Orbx announced they would look into updating London Landmarks, as many users heavily criticised the product on the Microsoft Flight Simulator forums, as well as several Discord servers. Today, they released updates for several products, including London Landmarks. Many users were reporting the low quality of some of the textures of the best-known London points of interest. The Tower Bridge, the Tower of London, The Shard, the Houses of Parliament with Big Ben and the O2 Arena all had this problem.
London Landmarks
In this update, Orbx reinstated the default POIs for those buildings. Whilst the team did not acknowledge that those buildings had low texture resolution, they did say that they would look for ways to increase the texture quality, whilst maintaining performance.
Our Landmarks London pack has received quite a lot of attention and we are going to explore how we can improve on aspects such as higher definition models, particularly for the more prominent POIs, while maintaining high performance in the sim.
Orbx, Orbx forums
They also added new POIs, such as the Dartford Crossing Bridge, the bridge the M25 takes to cross the Thames East of London. London and Wembley Stadium are new as well, and the HMS Belfast’s rotation was corrected. On a final note about the product, Orbx says they are working with Asobo to resolve issues with the height of the Thames.
London City (EGLC)
London City airport was among the products updated too. This airport received updated ortho at 15cm/px. The lighting of some POIs in the area was on, even during the day. That was fixed as well. The runway area was improved too, with more accurate runway starting points, touch-down zones and accurate PAPI glideslope
Tacoma Narrows (KTIW)
Tacoma Narrows got a very small update in comparison with the two others. Just like in London City, the glideslope of the PAPIs was corrected. In certain scenarios, the simulator would not detect that the scenery was installed. That should be fixed now too.
The updates should be available from Orbx Central and have been submitted to MSFS to be approved as well. To end the post, Orbx acknowledges that they learned a lot in the past week, acknowledging they made some mistakes with their first products for the new simulator. All of the products mentioned in this article can be purchased from the Orbx store or from the MSFS Marketplace.
