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I had bought FTX: Global VECTOR the day that it came out, and I think that I gave it a bad review.

Except for the coastal areas, I thought it was pretty horrible.

Not only did the road mergers look bad, but it messed up some of my ad-on scenery, especially Madeira - one end of the runway has roads underneath it in real life & VECTOR made it unsueable.

Now, though, I'm ready to give it a big thumbs up. It's still not perfect, but they've done a tremendous job.


FTX: Global VECTOR v1.10 Released

Lets get the worst out of the way. The shot below is in Philadelphia, PA.

Lets face it, unless you buy specially made, or photoreal scenery, you'll get some of this in any generic scenery. So I'm not holding this agains them.




OOOPPpps I clicked on the wrong button. Soon I won't be able to make any changes so I'll have to add to this one.

That's life.

So that was some of the "ugly" in Vector.

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE! - IF YOU CALL IN THE NEXT 5 MINUTES....

Sorry. Runaway brain.

There is more though.

When I saw these I thought that I had a bad install. There must have been 30 or more in Minneapolis alone.

I used to live next to the Mississippi where these bridges were. But this mess is all up and down the river.





All the railroad bridges that I saw were fine.



This is the reason that I'm changing my recommendation from a Wait to a BUY.










Now you have really great control over much of the scenery that Vector displays.

For instance some people didn't want any local roads being displayed due to the high flying jets that they like to fly.

Others wanted to reduce the scenery load on their computers.

You can now pick and choose what you want displayed.


Needless to say I unchecked all of the bridges. I'll probably go back later and see how things change with some of the bridges re-checked, but for now I'm MORE than happy.

These are some of those same bridges after I unchecked ALL the bridge check marks.

So MUCH better now.





And this is the bridge behind that one. A VERY nice looking bridge.


Nice as that bridge is, I have to point out that LARGE barges CAN, and DO, pass each other on the Mississippi River at this point. (Or they did when I lived there 30 odd years ago.)


And that makes this bridge inappropriate too, even if the roads DID connect to it.





Just a couple of thoughts;

Unless you have real photo scenery that's been thoroughly worked over nothing is going to look 100% correct. So I can't complain about inappropriate bridges.

Quite the contrary, I think that the variety, and quality, of the bridges add a lot to the total sim package.


In some places it's almost exactly the same. But with the user controls that they give you I'd say that it's good at high or low altitude.

The coasts and rivers have, as far as I know, always been VERY good.

Grand Rapids @ 40,000 ft. The river is very good.



Chicago @ 40,000 feet.


Chicago at 2,000 feet.



Near Amsterdam @ 1,000 feet.



Yes, it beats the heck out of standard FSX/Prepar3d.

Oh. I didn't tell you there's an installer for FSX, Prepar3d V1.x, and V2.x. No extra charge

So if you do by FTX Vector, you're covered for all three.


PS - My graphics card isn't great, but it is adequate for FSX, and just barely so for Prepar3d V2.1.99.

Vector didn't seem to slow it down all that much, but it's well worth it.