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Orbx TrueEarth Great Britain South & Southampton Airport By Stuart McGregor /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P1.jpg /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P2.jpgThis review is quite unusual for me,in that, this is the first time I have had the pleasure of reviewing twodifferent products at the same time. In this case Southampton Airport(EGHI) and also TrueEarth Great Britain South, both from OrbxSimulation Systems. If you are one of those folks that like to keep aclose eye on the third party add-on market, I am sure you will have beenencouraged to see a steady trickle of releases coming out from theOrbx team for X-Plane 11. This is particularly the case if you areregularly flying around the UK, where there is a rising number ofhigh-quality airports now available. But the even better news is thelong-anticipated release of the first of their TrueEarth Great Britainseries. Currently the South and Central areas are available (Centraljust released as I write this), and hopefully the North will followsoon to provide full coverage of Great Britain. For anyone who hasexperienced Orbx add-ons on other platforms, they will have a prettygood idea of what to expect, but for those who perhaps have yet totake the plunge in X-Plane, hopefully this review will give you someinsight into what you should expect. /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P3.jpg /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P4.jpgSouthampton the city, with approximately 250,000 inhabitants, isthe largest in the county of Hampshire in England and can be foundabout 70 miles southwest of London, and only a stone's throw from thesouth coast port of Portsmouth. The airport handles somewhere in theregion of around two million passengers each year, with the airportservicing flights to a number of cities across the UK andEurope. Airlines such as FlyBe, Aer Lingus, Aurigny and KLM, runscheduled flights to various locations, with companies such as TUI,Inghams, Prestige, EasyJet, Volotea and First Choice also flyingchartered services to far flung holiday destinations both hot andcold. During the winter, you can also take the kids (big and small) toLapland to see Santa and all his reindeer. One famous landmark towatch out for at the airport is the near full-scale model of aSupermarine Spitfire prototype which has been carefully recreated nearthe entrance. /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P5.jpg /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P6.jpgTrueEarth Great Britain South covers a whopping 107,349 square kmor 42,000 square miles of the southern part of Great Britain, fromLand's End at the most southerly tip of the mainland, right up toNottingham and Derby in the Midlands. The product is marketed ashaving autogen technology specially designed for X-Plane 11 and GreatBritain, with region specific housing and numerous landmarks andpoints of interest. In the user guide that accompanies the scenerypackage, you will also find information from the development team withrespect to other features included in the scenery, such as over 100million accurately place trees, more than 13 million correctly placedUK styled buildings, wind farms, light houses, churches, power lines;I really could go on and on! Basically, pretty much every VFR landmarkyou could wish for, along with many hand crafted custom models of realplaces of interest, such as sports stadiums and many other famouslandmarks of note, have been included. /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P7.jpg /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P8.jpgThe guide provided is short and sweet and nicely laid out,providing an overview of the product along with information on theauthoring team, installation guidelines, compatibility information,and where to get help if required. This is the same of the EGHIpackage, where you will also find airport information and an airportchart, in fact, all Orbx products come with a well laid out and simpleusers guide. One additional feature that is described in theTrueEarth guide is the FTX Control Panel where a choice can be madebetween using the default road textures or having transparent ones.This was a feature I was intrigued to try out for myself. If you are aWindows user you can use this to install and control the features ofyour chosen scenery as described in a little more detail later. EGHI Southampton currently retails at just over US $25, orAUS $32.95, and is pretty much in line with many of the other airportscenery packages developed by Orbx; although their TrueEarth packageis currently retailing at 54.95 AUD or approximately 40 USD. When youtake into account the actual size and level of detail provided by thepackage, an uplift in the selling price does not seem unreasonable,but I guess everyone has their own threshold on what they are willingto spend on add-ons like this. /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P9.jpg /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P10.jpgAs with all Orbx sceneries, you will need an account to be able topurchase their material, but this is a two-minute job to set up if youalready do not have one. If you already have an account, I am sure youwill know what to do, it is just so easy. Being a Windows user, I wasable to take advantage of their FTX Central installer to download andinstall the scenery which is a fabulous way to do things in myopinion, however, if you are using one of the other platforms such asLinux or MacOS, for now, you will have to manually download andinstall the scenery. To be honest, this shouldn't really be anydifferent to most other scenery packages out there, so not a majorshowstopper in my opinion. The EGHI download is quoted as being about 220 MB in size, howeverthe TrueEarth South is a whopping 26 GB, so be prepared for a bit of await. You will also require the Orbx object library to run the EGHIscenery and this can be found at their web site. At first, I hadn'tnoticed this was a requirement, and therefore was getting a fewscenery errors, however after posting a quick question the forum (allsupport requests go via this route) I got a very quick reply and wasable to fix the issue. Since then, no concerns. As far as the librarygoes, the good news is that it is free of charge, and from what I cansee, is updated quite regularly, although it does add another 118 MBto your hard drive. It is important to note that the Southamptonscenery will run independently of TrueEarth Great Britain South,however, it is highly recommended by the Orbx team, and as you willsee, I tend to agree with them. /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P11.jpg /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P12.jpgOnce done, you will end up with additional folders in your CustomScenery folder, with everything you need in there. FTX Central willgive you access to the User Guide and a means of uninstalling thescenery if you so wish, however a copy of the 10-page User Guide canalso be found within the main scenery folder if you don't want to runthe tool every time. One thing to remember is that you may need tore-order your scenery.ini file depending on how you have it organisedto ensure the scenery shows up correctly. If you have any issues withscenery not appearing, this is always one of the first things to checkin my experience. My assessment of the two scenery packages was done using X-Plane11.26 and the default Cessna 172. My current system consists of anIntel i7 5820K 3.3 GHz CPU (overclocked to 4.0 GHz), GTX1080Ti 11 GB GPUand 32 GB of Kingston RAM at its core. My system settings are at thehigh end of the range with objects on max, HDR on, although shadowsswitched off. I also use SkymaxxPro and I manually selected theweather to be fine with clear skies, a smattering of clouds andvisibility of 15 miles or so. Throughout the series of test flights,frame rates were generally in the high 20's to mid to low 40's, andbasically my system was able to cope well with the scenery and thedetails provided. I had no issues throughout. /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P13.jpg /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P14.jpgIt is always difficult to really predict how sceneries will impactthe myriad of end user systems, so all I can say is that I didn't seeany significant change in performance when using these sceneries. Inmy tests, I experimented with a few areas such as the areas aroundSouthampton (obviously), Norwich and Cardiff just to get a feel forwhat was on offer. With such a vast area to cover, it was not possibleto explore every nook and cranny of the southern part of GreatBritain, however I believe the areas covered give a pretty goodindication of what to expect. So here we go... Starting from Southampton airport itself, the first thing I noticedwhen sitting on the ramp was the sheer volume of traffic (both roadand rail), zooming past in front of me. Straight away I got thefeeling that the scenery was alive. At first glance, the textures ofthe objects outside my cockpit window had that 'real' feel about themand I was therefore already feeling good about what I was about toexperience. /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P15.jpg /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P16.jpgI pushed back from the ramp to be met by a couple of animatedvehicles going about their business, and for me, this is the sort ofdetail that really sets scenery packages apart. Going the extra mileto make an airfield feel as real as possible through the use ofanimation and detail, is one of the tick box items I look for,particularly when paying for scenery. With so much excellent freewarematerial available these days, commercial designers really have to beon their 'A' game at all times to get us to part with our hard-earnedcash, and I think it is safe to say the Orbx team certainly have theskills in their locker to challenge the best. As I taxied around the airfield, the vegetation provided along withthe ground textures are just fabulous and again give you that sense ofreality. I should also mention that I was using World Traffic 3 duringmy tests, and EGHI sync'd well, with aircraft on the stands, tosupplementing the static objects already provided. It also workedwith the coming and going of aircraft. The airport buildings are wellpresented (good textures used throughout) and one of the otherfeatures I really enjoy with Orbx sceneries, is the inclusion ofpeople at various locations around the airfield. For me, an airportwith no people just doesn't work, and leaves a place feeling hollowand empty, so it was good to see this. /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P17.jpg /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P18.jpgThere are a number of buildings provided at the airfield, includinghangars, the terminal, carpark, train station, warehouses, hotels andvarious other odds and sods. As I mentioned at the very start of thisreview, there is also a very nicely modelled Spitfire provided at theentrance to the airfield, so it is really worth taking your time tocheck out the entire airfield when you can. Most of my tests wecarried out during daylight hours, however I did check out after darkjust to get a feel for the lighting at the airfield and again I wasn'tdisappointed. The building illuminations are warm and convincing,although perhaps a little dark in places. What is fantastic is thesurrounding area at night, with so many buildings, roads and vehiclesbeing lit up, again Laminar and Orbx coming together to give the enduser a truly wonderful experience after dark. /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P19.jpg /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P20.jpgThe use of aerial images is another feature that makes the EGHIscenery stand out (even if you just purchase the airport), and this iswhere I believe Orbx have now taken X-Plane 11 to the next level. Whenyou take an already excellent product in the form of EGHI and theirother airfield sceneries for that matter, and combine this with theirTrueEarth series, this is where I now believe the X-Plane 11 bar hasbeen raised to Olympic levels. X-Plane, for many years, has been onthe verge of something very special in my opinion, and with playerslike Orbx now committed to developing products for the platform, Ifully expect more and more users to make the switch over to X-Plane,or at the very least, to come and have a look and see what all thefuss is all about. From the air, the effect looking down and around is even morebreathtaking. There were times during my test flights that I genuinelyfelt I was flying above good old 'Blighty' (UK...). Being lucky enoughto live in far flung parts of the globe, away from the UK, it almostbrought a tear to a glass eye! I have found that it is only when youare not there you actually begin to appreciate things from home, waymore than you ever do when you live there. Seeing this part of theUK's green and pleasant land sprawling in front of me was fabulous andis a testament to the quality of this product being offered by Orbx. Iam not ashamed to say it even made me feel a little home sick. Wellworth a visit if you have never been. /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P21.jpg /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P22.jpgAnyway, moving on....cough, cough.....one of my biggest criticismsof X-Plane to date has been the use of very generic house styles inmany locations, as having European styles in the UK, just doesn'treally work in my opinion. However, the combination of aerial imageryand also UK styled houses, just hit the bull's eye for me. The effectis genuinely game changing if you are a UK flyer, and I believeX-Plane has really now arrived at the grown-ups table. Being an island, the UK has miles and miles of amazing coastline,so now seeing details like the White Cliffs of Dover, and thebeautiful, but absolutely freezing (believe me even in summer) goldenbeaches all laid out in front of me was just fabulous. I also lovedthe fact that vehicles were driving on the 'right', or actually leftside of the road, which for a detail junkie like myself, really mademy day. I spent a good couple of hours with the autopilot set, justscouting the countryside at 1500 feet or so taking it all in. The scarything is that I already spend a huge part of my week immersed inX-Plane, and now I have an even bigger reason to do so. Being from thebit above 'the border', i.e. Scotlandshire, I can't wait until theNorth is released, as that will be all my Christmases, birthdays andanniversaries come at once. I think by now you will be getting theidea that I am quite hooked... /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P23.jpg /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P24.jpgBut seriously, EGHI Southampton and TrueEarth Great Britain Southare examples of why I believe 2018 has been a game changing year forX-Plane as a platform. With the introduction of developers like Orbxto the market, and a steady stream of excellent new sceneries beingreleased month on month, if you have the budget, it all bodes well forsimmers young and old alike. It doesn't matter if you have beeninvolved for decades or are just putting your first virtual toe intothe simulation world, as I believe this is a really exciting time tobe taking to the skies. If like me you are still relatively new todevelopers such as Orbx, I hope this review gives you some insightinto what their products are able to bring to the X-Plane table, andwhy I believe that our virtual world is changing for the better. At the end of the day, it still comes down to personal choice, andwhat you can afford, but the good news is that the level of choicejust keeps getting bigger, allowing us to hopefully make more informedchoices with what we want from a platform such as X-Plane, or theproducts being created by developers such as Orbx. If you would likemore information, I recommend you take a look at their product rangeover at their homepage and make up your own mind. /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P25.jpg /images/reviews/orbxeghi/t/EGHI_Southamption_P26.jpgI believe it is fair to say that with products such as EGHISouthampton and TrueEarth Great Britain South being released to themarket, in combination with the relentless development that is goingon over at Laminar Research, the future of X-Plane appears to be ingood hands. In my opinion, this truly puts X-Plane up near the top ofthe sim pile and a genuine contender for the 'go to' sim these days,and dare I say it, even pushing for 'top dog' if things carry on asthey are... Hmm food for thought! /images/notams/notams18/orbx1026/orbx1026.jpgI really can't wait to see what 2019 has in store! Stuart McGregor Orbxdirect.com
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/images/notams/notams18/orbx1026/orbx1026.jpgThe first TrueEarth integrated airport for X-Plane has been released - experience EGHI for the first time in X-Plane 11. Located northeast of Southampton within Hampshire England,A EGHIAis a feature-packed add-on with an incredible level of detail. Fromthe brick-paved aprons, to the nearby factories, hotels and otherbuildings, this airport is a faithful replica of what you see in thereal world. The airport is Q400, 737 and Embraer 175 ready, as well assupporting GA and private jet movements. This is the perfect stagingpoint for flights to Europe, Cardiff or Dublin, or short GA hops toGoodwood or Shoreham. /images/notams/notams18/orbx1026/eghi-2.jpgKey FeaturesQ400, E175 and 737 capableSuper detailed brick paved apronFully custom modelled airportDetailed Ford Southampton plantFully blended intoA TrueEarth GB SouthRealistic night, apron, taxiway and approach lightingMany custom local buildingsCompatibleA with World Traffic 3Realistic static aircraftGround personnelAnimated ground services /images/notams/notams18/orbx1026/eghi-3.jpgPurchase Orbx - EGHI Southampton Airport for X-Plane 11 Also available for FSX/P3D /images/notams/notams18/orbx1026/eghi-1.jpg
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/images/notams/notams18/orbx1024/orbx1024.jpgFollowing on the successful release ofTrueEarth Great Britain South,we have heard a lot of you ask for more airports to be ported to XP tofurther enhance your British flight simulation experience - so you'llbe pleased to hear that we are bringing EGHI Southampton Airport forX-Plane 11 or OrbxDirect! /images/notams/notams18/orbx1024/southampton-1.jpgLocated northeast of Southampton within Hampshire England, EGHI isa feature-packed add-on with an incredible level of detail. From thebrick-paved aprons, to the nearby factories, hotels and otherbuildings, this airport is a faithful replica of what you see in thereal world. The airport is Q400, 737 and Embraer 175 ready, as well assupporting GA and private jet movements. This is the perfect stagingpoint for flights to Europe, Cardiff or Dublin, or short GA hops toGoodwood or Shoreham. /images/notams/notams18/orbx1024/southampton-2.jpgKey FeaturesQ400, E175 and 737 capableSuper detailed brick paved apronFully custom modelled airportCustom local road and motorway trafficFully blended into TrueEarth GB SouthRealistic night, apron, taxiway and approach lightingMany custom local buildingsCompatible with World Traffic 3Realistic static aircraftGround personnelAnimated ground servicesPlease note that for the best experience, we recommend using EGHIin conjunction with TrueEarth Great Britain South. The scenery willwork without it, however some users may experience missing ormisplaced forests, missing or misplaced buildings surrounding theairport or photoreal blending. Product Page