ORBX Northern Rocky Mountains negative review; can anyone confirm? Or deny?

[TeaSea]

Is it Fanboi or Fanboy??? What if I'm a girl? Or would that be grrl??

I'm confused.

Either way, I love my NA PNW...very nice. I want to point out to ORBX that my purchased was based specifically on the freeware try it on for size download. After running it a bit I was sold. Normally I would not spend that much on a product....I'm sort of a cheap bast**d. Which is why I'll not go for NRM right away....but probably at some point....

 

[Dain Arns]

You made use of the word picky with a question mark. Since I was the only person to use that word, I will assume it was a question directed at me.

I stated that in my limited, but not completely unfamiliar knowledge of the Canadian areas of NRM, (I will stress again that I said the Canadian areas, so not Montana) the scenery is rendered close enough to make me happy, but someone who lives there may be more picky. How is that derogatory towards you or your review pray tell?

You assumed wrong. Thought it was obvious I'm the picky one from the review.
Sorry to disappoint you, Sir, but I never considered your post at all in my response. :salute:

 

[Dain Arns]

We'll cop any criticism on the chin, no problems at all. After all, it's the feedback and exact reports such as these which make our product better.

In fact, we just released a major PFJ.001 service pack for Pacific Fjords yesterday and the release notes show how the dev team have specifically responded to many customer reports on our forums. In the past week alone we've released six patches or service packs for airports and regions. The FTX Australia region is now into its SP4 release, representing many hundreds of hours of remedial fixes and further enhancement - none of which we charge our customers for.

So can I please suggest that you report this and other anomalies on our forums so we can schedule a landclass re-sweep of specific areas which are less than accurate.

Our landclass is crafted by hand using direct comparisons to sources like Google Earth, maps and other geodata, so in this instance it's human error which you can see here. Even being as parochial as we can be in Australia, we missed complete towns in our home country which we had to add in later. Even this week I've gotten an email from a customer with a specific landclass fix request at Lismore airport, which we'll of course fix as well.

Don't worry, we'll certainly fix it as we've done to all our products since our debut release in 2008.

We've never made claims of perfection in terms of LC cover, particularly given how we make it by hand. But our scenery does have that non-mechanical "soul" to it, which is why it's so popular worldwide.

Thank you Mr. Venema for the quick, honest, and kind response.
I'm glad the review was received as given.
I'll drop into the Orbx forums sometime this weekend or early next week with that info you have requested.

You and your organization have moved up, yet another notch, in my opinion.
It's always heartening to hear about excellent customer support situations like this.
Additionally thank you for your continued support for NRM.
I look forward to the update for NRM, and future NA products! :salute:

 

[Dain Arns]

John,
Thanks for the hu about the PFJ update.
If the thread stays civil it will remain open and it seems pretty well handled so far

It's been civil from the start, Roger.
Have no further fear, I'm going back into "lurker mode".
Ta ta! :salute:

 

[koorby]

An appendix, if I may..

Martin Lott (our LC guy on NRM) checked UTX versus GE and found many areas where houses were placed where they should not be. This of course is not to disrespect Allen's excellent work on UTX (we're good friends and mutual fans), but it underscores the limitations of landclass based products - that is, they are limited to 1km x 1km texture blocks.

That said, we've fixed the example issues already by utilising polygon vector landclass (like we do through all our products where finer detail is needed).

So again, thanks for the feedback, and the more you highlight bugs to us in a logical amicable manner, the better the likelihood that it ends up in a patch or service pack.

 

[tracyq144]

Very good, koorby, et al. I will purchase NRM, based on my happiness with PNW and Orbx's responses in this thread.

You guys really do make the best scenery for FSX, and it's probably a compliment to you all that I expect perfection, LOL!

 

[paulb]

I first purchased a FTX/OrbX product last year. I was so impressed with the scenery that I have since purchased almost every scenery and airport that they have released to date. Such is the quality of their scenery that I now do 95% of my FSX flying only in OrbX.

I agree with the thrust of the initial review - IMHO NRM is not yet up to the amazingly high standard of some of their other sceneries.

However, and this is the point of my post - I have been hugely impressed at the way that they keep issuing free updates to existing scenery and airports. FTX has a very active forum - as good as any that I have seen from a developer - they take constructive criticism on that forum better than any that I have experienced. What they need are specifics - ie what exactly is the problem etc. In the six months that I have been visiting the forum, I have seen all notified 'scenery weaknesses' addressed by FTX and improvements included in a free update. In addition, they will just issue a new release with improvements - even if a customer has not asked for it! Looking at this month, I have downloaded about eight new scenery upgrades from them!

It is really excellent how they work so hard to keep making existing product releases even better. This has made me very confident in buying their products. In fact, it keeps an 'old purchase' exciting - knowing that it will get even better

Cheers

Paul