"What is this, a duck?"
"It's a swan. I like it."
"You do?"
"Looks like it was made with... you know, longing. Made by a person really longed to see a swan."
"Perhaps because they'd only heard of them by rough description."
Orbx NZ is beautiful, but obviously not made by someone who had grown up with swans.
The second reason is that Orbx scenery is designed to be a full, complete and exclusive world. There isn't much wriggle room for other developers, unless they buy into that world, which many do -- and good on them -- but it does mean that anything they produce works only with Orbx scenery. That doesn't suit me, as a tiny little country like New Zealand needs a lot of choices to keep their flightsim scenery current and adaptable. And in New Zealand's case, as Orbx have ceased any NZ development, it needs to be thought of as finished and complete.
The first reason is maybe a bit facetious, in that obviously the Orbx developers have seen New Zealand, but why spoil a good analogy for the sake of reality?
One thing which I have always loved about Orbx, right from the very beginning, is they make very nice trees. Trees have always been a weak link in the sim, especially here in New Zealand, where it is tricky to find a tree type which looks like it belongs here. That's not Microsoft's fault, they had only a small selection of trees to choose from for the entire world, so New Zealand was never going to get 'our' trees. So when Orbx released FTX NZ, with it's real New Zealand trees, suddenly our New Zealand became a whole lot more realistic. Not enough to convince me to move to Orbx scenery, but enough to show me that what we really needed was a much-improved vegetation texture set, at least.
So I was very pleased -- and surprised -- when Orbx released FTX Trees HD, simply because they are not exclusive to Orbx scenery. So anyone who uses FSX or Prepar3D can get a huge improvement in the appearance of their trees, without having to commit to or buy any other Orbx scenery. Now I own FTX NZ, and I have it installed in FSX, but I don't often have it active, unless I'm checking FTX compatibility. My main sim -- Prepar3D -- doesn't even have any Orbx scenery.
However I did need to wait to try this out, as it was quite likely that non-Orbx users may not get a good result in New Zealand. That's because the benefits from using these trees are greater for Orbx users -- in New Zealand, Orbx have a lot of additional, custom vegetation as well as replacement default textures, but if you don't have FTX NZ, only the replacement default textures are available. So these were the textures I was most interested in.
The results, though, are outstanding. I've tried other custom tree texture packages before, including Zinertek - Natural Tree Environment, but nothing added to the realism in New Zealand. FTX Trees HD is the first one I've ever tried which actually works well enough for me to consider using it permanently. And I'm no longer in such a hurry to start on a custom New Zealand vegetation package, which I've always had on the todo list.
Now I could have put this post in the Review forum, but it isn't really a review, it just deals with a small area, New Zealand, and doesn't cover the main feature of the package -- how it improves the existing FTX scenery regions, plus the apparent improvement in performance. (You won't see any improvement in performance if you don't have FTX scenery, in fact the larger textures may need tweaking to keep the frame rates up.)
I could have put it in my own Godzone forum, but it also includes some non-Godzone scenery. So I'll put it here in Scenery.
Here's some screenshots showing some of the Godzone Subscription photoscenery with the HD trees. Normally I'd include the 'custom' NZ native tree textures supplied with the Subscription (and Vector Land Class) but the HD trees are a worthy replacement. Subscription shots are Prepar3D:
These few shots show Vector Land Class in FSX with the HD textures:
I'm happy to show any requested areas, up to a point.
FTX Trees HD cost me NZ$24, which puts it in the 'bargain' category. You can buy it here.
