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We believe there will never be a "one size fits all" texture product that can cover the entire globe. Years of experience creating the most celebrated FS2004 freeware texture addon released, Vista Australis (VOZ), taught the FTX developers that even for a single country, the climatic and geographical regions are just too diverse to be depicted with a single texture addon. The default FSX texture palette is just too limited to attempt a broad and varied global coverage. The result when using default FSX is that too much of the world looks the same because many base textures are re-used over and over again with only subtle differences to create climatic variations.

Our approach is different, innovative and completely logical. Based on extensive research, we look at each continent or country on Earth and split them into regions. Those regions are defined by many factors including climate, geography, rainfall, seasonal temperature variations and other data. FTX is then produced in Region Packs, allowing you to decide which parts of a continent or country you will most likely fly in. The benefit to you is that each pack by itself costs a fraction of the price of an entire country.

Each FTX Region Pack is a fully stand-alone, self-contained FSX product, with all seasonal variations, beautiful and immersive 3D night lighting, improved custom landclass and tile meshing, autogen annotation, unique roads, trees and other textures. Orbx even creates brand new super-accurate coastlines with sandy beaches where they occur in real life. In some areas we will adjust the rivers for greater accuracy and place larger lakes in the right place, although this won't be as complete as the coastlines. No two region packs will ever be the same, since the source aerial photography is specific to a region. There is no other product on the market that takes as much care to truly create a global terrain coverage like nothing else before it.

So welcome to à la carte ground terrain, at an amazing flat price of just US$25 per region pack, with a small fee for those who want it on CD-ROM. We'll also do DVD bundles for whole countries when they are completed, beginning late in 2008.

FTX is incredibly ease to use. Just run the installer for your Region Pack and then just fly! There is no tweaking of configuration files or fiddling with complex interfaces. FTX is all about enjoying the stunning landscapes you'll now want to enjoy. FTX ground textures do not install over the top of the default FSX textures, but occupy their own folders, thus being completely unobtrusive to your installation.

There is no need to switch textures as you cross from one FTX Region Pack to another. It's all handled by the unique system used to implement the custom textures. You will literally see the landscape change before you on-the-fly as you transverse from a wet to dry climate with completely unique textures, landclass and autogen for each region.

Does all this increased fidelity come at a performance cost? The answer is a resounding no! You see, FTX is designed to use fewer, more varied textures to deliver higher visual detail, meaning that loading times aren't longer because FSX is actually retrieving less textures into your graphics card. That's the first benefit. More importantly, if you have autogen turned on, you'll still enjoy great frame rates since we have optimised the placement of autogen objects and we're using our unique Orbx custom Gmax low-poly library objects, resulting in a smoother flight experience with more accurately placed autogen objects.

For those of you who want to enjoy the amazing richness and depth of the textures, you will find that turning autogen completely off will not diminish your flying experience in any way at all. In fact, many testers of FTX prefer how our textures look with autogen completely disabled - resulting in frame rates as smooth as butter, and allowing you to max those scenery complexity, traffic and effects sliders and turn the bloom effect on as bonus! We challenge you to try FTX without autogen and tell us if you really miss it!

Want to see the level of detail that we've shown in our screenshots and videos? Well,  if your PC can run default FSX with the autogen sliders set to "Dense", then you'll have the same experience. Just use the FSX in-built sliders to tune the performance to suit your PC.

If you have invested in other addons for FSX such as vector scenery for new roads, rivers, water or topo products, terrain elevation mesh, AI aircraft and airport sceneries, you have the complete assurance that FTX will work seamlessly with all of them. If you are using more comprehensive and detailed topo products such as UTX, we'll work with Allen Kriesman and other developers to ensure they don't conflict, or allow you to turn our topo layer off simply and easily. You can be safe in the knowledge that other addons will not conflict with FTX and many developers will take advantage of the publicly available SDK we will release to allow their products to blend in with our ground terrain. Remember, FTX conforms 100% to the Microsoft FSX SDK, so it will work exactly as ACES themselves intended custom scenery to do.

For flight simulation fans of Australia, the VOZ team has also released completely free of charge, VOZ Scenery X, which moving forward will be revised from the ground up to completely blend into the FTX Region Packs for Australia and add hundreds of major and minor airports to the country.

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Lush rural landscapes

Hand-crafted coastlines

Accurate urban landclass

Rivers and lakes  in key areas

Stunning  sunset  views (FEX)

Completely new tile mesh boundaries

Autogen placed to within 1m

Spectacular 3D night lighting

Thousands of miles of new roads