Thursday, April 7, 2011

TEST : Orbx Orcas KORS : jumping for joy ?

PeopleFlow everywhere on Orcas Eastsound airfield

FSX. Orbx has updated PeopleFlow for his Orcas island, an add-on dedicated to NA Blue Pacific Northwest. A few days ahead of Cushman Meadows release, what's really good with these Orbx addons ? Is this one worth it ?

Orcas island (KORS), was for me a real discovery. I already knew NA Blue Pacific Northwest. The groud textures, mesh and road traffic are impressive but i found this scenery (PNW) a bit disappointing ; the airports are basically unchanged except for a couple of ones, that are slightly updated with custom hangars.
With Orcas addon, here we get a highly detailed airfield, a very sophisticated place with thousand of carefully placed objects, custom traffic, sounds, birds and PeopleFlow.


With the last 1.1.5. PeopleFlow update, one third of them have specific moves and can even walk under a certain path loop. There are also three or four marshallers but - here is a real disappointment - if you expect them to take care of your aircraft, you are wrong !. The marshallers are just looping and looping around, totally ignoring you and your aircraft. Too bad. By the way, in the Coffs harbor update, PeopleFlow are actually doing proper animations around your liner. But not in Orcas.

On this screen, a circle show an animated people looping around.
A stroke just represents a people moving an arm or just doing one mouvment.


Orbx Orcas airfield... (here with full autogen)

... and the Google Earth view

Of course, the addon include much more than just this airfield but if you are not aware of that, be warned that the islands of San Juan, Lopez etc are NOT depicted with this amount of details. The airfields of Lopez and San Juan have standard quality level of NA BLUE Pacific Northwest updated airports. No peopleFlow, no special features apart some static aircrafts.
Three or four areas have custom high definition textures but that's all and i didn't see a lot of eye-candies. So, personally, i would have looked for some better equilibrium of details around the scenery. For instance, on a VFR flight, i would have liked to see animals (cows, horses) in a field, a bush fire, some events and more custom textures.
Of course, its just the beginning of Orbx adventure. We can imagine new features like AnimalFlow etc.


hangars areas are nicely done. Some of them are open and show objects and details.

Here three more people looping. A complete loop usually takes 30 sec. So with the marshallers for instance, imagine 3 loops, 4 loops, 5 loops while you are making your checklists at parking...irritating ?

Nevertheless, the whole scenery is very addictive
 and there are a lot of possible flights toward Lopez airfield, San Juan or Bellingham airport etc.

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