FTX AU Gold


     No one can deny that the FTX products are becoming some of the most beautiful and sought-after products for the simulator.  People were blown away by AU Blue, and AU Gold is no exception; if you’re new to the series, you’ll be amazed at the beauty and will promptly fall in love with Australia. Should you be a returning friend from just south of the Gold region, you’ll appreciate the continuing devotion to detail and excellence from the team at Orbx.

     First Impressions-
           As with AU Blue, the package is available from FlightSimStore.com via a 700MB download.  The installer was perhaps a little slow , but still ran well.  Make sure that you turn FTX Mode ‘off’ for proper installation.  Just so you know, all FTX packages that you have installed are shut off by the one Mode program rather than one for every separate package.  After the installer ran, it created an Orbx group in the start menu, as well as a manual and two programs on your desktop.  The programs were FTX mode and FTX light tweaker; each of these are very handy tools that can save you a lot of trouble.  FTX mode basically removes FTX from the sim, and it’s recommended that you shut FTX off when installing scenery.  Shutting it off can help when flying around other addons that are covered by FTX, most particularly  Aerosoft’s Lord Howe Island X (covered by the Blue region).  FTX light tweaker is just that: it lets you configure the different halos styles and sizes to your own preference.  Mr. Tim Fuchs of Real Environment Extreme lent a hand here, with the result of some very fine light styles for different conditions.  Unfortunately there’s no intro mission, and I thought that that was a nice touch in AU Blue.                                                

     Autogen-
           As I’ve said before, I don’t really know what plants are common in Australia.  However, with the help of some Googling, I think I have an idea of what type of plants, trees, houses, and wildlife are to be found in Australia and the scenery.  

     Veggies-
           What I found most common in FTX Gold are plants that are a rather dark green.  Yes, I know that doesn’t leave a lot else, but this general color stood out to me, rather than some of the more tropical-looking plants to be found. To anyone (like myself) who doesn’t live in Australia, you’ll have no problem with it.  Generally, I noticed tall, thin pine-like trees.    However, there are also a great deal of shrubs, bushes, and other plants (much of the same color).  They have sort of a greyish trunk and branches, with dark, scraggly leaves.  I found them quite similar to some of what you’d find in the Blue region, but with more mountainous-looking plants.  It’s particularly noticeable along roads how well the objects are placed.  From the air, the trees look like they’re intruding onto the roads, but when you go down lower you can see that they’re placed feet away from the roads.  They make a nice little border of trees.  It’s just the leafy foliage giving the impression of being placed on the roads.  The autogen does give the impression that it’s the same thing just stretched to different dimentions.





     Houses-
           The buildings throughout the scenery are undoubtably quite nice.  Because they are all photoreal, a lot of them look like they have more sides and stairs going up the sides.  The roofs are mostly of a reddish color with some grey thrown in and look like they are made of metal.  There are also some four-sided larger warehouses, and these are quite common in the city.  Also, do you remember the first time you booted up in a big city?  Remember those horrible-looking pentagon things?  I didn’t noticed one of those throughout the scenery, and that was undoubtably nice.

     Out away from the cities, you’ll find some ranches (or stations).  These are really some of my favorite places to visit, if you can spot one.  It’s not unusual to find some sheep or other animals around these, as well as some cars and the buildings.  Generally, there are incredibly long fences around the perimeters, but they’re sort of hard to see from high above.  Keep your eye out for these ranches, they’re a great addition to the scenery.
                                                           
     One thing that I noticed in AU Gold was that the detail on the shores of inland lakes is really incredible.  Just past the mountains to the west of Brisbane are some incredible lakes which are a great pleasure to look at.  However, I was a little disappointed that they didn’t include more shorelines.  The ones on the ocean shores add a lot, and it’s a heck of a lot nicer than looking at the scenery just cutting off at the edge of the water. Some of the ocean shores near large cities have some very nice beach textures such as bright white sand or cement boat docks, but not as many inland.   Like I said, the inland lakes are incredibly detailed, and there’s more detail in one AU Gold lake than all of the ones in the default North America put together.





      FTX is really great on performance in rural regions.  Even my very low-spec computer can run ultra-high autogen and scenery complexity, and still achieve decent frames.  I didn’t try these settings on AU Blue, and therefore, never saw any of the wildlife that they have around.  There are quite a few animals roaming around, particularly swirling flocks of birds, and (static)  kangaroos at the base of hills around airports included in the freeware package.  The FTX scenery comes with birds and sheep spread around.  We’ve probably all seen what the birds look like from the missions, but the kangaroos and sheep are definitely new.  They look tiny from an airplane and are infinitely hard to spot, but when you get down close to them, I think they are actually well sized.  The animals are in a variety of poses, such as standing and lying down and kneeling.  Also, if you’re looking for the winter textures, have fun.  Australia is very dry, and as such you’ll only find snow on the some of the higher mountains.  However, if you want something less realistic, just turn on the theme ‘Winter Wonderland’ and you’ll see Orbx’s hard winter textures.  These are just as nice as summer textures, but I prefer to fly over the green landscape.

     The traffic and the roads are simply superb.  There are vast miles of roads, and the traffic dynamics and turns are beautifully done.  Most noticeably, I found something that looked suspiciously like a round-about.  The cars, to my surprise, navigated it with ease.  At some of the airports and farms, there will be roads going right up to them.  I think that this is supposed to be the road that would bring people to an airport in real life, but the airports aren’t detailed enough that it looks realistic as the road just cuts off.  The most prominent fault that I found is that a lot of roads just suddenly stop.  However, these are generally dirt tracks with little or no traffic.  

There are plenty of lighthouses, streetlights, and custom objects.  For all the autogen, it is incredibly easy on frames.  

     The freeware airport and scenery package deserves a review of its own, but I’m going to try to cram it into one paragraph.  Between the airfields and the photoreal scenery, you have over 150 places and areas to explore.  The airfields are really nice; many have flocks of birds wheeling around them, as well as all sorts of hangars, static aircraft, and are certainly high-quality.  Additionally, they mostly based on photographic scenery, and blend in beautifully with FTX.  The latest release covers airports in AU Blue and Gold.  This is a great package and adds a lot to the scenery.  Some of the grass or dirt runways aren’t actually set as a runway, and are only visible by the marking cones around it and how it looks in the game.  These fields a lot of custom objects around them, and expect stutters if your computer is a bit lower end.  Orbx has spun-off the development off the former FTX freeware to a newly formed independent group of developers called "OZx". Their website is at www.aussiex.org and they will soon release OZx 1.0 which includes most of the former Orbx FTX freeware airports previously available. The OZx team expect to release hundreds of new airfields by the end of 2008, which is fantastic for FTX users!                  

     Finally, it was very considerate of the developers to include the lights tweaker.  Everyone has different opinions of what the lights should look like, and they look different under the various weather conditions.  So, with this handy tool, you can choose which style of light will be displayed in the sim.  Mind you, this only covers the lights in AU Blue, and doesn’t extend out of that area or to traffic.  Just so you know, my personal favorite is he ‘Holger’ style at size 7.

     
     There are remarkably few major faults (other than the minor ones that I’ve mentioned) in FTX for this large of a scenery.  I only really think there are two of any notability.  Firstly, you’ll occasionally see trees in buildings, or rarer still, buildings or objects in roads.  This is sporadic enough that it didn’t effect the feel of the scenery, but you should still know.  Secondly, the large, major buildings and skyscrapers in the major cities like Melbourne and Sydney aren’t lined up with the ground.  That is, the scenery where these buildings are placed aren’t photoreal from the actual places, so they just sort of look like they’re put there randomly.  It does sort of detract from the scenery.  In the fairly near future, Orbx will be releasing additions called ‘CityScapes’ to utilize photoreal scenery to fix this (starting with Perth). Overall, the placement of objects throughout the scenery is exemplary.      

     FTX gives a reviewer trouble.... We simply aren’t creative enough come up with the shear quantity of original compliments that this product deserves.  Don’t think that AU Gold is just the same as Blue, and that you’ll just be flying over the same Blue stuff; the Gold region is very unique, and, as I said, there are new things (like the lakes) to explore.  FTX is a monument to all that a simmer wants, and it delivers unparalleled results.  The only limitation to this scenery is how much or little time you have to enjoy it and explore.  Quite simply, this is FTX.  It’s beautiful.  It’s diverse.  Let the Revolution continue.