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Interview With John Venema From Orbx Conducted By Dominic Smith Development When did you start developing for flight simulators and what got you interested in it? I first began developing textures for FS2004 for a project called Bird's Eye View (or BEV), back in 2003 I think it was. Not long after, I began creating my own textures for Australia purely for personal use. I began to post preview shots on a temporary forum and soon it grew into a major freeware project called Vista Australis (or VOZ), which incidently became possibly the most downloaded freeware project for FS2004 in its day. Tell us about the nature of your designs and what you do? Orbx tends to differentiate itself on the quality of our FTX (Full Terrain Experience) textures, that is both for landclass ground textures and those used at airports. First and foremost we make new ground textures and landclass for large regions of the world such as the Pacific Northwest in the USA, or England in Europe. We've done a bunch of these FTX regions to cover Australia, New Zealand, the UK, most of the USA/Canada western coast areas and currently we're working on Norway in Europe. These regions include new textures, new landclass, elevation mesh and vector data for roads, railways, coastlines, lakes and rivers. Additionally, we add many POI's like bridges, photo-real mountain areas, etc. Each FTX region is meant to be a stand-alone simulation area where you can enjoy them out of the box. Of course, sitting on top of those FTX region we make FTX payware and freeware airports. These are designed to blend cohesively into the region so you can experience incredibly detailed airports right down to seeing mechanics repairing a C172, the groundsman sweeping the apron, and trees and grass blowing in the breeze. Because of this immersive level of detail, Orbx tends to focus mostly on GA, VFR and regional airports. What do you consider your best or most popular work? FTX Global is probably our most popular product since it creates a "Region Lite" for the entire planet with a single installer, and uses six years of ground texture development. So in essence, FTX Global is a celebration of all the hard texture work that went into our earlier FTX Regions, but engineered to create a one-stop solution to provide those famous Orbx textures over the entire planet. So yes, we're very proud of FTX Global. What do you find to be the most challenging aspect of a project? That varies from project to project. An FTX region is challenging purely from the scale of it (for example a whole country like Norway takes an enormous amount of work), whereas an FTX airport is challenging from the perspective of getting good photographs of buildings and objects around the airport so as to model and texture it the best way possible. What have been your favorite projects? For me personally I loved working on our debut regions in Australia; I poured a lot of passion into those four areas (which we now sell as a single region covering all of Australia), and it was pioneering stuff for us back then. I also enjoyed working on airports like Tamworth, Israel's Farm, Walter Sutton's, Aeropelican - you can tell by their names they were quaint destinations with loads of character in them. / John, was there a particular reason why you chose Australia as your first major scenery package (both freeware and payware)? It was mainly because I was living there at the time and wanted a better scenery to use in the sim (I was studying for my PPL). What software packages and tools do you use to develop? Our team mainly uses Photoshop and 3DStudioMax, plus a bunch of great tools developed by Arno and the FSDeveloper.com community. We also use some commercial packages which are used to place objects and develop airport definition files. Who would you consider to be your mentors or inspiration in the development world if you have any? I'm not sure if I have any mentors as such, but I was a huge fan of Holger Sandmann's work for FS2004 back in the day. I'd download his stuff and spend days and days exploring the Pacific Northwest area. In fact, I respected his work so much I offered him a job seven years ago and he's spearheaded much of our region products since then. Other than that, I've been a video gamer for 37 years and love exploration style games where you have worlds or environments to discover. It's amazing how much modern games are like being inside movies these days. If a game can make me lose myself for a few hours at a time and immerse myself in the story and environment, I'm there. I always buy those sorts of games, so you could count Blizzard, Bioware, Bethesda, Lionhead as some of the companies I admire. Being a gamer for 37 years, do you have one particular game which stands out? Dragon Age: Origins was a masterpiece and I'm really looking forward to Dragon Age: Inquisition. I am also a big fan of the Uncharted series. Anything which is open world and done well gets my attention. Do you develop payware/freeware or both and why? We develop much more freeware than payware. In fact, I'd say Orbx is the most generous and prolific freeware publisher in the entire FS community by far. We do this because that's our roots, that's what our company was born from and why we will always continue to give back to our community and customers. The Team How many people work with you or your team? All up, about fifty plus, based all around the world, with some being full-time and others part-time. We also have a lot of volunteers who contribute because they love what Orbx does and just want to be involved. What do the various members of the team do? It depends on the projects, but mostly we have texture artists and modellers making airports, landclass developers, vector data specialists working on regions and everything in between. We also have a great beta testing team, a skilled webmaster, a dedicated server guy, an online store team at FSS and a production manager who overseas all aspects of rolling out builds, betas and sending it out retail. It would be safe to say most of our development team is multi-talented in that they do many different tasks. It's not uncommon for instance to have a single developer design and build an entire airport from scratch. What other developers or teams have you worked with and what were their roles? Outside of Orbx I have not worked with other developers. Before I got into FS development I had a 26-year IT career in coding, support, sales and marketing - very different to creating flight sim content! That is different. What languages did you used to code in and do you still use any of them when designing software? I coded in about five dialects of BASIC over a decade, but never did get into C or its variants. I also used various 4GLs including Advanced Revelation and OpenROAD. I was also a DBA so know SQL pretty well (or used to). Real Life You mentioned earlier that when living in Australia you were studying for your PPL. Do you have real aviation experience? Yes, three of my brothers have pilot's licenses and two of them are instructors so I do fly with at least one of them when I am back in Australia. Locally here in the UK I sometimes rent a C172 from a local aeroclub and do some circuits over my area (with a PIC instructor on board of course). At one stage I had aspirations to get my PPL but not any more, Orbx became on all-consuming passion for me. What started your interest in aviation? My dad was a big aviation buff and when I was young I remember many trips out to the local international airport observation decks to go plane spotting. Any memorable flights in real life? Well I have spent the past 30 years as a commercial airline passenger (in all cabins and classes) but the most memorable was a flight in the jump seat of a Cathay Pacific B747-400 whilst on final to Hong Kong's Kai Tak airport. What other hobbies or things do you do for enjoyment? I love driving convertibles, going to the cinema, good food, good wine and just socialising with friends at the local pub. I am a keen cyclist (I ride about 100 miles+ a week). Of course my family and I love to travel as well, so we tend to go abroad 3-4 times a year. Future How do you choose your next new design or project? Airports are mostly left up to the developers to choose; I give them the freedom to develop what they find a fun project to do. As for FTX Global, it naturally covers the entire planet, so with that in mind, we are focusing on new openLC Landlcass products to eventually cover the whole planet. What simulators do you design for now and which ones do you plan to develop for in the future? We design for FSX, P3D1 and P3D2 - that's all we are working with for now. In what ways do you see development changing in the future? Not much really. Perhaps better toolsets for modelling and texturing would help. If there was a new sim platform that had an SDK which was really easy to add content to, that would make our lives easier. The way 3D content has been created has not changed for 25 years, and it's not likely to do so in the long term. Your Thoughts What can sites like FlightSim.Com do to support you and the hobby better? Just continue to service and serve the FS community in the most impartial way possible. How do you feel about the future of flight simulation in general? Very positive really. Our hobby is growing rapidly, not shrinking. I know this because our customer base is growing all the time and we have many new customers from all over the world. What are some of the most important things a site or community can do to help the developers? Promote their work. A lot of smaller developers need exposure and rely a lot on the goodwill of sites like yours to get their name out there. What would you like people to know about you or your team and work? Orbx is a very enthusiastic and passionate bunch of people that make very detailed and immersive environments to fly over, and land into. We back that up with the best service and support possible and always continue to release updates and patches for all our products at no charge. Add in the largest freeware library by any vendor and you can understand why Orbx is so popular in the FS community. John Venema https://www.fullterrain.com Videos -
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