Introduction
When we approached Orbx systems about reviewing FTX AU Gold and maybe an airfield, John Venema, the founder and lead developer of Orbx Systems, really came up trumps and suggested a featuring several airfields that would demonstrate the many facets of their expertise and products, that way the viewer could really get the full impact. This first review features the bedrock of the FTX range, the region pack.
After quite a few weeks of enjoying the scenery interspersed with operating system upgrades and re-installation of FSX and FTX etc. I feel I have now got a sense of what it's all about, hopefully I can share my experiences with you here.
What I intend to do is work from the ground up so the underlying landclass and terrain of the FTX region pack first then the individual features of the airports in a later review.
One thing I have found in my research is this is nothing short of religion for these guys, there is a large community formed around FTX, you will find freeware airports to download as well as themed liveries for default and payware aircraft. Indeed, the first thing I did after installing FTX Gold, was to download and install the freeware 76 metre resolution terrain mesh 'Holgermesh' developed by Holgar Sandmann. This actually covers the whole of the country, not just this region.
At this point, I must state that the shots below are featuring Holgermesh in the FTX shots and REX2 environmental enhancements in both the default and the FTX shots featured.

P3D-P3DV2-FSX ORBX FTX Collection Serial Key Keygen April 17 2020. FSX - OrbX - FTX NA Blue. FTX NA Gold Northern California v1.30., Telluride AI ATC FSX/P3D. FTX Global v1.41. THETA Serial Key Edna.And.Harvey.Harveys.

So, what is Full Terrain Experience AU?
FTX is basically a depiction of the underlying landclass. Landclass, or land classification, refers to the generic scenery tiles that are displayed when flying in the MSFS world. Each tile in the landclass represents the terrain for a 1 square kilometre piece of the Earth. The type of tile is varied and can be used to depict forest, urban, desert, or farmland etc.
What Orbx have done is taken this a step further with ground terrain based on aerial photography sourced at 15cm/pixel resolution and re-sampled to 1m/pixel tightly integrating hand-placed custom landclass and in many areas, polygon landclass to define individual parks, towns, golf courses, rail yards in much more detail.
Combined with accurate roads, moving traffic, 3D lights, hand-made coastlines, lakes, rivers and vertical obstructions (TV towers, wind farms, lighthouses, chimneys, power stations) The autogen is hand positioned to within 1m accuracy, which makes all trees, buildings and other objects perfectly positioned on the ground.
Finally, full seasonal colour support is thrown in for good measure.

FSX Orbx ftx AU SP4 Vol.2 YMUI. Prepar3d Default Scenery vs. FTX Australia Scenery - Orbx - Duration: 17:42. Wicked Gameplay 5,245 views. ORBX AU Freeware Airport Tour #5 - YRED.
However, whilst FTX Australia was a stunning product at the time, technology and data has since improved and as such, Orbx has spent countless hours updating Australia to a brand new version. Back in December 2018 John Vennema briefly shared some previews of Australia.
I highly recommend, if you have Australia SP4, or even to get it.along with is airport! Orbx - FTX: AU YBCS Cairns International Airport. Orbx - FTX: AU YBRM.

AU GOLD Territory Picture courtesy of Orbx Systems

I will be flying in the Gold region, this is the smallest of the region packs but probably one of the most interesting. On their website Orbx Systems confirm this and quote:

'South East Queensland is in fact a VFR flyer's dream and sports some of the most enjoyable terrain to fly over in the simulator. Crammed full of small airfields and with a very diverse geography, you'll experience rainforests, the outback, hinterland ranges, lush rural landscapes, spectacular tropical waters and countless islands to explore, all with that typical Queensland look and feel. Visit Brisbane International Airport, the city and up along to the Sunshine Coast. South you'll discover the vibrant Gold Coast and rich pastoral farming areas, all superbly rendered with their unique crops such as bananas, tobacco and of course, sugar cane.'
Finally, it is worth mentioning that there is a very decent demo available for download , this covers part of the Blue region with the entire state of Tasmania with no limitations, this will give you a good taste of the software.

Installation and set up
As I write this review, the individual regions are available as a download from the flightsimstore.com or as a download with DVD backup for a small extra charge. However, the complete set of 4 regions is available on DVD right now. Make sure whatever you buy that it is the latest SP3 version.
Prepare to download a big file, the Gold region weighs in at 786Mb but for scenery that is not so bad nowadays. When you install the product it will only install to the same path as your flightsim with no options given, bear in mind that any future FTX airport add-ons will have to be installed into the same place so check you have plenty of spare capacity as you will need it.
When running the installation I was aware of a script running that was probably notifying the FTX Central interface and the FSX scenery library of the new layer.

FTX Central GUI

FTX 3D Lights Tweaker

Scenery Layer Tool

After the installation is complete the FTX Central GUI runs, here you can opt to use the custom Orbx trees, set insertion points for your scenery levels, run the FTX Aero tool to add custom textures to an installed FTX airport's environment or the 3d Lights Tweaker. The system creates multi-coloured lighting for all roads in urban areas and major roads in rural townships. The lighting system is also implemented with the autogen in the textures themselves.
As part of FTX Central you get easy access to the user manuals, I like this option a lot and now there is no excuse not to read the *** manual! Seriously though, there is some good information in there. Ideal and suggested display settings and a hint to run the system in full windowed mode rather than full screen mode. I tried both and didn't notice any performance gain on my set up so I kept to my favourite full screen mode.
For the more advanced and confident simmer, a couple of useful tweaks to the FSX.cfg is also suggested such as adding:
[TERRAIN]
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_TREES_PER_CELL=2000
TERRAIN_MAX_AUTOGEN_BUILDINGS_PER_CELL=1700

That helps to bring down demand on your CPU and is well worth doing, a lot of FSX simmers will recognise this from the early days when tweaking was king, for me, with FSX SP2 running, performance is so much better now but every little bit helps!

Flying in AU Gold
Ah! the bit I have been waiting for, this should be a VFR flyers dream? The main difference between landclass and photo scenery would normally be in recognising local features; photo scenery by its very nature should be totally accurate but it is also so flat and life-less. So the team at Orbx have included custom autogen, complete roads, rail roads, trails and tracks for accurate VFR flights. One thing the default scenery doesn't give you is a believable, life-like view out of the window. From reading how Orbx assimilated the purchased terrain and photo data taken by themselves in chartered aircraft, I would say this would be as accurate as landclass could get.
My first impression of FTX was I only had just started flying in full colour after years of rather drab default textures! My first flight was in rich pastureland which in the default sim would really only be dull and uninteresting, just see below! FTX AU Gold is different, a lot different. There are roads leading to isolated farms and running hundreds of miles into the distance. I can see custom buildings and trees populating the landscape.
There is a random, but probably accurate, patchwork of fields which in themselves varied tremendously. I could detect very little, or no repetition in the scenery. I was surprised to see shadows from trees and houses, this could well be down to the use of licensed aerial photos to produce the textures. There are vast plains that reach far past the horizon illustrating beautifully what this country is all about, large distances and diverse scenery. A GPS is absol

Orbx Ftx Australia Sp4