ORBX - FTX Australia - FlightSim Pilot Shop

ORBX - FTX Australia [ORX-100] Earn 180 Rewards Points For FSX.	$89.99

View Product Images

Reviews

FSX Certified FTX is the Full Terrain Experience, and is the culmination of over five years of research and development by local Melbourne company, Orbx Simulation Systems.

FTX will completely transform how the entire country of Australia looks like in Flight Simulator X, and only occupies 12GB of hard drive space and performs equal and in some cases better than default FSX!

This all-in-one package includes all four FTX regions; AU BLUE, AU RED, AU GREEN, and AU GOLD, plus the FTX Coffs Harbour scenery add-on and the latest SP3 service pack!

A NEW LEVEL OF REALITY
FTX introduces a radical new modular design with a level of visual fidelity unprecedented in Microsoft Flight Simulator since its introduction over twenty years ago. For the first time ever it is a pleasure to fly low and slow and take in the depth of features that our ground terrain textures provide.

FTX Features:

Super-crisp, superbly detailed 1 metre-per-pixel textures made from aerial photos

Hand-crafted custom landclass for the entire country - a world first!

Improved and highly accurate coastlines, roads/rail, rivers and vertical obstructions

Brand new autogen textures for trees, houses, buildings, industrial estates and more

A superb 3D night lighting system with moving traffic on every road in the country!

Unlike FS2004, with FTX it's a case of the lower you fly, the more detail you will see! It's completely the reverse of what you have previously experienced, and it is only when you see FTX in motion on your PC that you will believe how truly immersive flying can now be.
MADE FROM AERIAL PHOTOS!
FTX is hand-crafted by a team of texture artists and custom landclass developers using source aerial photography licensed from world class data providers. Additional digital low altitude images have also been taken by the Orbx development team using rented aircraft and 10 megapixel DSLR cameras. The advantage of using low altitude aerial digital photography versus satellite images cannot be overstated. The results are evident in the much higher level of intricate detail which can be found in each texture, and by using efficient resampling from 15cm/pixel down to 1m/pixel, nearly all of the source information is preserved. If you can imagine flying over a golf course at 500FT and seeing golfers and their carts on the green, then you can imagine what using FTX will be like!

A LA CARTE REGION PACKS
We believe there will never be a "one size fits all" texture product that can cover the entire globe. Years of experience creating the most celebrated FS2004 freeware texture addon released, Vista Australis (VOZ), taught the FTX developers that even for a single country, the climatic and geographical regions are just too diverse to be depicted with a single texture addon. The default FSX texture palette is just too limited to attempt a broad and varied global coverage. The result when using default FSX is that too much of the world looks the same because many base textures are re-used over and over again with only subtle differences to create climatic variations.

Our approach is different, innovative and completely logical. Based on extensive research, we look at each continent or country on Earth and create FTX Regions for them. Those regions are defined by many factors including climate, geography, rainfall, seasonal temperature variations and other data. FTX is then produced in Region Packs, allowing you to decide which continent or country you will most likely fly in. The benefit to you is that each pack by itself costs a fraction of the price of coverage for the entire globe.

Each FTX Region is a fully stand-alone, self-contained FSX product, with all seasonal variations, beautiful and immersive 3D night lighting, improved custom landclass and tile meshing, autogen annotation, unique roads, trees and other textures. Orbx even creates brand new super-accurate coastlines with sandy beaches where they occur in real life. In some areas we will adjust the rivers for greater accuracy and place larger lakes in the right place, although this won't be as complete as the coastlines. No two region packs will ever be the same, since the source aerial photography is specific to a region. There is no other product on the market that takes as much care to truly create a global terrain coverage like nothing else before it.

So welcome to a la carte ground terrain, at an amazingly affordable price per region pack, with FTX Australia SP3 DVD being the first region for sale as a single, simple installation.

INSTALL AND FLY
FTX is incredibly ease to use. Just run the DVD installer, activate FTX Australia from the FTX Central application and then just fly! There is no tweaking of configuration files or fiddling with complex interfaces. FTX is all about enjoying the stunning landscapes you'll now want to enjoy. FTX ground textures do not install over the top of the default FSX textures, but occupy their own folders.
There is no need to switch textures as you cross from one part of the country to to another. It's all handled by the unique system used to implement the custom textures. You will literally see the landscape change before you on-the-fly as you transverse from a wet to dry climate with completely unique textures, landclass and autogen for each region.

SCALABLE PERFORMANCE
Does all this increased fidelity come at a performance cost? The answer is a resounding no! You see, FTX is designed to use fewer, more varied textures to deliver higher visual detail, meaning that loading times aren't longer because FSX is actually retrieving less textures into your graphics card. That's the first benefit. More importantly, if you have autogen turned on, you'll still enjoy great frame rates since we have optimised the placement of autogen objects and we're using our unique Orbx custom Gmax low-poly library objects, resulting in a smoother flight experience with more accurately placed autogen objects.

Want to see the level of detail that we've shown in our screenshots and videos? Well, if your PC can run default FSX with the autogen sliders set to "Dense", then you'll have the same experience. Just use the FSX in-built sliders to tune the performance to suit your PC.

BONUS FREEWARE AIRPORTS
Orbx continues to release FTX-matched photo-real, high quality freeware airports available for anyone to download. These will be released using satellite photo ground terrain and will be seamlessly blended into the FTX textures. Included in each of these airports will be lots of macro details such as some modeled buildings, hangars, static objects and a huge variety of FSX native scenery objects such as flying birds and moving traffic.

NOTE: Some screenshots below show freeware add-on airports not included on the FTX discs. These are available for free download from the FTX website at http://fullterrain.com/freeware.html

FTX WORKS WITH OTHER ADDONS
If you have invested in other addons for FSX such as vector scenery for new roads, rivers, water or topo products, terrain elevation mesh, AI aircraft and airport sceneries, you have the complete assurance that FTX will work seamlessly with all of them. If you are using more comprehensive and detailed topo products such as UTX, the FTX Central application ensures they don't conflict, and allows you to integrate them simply and easily. You can be safe in the knowledge that other addons will not conflict with FTX. Remember, FTX conforms 100% to the Microsoft FSX SDK, so it will work exactly as Microsoft themselves intended custom scenery to do.

For flight simulation fans of Australia, the OZx team (a fully independent group of FSX scenery developers) have also released completely free of charge, HUNDREDS of airports which blend seamlessly into the FTX region packs. To date they have released over 372 airports and sceneries, which you can download completely free of charge. What other vendor addon gives you this level of freeware developer support?

For FSX.