VFR Photographic Scenery: Northern England

The Good
I've submitted three of this scenery series to the MOBY database so the parts of this review are pretty generic. I'm going to start this review by saying that I think Microsoft's Flight simulator is an excellent product and that I've had a lot of fun with it. I don't fly a lot but I enjoy the odd flight and it's something I plan to get into more over time.

That said it never really occurred to me that what I was seeing as scenery was anything other than accurate. This is silly really because I have flown before to go on holiday and such like, and whenever I get a chance at the window seat I'm looking down at the world as it passes by. I just never made the connection between a game and the real world. The thing is though this is a game on one level and its a flight simulator on another and as such it should be as accurate as possible.

This is the second scenery package that I loaded onto my pc and the most anticipated because it's my part of the world. The personal relevance should not influence the review but it does. The difference in the flying experience is immediate. This looked much more realistic. The houses were no longer odd white flat roofed things, these were good red English brick with dark slate roofs. A lot of those white buildings that dot the landscape went too and that removed much of the toytown look to the simulation which again made flying much more satisfactory and because this is somewhere that I thought I knew it was more satisfying than seeing an enhanced view of some place I didn't really care that much about.

The manual goes into detail about how the default scenery is generated and how it's not especially accurate. This is forgivable because this product was made from some millennium project that produced the first full aerial photographic survey of the U.K. so I guess there wasn't the reference material for MS FS 2002 to draw on. The accuracy is something that I noticed when taking screen shots with & without the scenery enabled. Roads, rivers lakes, forests, e.t.c. did all change position and they looked better for it. Rivers are not a standard blue/grey colour. Many like the mighty River Tyne that runs through Newcastle are naturally a mucky, dirty brown because they're full of silt. Lakes often look black , something I remember from hiking in the Lake District and looking down on Angel Tarn, and this comes over beautifully in this scenery add on.

What really brought home the difference between this scenery and the default scenery was when I started looking for an landmarks that would be recognisable from the air. I'm from this part of the world so flying over both Newcastle and the north east coast where I grew up, and Sheffield where I live now, were obvious choices. This is when I really had some fun and it's why I make no apologies for including a personal element to this review. Using photographic scenery it is possible to start with one landmark and follow roads, rivers and other landmarks in order to navigate to a destination. It's what I think VFR, Visual Fight Rules, is all about and while all I meant to do was to get a couple of quick screen shots for the database I actually spent all evening looking at this trying to find the field where I go to car boot sales, seeing how fast it would take to get from Sheffield to Derby where I go to auctions and so on. Over Newcastle being able to spot the five bridges I knew when I was young, yes I know the screen shots show there's six bridges now, as well as St James' football ground was a real buzz. Later, by using a map and following roads in the photographic scenery of Sheffield I was able to locate the area where I live and capture the screen final shots I wanted and a most satisfying experience it was.

The Bad
So this scenery is a great improvement and I love it but it wasn't love at first flight and it didn't immediately blow me away, it does have it's flaws.

The product was designed to be viewed from a slow plane like a Cessna flying above 1500 feet. Anything lower such as the first take-off and, while the scenery still looks more realistic, it looks very grainy. Anything faster and the scenery blurs as the flight simulator tries to keep up with the plane. This was most noticeable when I turned the simulator speed up to eight times normal so that I could get from A to B faster. When I paused the flight to look around I had to wait for the scenery to gradually come into focus before I could take a screen shot.

I also had to tweak the flight simulator settings to get the best out of the scenery and I'm not convinced that I'm done yet. Increasing cache size for example so that the new scenery stretched out to the horizon is one tweak, playing with MIP mapping settings is another. That's fine for me because I enjoy a good tweak but it's not for everyone.

There are also some anomalies that, when they surface, really stand out. They apply to the whole series but I spotted different ones as I played with different volumes.

One anomaly is where rivers meet the sea. With the default scenery the standard blue/grey of the river meets the standard grey/green of the sea and there's no real join. With this scenery on all the rivers I've looked at, and I have not looked at all the rivers in the UK, the river is a dark brown and that colour ends in a sharp line where the river meets the default seascape. This was especially noticeable at Tynemouth where the River Tyne just sort of stopped dead.

A bit further down the coast and there's an anomaly that probably occurs elsewhere around the edges of the products in this series. I think it's because the mesh for the new scenery did not quite replace the default flight simulator mesh. As a result there's a triangular bit that sticks out into the sea that looks like it's been duplicated, one promontory is cloaked in landscape scenery and the other is cloaked in sea and gives the impression of a mighty waterfall. This is a minor glitch but it stands out because the rest looks so good.

Another, which the manual does warn about, is that the new more accurate roads don't match the where the flight simulator has placed its landmark buildings and airports

The Bottom Line
Because this is my part of the world, this scenery enhancement has more value to me than others. Trying to navigate by landmarks I knew, or thought I did, makes a real difference and I guess the right area will do the same for any PC pilot. This has, definitely, changed my flying experience.