery without any consultation to the developer (it is quite traditional for reviewers to contact us prior to posting anything negative to try to “clear the air” or see if it was just something they were missing themselves. I am all for pointing out negatives and drawbacks. I believe it gives customers a great way to gauge whether they should buy a product. One of the points sticking out to me here is your negative commentary about the “misaligned” ortho’s, and that for $30 you would have expected more. Had you contacted us you would have learned that the orthos are NOT misaligned, and that the issue you see are small white lines in very few places caused by a bug in X-Plane 10, and is something on Ben Supnik’s to-do list. Instead, however, we are stuck with a negative knock on us for something we cannot control. I believe your commentary with regards to “fixing LODs” would have been better discussed over as well. For what it’s worth, the performance on this scenery is quite phenomenal on a plethora of tested systems, and the LODs are quite literally the best of ANY scenery I have ever come across. Each and every object has them done with care.
So, in the future I would encourage you to speak to developers and get their side of the story before calling “foul.” I don’t say this because it’s a knock to something we have done (we’ll be fine, of course), but it does help your credibility to listen, learn, and come to a conclusion based on both sides and not just one. I believe this applies for ALL developers.
I did say the vid was ‘warts’n all’ Cameron. In the end, your thorough reply and Drawbridge’s reply has answered some of the things I, as an average customer, noticed. It’s important to show things as they are NOW, not what they could be if certain XP bugs were ironed out. I don’t recall seeing any notes re. the white prior to purchase, and equally I did qualify the whole thing by saying that I may have a few bugs in my own install that might make things worse than someone else may see.
In the end I highly commended the scenery. I’ll change the written text re. the alignment now.
In future, if you’d like such things avoided, maybe sending us a preview before release (as most other devs do now) will give us time to iron out such things.
I respect you, Simon, but I fail to see how providing you an advanced copy dismisses the fact that as a reviewer you should cover your bases and write in about negatives, concerns, or cons. You have instilled things in this review that are in fact no fault of our own. Not everyone that will watch that YouTube video will read this blog. To go as far as to say we are essentially incompetent as designers (you started out by saying Chris – who does great work – is someone we need to take advice from and that such a package should have been better done for $30…yet nearly 14 minutes later you recommend it…and not everyone will watch these videos in their entirety either!) is not exactly something I consider highly commended, though I do appreciate the comments in the end.
As a further side note, every professional review outlet wishing to have credibility (or does) that we DO work with is ALWAYS sure to come to developers about concerns, cons, and negatives to ATTEMPT to clear the air or ensure they are reporting accurately. This includes PC Pilot, Computer Pilot, Avsim, and even FS Magazin….and they don’t received advanced copies!
You can take this how you wish. I am not looking for trades. I am only helping the integrity and credibility to your blog (developers talk amongst one another). Should you not like to listen to it or dismiss it that is entirely your own decision. I have provided feedback to your videos, just as you asked for. Do what you want with it!