Yes, you are correct, the "Top 5 Picks" for the week of April 1st through April 7th are a week late, but sometimes the quality can improve with time! In addition, this week I am receiving some assistance from Joern Alles with this week's picks, as Joern is a real fan of FLY! and has been kind enough to offer up the first pick and mini-review of the week with this high quality offering from How In The World, Inc.!
There are only a few places on this planet that can take your breath away like the mighty Grand Canyon does. If you ever visited this awesome place, standing on the edge and just wondering what's around the next corner, or if you've never been there: The Grand Canyon scenery from Jak Fearon is a must!
Created first with Terrascene 2 and then extensively repainted by hand
to encompass more detail, the use of trees, buildings and static aircraft around Grand Canyon National Airport give you a real sense of being there!
Especially the trees give you a more realistic feel of speed and flying an aircraft! I fired up Rob Young's Piper Malibu and took off from KGCN heading north. Talking about spending quality time with Fly! I hope the Park Service wasn't watching! I don't think zooming along the bottom of the Grand
Canyon just a couple feet above the Colorado is all that legal! But hey, that's the beauty of flightsimming!
Jak is famous for his excellent work and Flying around the Grand
Canyon once again shows his great sense for detail and realism. The frames rates are excellent (in the low twenties) with my 'old' system despite the huge number of extreme elevation variants and models.
President Theodore Roosevelt once said about the Grand Canyon: 'Leave it as it is; you cannot improve on it, not a bit!' If he would be around to see Jak's scenery package he would most likely say the same. The only things really missing are the bus loads of tourists and the strong smell of mule droppings on the trails. But Fly! II is just
around the corner! You never know what will be possible in the future... Joern CYYD
17-April-2001 Nationwide is a South African airline that operates 5 of these BAC1-11 400s out Johannesburg International to other points in South Africa. David Meltby (designer of this FS Aircraft) has put together a really terrific flying aircraft, plus it includes a custom panel by Tony Lewis, with Mike Hattingh providing the photorealistic textures. Over all this aircraft, from all the external views, carries with it what we've all come to expect of the level of quality from the FS aircraft designers today. The textures have that "in service" look, which I do like very much. Also included are a steering nose gear, fully animated gear/gear doors, control surfaces – well, in other words, just about everything moves!
The panel, by Tony Lewis, is a bit FS98 in its general appearance, but is fully functional as a panel for FS2000, using the normal FS2000 icons for radios, GPS, and throttles. Having only seen photographs of the real panel for a BAC1-11, I can only say that Tony's panel looks very much like the real thing, or at least its basic layout is similar. You will have to adjust your seat somewhat during landing due to the restricted forward view with the high panel, but I found that to be really no problem.
So, I give these guys a B+ for an attractive package, for a less than common twin-engined airliner, that is fun to fly! ...Bear!
18-April-2001 Paul Baines has again given us more scenery for the Manchester, England area and this time he's giving us the small turf/grass field of Barton, just outside the city of Manchester. Barton has 3 turf or grass runways and the field itself (in real-life) is operated by the Lancashire Aero Club (according to Paul's readme file) and home to the annual Manchester Airshow.
Installation is pretty straight forward, but you do need to download his bart-fix.zip to correct some textures Paul forgot and you will also need to have downloaded the textures for Airport2.10 as well (otherwise your surrounding trees will look like large flat panels). In addition there is a set of flatten switches that will need to be placed in the scenery.cfg file.
Though Paul has included such features as lighted parking and buildings, the airport itself is unlighted and in real-life this airport only operates during day-light hours. This scenery package includes many buildings—hangers, static aircraft, grass textures, area structures, and hedge-row trees. There are even tree-lined roadways around this neat little general aviation airport. Paul has obviously spent a great deal of time designing a very highly detailed airport that is very realistic in its appearance, and Paul has even included an FSTraffic track for this airport (for those of you that have FSTraffic), which is a nice touch. Paul's work blends very nicely into Lennart's seasonal textures, and frankly I think it's quite beautiful! If your flying time is spent mostly in light aircraft and in the English countryside, then you must download this beautiful little airport package! ...Bear!
17-April-2001 Well, Lennart does it again with his latest texture set, a texture set designed to go with his Summer-Fall-Winter texture set released last year! Lennart has been providing his seasonal textures all along, first his Summer textures (called Beta 1) early last year, then his Fall-Winter textures late last year, and now he's completed the full set with his Spring replacement textures. Included with this Spring time set, Lennart has also supplied a spring desert and a rock desert set, of which I installed—the rock desert set to go with the spring set. His "rock desert" set is much more reminiscent of what I see around here in Reno; much more so than the default textures.
Overall, the FS2000 default textures aren't bad, but Lennart's textures have this more realistic appearance, that's difficult to put into words; and they seem to fill in the gaps with 3D appearing trees, forests, and especially rural areas! Plus his texture color is much better than what the FS team at Microsoft compiled. I feel that all of Lennart's textures are a must have add-on and it's wonderful that Lennart makes his textures available as freeware. Thanks Mr. Arvidsson, excellent work! ...Bear!
17-April-2001 This is James's second rendition of the George Bush International Airport and as last time he's greatly improved on the default airport, but he's also added a great deal with downtown Houston as well.
James explains how he has made adjustments to his terminal building as they have been apparently closing some sections, to make way for a new terminal and he (James) has reflected that in this version. With that you can understand that James is keeping very strongly with reality and plans on future updates as they complete more of the new sections over the course of this year and next. The airport night lighting is excellent and you can even see in the Continental Airlines building over by runway 15/33, with the full-motion simulators through the east facing windows, especially at night. All of the buildings, terminal, gateways, and such sit on approximately 27 square miles of photorealistic ground area with hand-painted textures. It all blends much better with Lennart's "4-Season" textures installed, as James has rendered the surrounding area with textures that are a bit light in their green color, particularly if you're still using the default textures.
Downtown Houston is complete with the major buildings and streets (with moving traffic at night) correctly placed and accurately displayed. You can even see the neighboring buildings reflecting in one of the all glass towers, very interesting! The downtown section of Houston (as James has rendered it) looks even better at night. All James needs to add to make his scenery complete would be some static and dynamic aircraft and if you happen to have FSTraffic 2.1 then you can take care of this yourself! Overall, I really like James's work, particularly with what he's down to the downtown area and I give James a strong A minus (a minus only due to the lack of the static and dynamic aircraft)! ...Bear!
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