Scenery for Microsoft’s Flight Simulator series has improved leaps and bounds with almost every version. Looking back over some of the earlier versions, it’s hard to imagine that they were cutting edge at the time. However good it is, though, there will always be those of us who crave for the absolute best possible scenery. I would imagine it would be technically possible to supply a vast portion of the planet with high resolution photographic scenery, but I’d hate to think what the price of the sim would be and how many DVD’s it would arrive on! An advantage of add-on photographic scenery is that you can purchase it for the area you’d like to fly in, rather than paying a vast some of money when you would generally be using very little of it.
Currently, there are two photographic scenery add-ons for the United Kingdom for Flight Simulator X. One is from Just Flight (currently only the downloadable VFR London scenery is available, but the remaining 4 volumes are due soon), the other being from Horizon Simulation - VFR Generation X - which is the topic of this review.
VFR Generation X is supplied in 3 volumes as follows:
- Volume 1 - England and South Wales
- Volume 2 - England and Mid Wales
- Volume 3 - Northern England and North Wales
Each volume is supplied on 3 DVD’s, requiring between 4-5Gb of disc space for each volume. An entire installation of all 3 volumes required approximately 13Gb. This can reduced somewhat if need be during the installation process by electing not to install the 1.2m resolution scenery. This is provided as an option during installation and is in addition to the standard 2.4m resolution scenery used by VFR Generation X. Additionally, you may also opt to install night lighting also at 2.4m resolution and a 5m per pixel resolution terrain mesh is also supplied. Have a think about those figures for a moment. This really is a stunning level of detail. You can easily make out individual vehicles on roads. As the Horizon web site mentions, VFR Generation X has ”16 x more detailed photography than the Award Winning VFR Photographic Scenery for Microsoft FS2004“. For the purposes of this review, I installed all available options.
There is an issue with some of the dialog boxes displayed during installation. To get around this, you merely need to insert the disc referred to in the warning message and click OK, disregarding the actual contents of the warning message. Apparently, this problem was introduced at the point of manufacture, i.e. too late to do anything about it before it was released. It’s certainly not a show-stopper, just something to be aware of.
Okay, enough teasing. What does it look like? They say a picture’s worth a thousand words, so here’s a screenshot using the default FSX scenery, taken just North of Edinburgh (this is indicative of the scenery for the whole of the UK and much of the rest of the FSX World):
And here’s a shot taken at the South end of the Lake District, near Walney airfield:
As you can see, there’s quite an improvement!
Once installed, you have the option of registering the product. This entitles you to support and also gives you access to some proposed free downloads of very highly detailed additions to the scenery. At the time of writing, one update was available, for the Snowdonia region. From the Horizon web site: “Included in this update are highly detailed 3D renditions of two of Britain’s most historically significant bridges; Britannia Bridge & Mennai Bridge. Also included are the three bridges at Conway and Conway castle itself, as well as the Land Crossing that’s there too, which is missing from the photo scenery.”
On the initial release, there were a number of areas of scenery that gave the appearance of a “flooded plain”, most noticeably in the Lake District. This has now been addressed with a downloadable patch for registered users. A patch is also due to fix the lack of night lighting currently available.
One thing you will certainly notice is that load times will increase. On my particular system (see my specifications below), after a fresh reboot of Windows and setting up the initial flight (aircraft, location, time etc), it will take approximately 4-5 minutes to load the scenery. This would appear to be an issue with Flight Simulator X rather than the scenery itself.
The provided manual gives details about the optimum settings for FSX to get the best out of the scenery. I followed these guidelines for the review and I’d recommend you do the same, as the end result is simply stunning. I’ve been “wowed” by numerous products over the numerous years I’ve been involved with Flight Simulator, but never as much as I have with this! It’s very difficult to find words to describe the realism this add-on provides, so I would recommend taking a look at the screenshots both here and on the Horizon site.
Here’s a shot after take-off from Walney Island, just south of the Lake District:
And here’s a couple taken near Newcastle
You can get some issues with the placement of static objects in the simulator, but again, this is an issue with FSX itself rather than the scenery. An example showing the Dome below clearly shows the discrepancy:
And you can also find areas, especially around coasts/rivers where you’ll see problems:
You’d be forgiven for thinking you’d get a performance hit with this level of detail, but in fact I’ve experienced a gain in frame rates and fluidity while flying around the VFR enabled areas. This is partly due to my disabling autogen but, interestingly, with the same settings in the simulator, I get better performance when flying in VFR enabled areas than with the default scenery. I’ve also experienced none of the dreaded blurries that seemed to plague scenery in past versions of Flight Simulator.
One downside to the scenery is that it can make the rest of the planet seem pretty bland! So much so, that I find I’m flying almost exclusively in the VFR areas. It’s just so good, you don’t really want to fly anywhere else where the level of detail and realism is so reduced.
Each volume of the scenery costs £29.99, or you can buy all 3 together at a reduced price of £69.99. This may seem expensive at first glance (it’s more expensive for the whole set than for the simulator itself), but you really need to bear in mind that this is going to change your sim flying experience forever. You also get excellent support from the forums, where you’ll also be kept up-to-date about the latest updates and patches. More details can be found on the Horizon web site.
Conclusion
This products is not without its problems. Indeed, there are more than a few unhappy customers on the Horizon forums. Having said that, Horizon themselves are very aware of the issues and are doing their best to get them resolved as quickly as they can. They have, and continue to, release patches as soon as they’re available. If you’re interested in VFR flying across the United Kingdom, you’re not going to be disappointed with this add-on. Personally speaking, it’s added more to the pleasure of flying the sim than any other single add-on and I’m sure it will continue to do so.
I tested the scenery using a machine with a 2Ghz Centrino processor with 1Gb RAM, a 256Mb nVidia 7800 graphics card and around 200Gb free space on my FSX install directory. As mentioned above, I have actually seen a performance increase since using the scenery.
I can wholeheartedly recommend this product to anyone looking to enhance their FSX experience.
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