Introduction The Eagle Soft Development group has been concentrating for some time now on the Cessna line of the corporate jet liner series. They have made an impressive selection of Cessna’s leading ships and from what I hear through the grapevine, they are currently working on more great add-ons. This review will encompass a detailed look at the Citation X for FS2004/2002. You can download the Citation X from the Eagle Soft main site http://www.eaglesoftdg.com. The download size is roughly 31 Megs and the cost is under 30 dollars. If you are on dial up this is still handled ok, but you will be in for a bit of a wait, as for DSL or cable modem folks this is a walk in the park down load. I’m not sure if they would send out a CD order I wasn’t able to find any offering of this on their main page. Well, what do you get for $27.95 USD? From the main web site I read the following claims to what the purchaser will get once they have completed the download. I systematically reviewed and tested each feature. Multiple animated surfaces including: So far it looks good, time to dig into this add on from a designers stand point and see how it measures up. Flight Model Right away when I consider a new Flight Simulation virtual aircraft purchase to expand my huge collection, I think of what I would like to fly and when I find it, I want to get into the flight model configuration file right off and see what the designers did that would impress me. Then I want to fly it with the real plane spec’s with me at all times during the testing period or time I spend flying a new acquisition. When I 1st flew the "Eaglesoft Citation X" I was mildly impressed, the air model does nothing out of the ordinary, its very smooth and very easy to fly, almost like a beginner air file. But this is how these planes fly in real life, they are pretty docile and so writing an air file to imitate the real deal would not be very hard for a seasoned designer. I liked flying the aircraft, it was very easy to manipulate on the taxi lanes and take offs and landings were very easy to do, as they would be for any good pilot flying the real Citation X. When the Citation X leaves the ground it will climb quickly and steadily to 20,000 ALT and then it is easily trimmed to level flight and setting up the autopilot will demonstrate the steadiness of the air model. It’s a pretty nice plane to fly, veteran, novice and beginner virtual fliers will enjoy this flight model since not very much will be demanded from them as they do whatever flights they do. Nothing really quirky ever happens with this flight model, its actually almost boring … I dare say. But that is true of the real thing as well.
As it is a small commuter jetliner this will change dramatically once you hit rough weather, then the size of the plane itself will let you know that it is still a full attention aircraft in bad weather. So hands on and watch those instruments closely to stay on course and get those wing anti-icing devices going. Landing in rough weather is a bit of a chore with this flight model as well. It is after all a small aircraft, so in all I would say I was somewhat pleased with this air file and I didn’t have to do any modifications to the air file as it was reasonably close to spec or as close as any designer would be able to get with the Fs9 game engine. I was pleased with this feature.
3D Model 3d is what I do for a living and as a hobby. It is the next thing I think of when I look at most models I would like to buy for my livery. The Citation X is a FSDS v2 model. This is a pretty good model all the way around. FSDS2 does build some pretty impressive models if I say so myself. The outer shell is very smooth and the attention to detail is good as well. The add-on exhibits reflective surfaces and the animations are smooth and precise; this is a trademark of FSDS v2 that I have become familiar with. The plane has a reasonable poly weight, I didn’t think it made a big impact on my PC’s FR and there didn’t seem to be any cracks or misaligned parts anywhere on the model, so exteriorly speaking, it is done very well. Moving into the interior, the modeling is done in here pretty good too. The detail is good and the animated parts are all smooth and as real as they would be in a real Citation X. Nice work on the window ledges and other areas where most designers would fudge a bit to save on polies. As I mentioned before, the detailing is pretty good in a modeling aspect, I like the VC. Moving to the rear passenger deck, the detailing in the modeling is very well done here as well. The seats are modeled well to the photo textures and so the textures fit the modeled parts very well, thus adding good realism. The windows of the passenger deck are cut out nicely and provide a good view out if you slew your viewpoint to that position. Adding to the fun is a passenger. It’s a good touch, but a good touch on the Poly count as well. On some machines this could be the backbreaker, adding this many polies as a non-essential feature is a risky venture, so if your machine starts to bog down, this is probably where it is coming from. Outside of this, the passenger is animated well with moving head and arms and is fun to look at, on my machine this never effected me at all, I even cracked the Mdl and took out the passenger and I did notice a small jump in frame rates to the positive but on my machine it wasn’t very noticeable (I do have a pretty fast machine) so I didn’t worry over it too much.
The VC isn’t as dynamic as I would have liked, this is the downfall of using FSDS v2. FSDS v2 doesn’t accommodate the better dynamic features that GMX can. FS9 was setup to utilize GMAX, so all of the weather effects and dragable levers and other very cool stuff that FS9 does, isn’t possible in this plane. I hope that this will be a possibility for FSDS v2 in the future as it’s a great little program, but alas as it is now, its just not possible. On the plus side, this does make it a good FR plane for lower or mid range computers. For me this wouldn't matter much, I don’t mind the add-on the way it is, however, you the customer may feel otherwise. Virtual Cabin The Virtual Cabin of the Citation X is as I mentioned before, is a very well modeled and detailed work. I found it to be very accurate in details such as the seats, they look right. The console is laid out properly and all in all it is pretty realistic. Viewpoint wise, this is a very easy add-on to look out of as well as around inside. Taxing from virtual interior camera mode is pretty decent and I was quite pleased. Clicking the Avionics, (yes you can click all of the gauges you could in the 2D panel within vc mode) and setting up inflight adjustments is a breeze in this add-on, it is very well done. 2D Panel The 2D panel is a photo-realistic representation of the real thing; good visibility out of it is possible. It exhibits full 360-degree views, also a full livery of excellent pop up panels that have all of the avionics to do inflight adjustments on the fly. By using the number keys, they flip up or down instantly as you need them. One oddity for me, was when I went to 2D panel mode, all of the pop-ups were there all at once. This made it a necessity to manually knock them down one at a time, which wasn’t a big deal. All in all, I was quite happy with the quality of the panel set up. It was functional and was working in good order for me throughout the test. I liked it a lot.
Sound In any add-on, I like a good set of sounds. When you get the Citation X, this is a feature that they have done well. The engine sounds are done very well. I liked the voice gauging, a good realistic touch here. I like good attention to detail like this, it just makes a good add-on that much better. Good Virtual First Officer Call Outs & Honeywell GPWS Call Outs are abundant in this add on, it’s a great job done here. Very cool! Avionics and Guages There is a lot of good work done here on this add-on. Good research would be needed to get the most out of all that this add-on has in its Avionic functionability. In this area it was done well, do some studying to get the most out of this avionic setup. It works well under all circumstances and is very accurate. I set up a pretty intense flying exercise with this add-on where I had to fly a vast distance over water, hit numerous waypoints and then land on a old deserted airfield in Western Canada. It worked bang-on just using the avionics. Easy you say? Maybe. The point is the avionic suite in this add-on worked perfectly. That is a pretty good accomplishment in itself. Avionic design is a tedious and laborious task to begin with and then to test and make sure it all works right. Well lets just say it all works right, I’m happy with it.
Textures Nowadays, there is not that many designers that can texture from scratch and get it as real as a real Photo "cut and pasted" onto a part. What the common thing for most flight-sim designers to do, is to take real pictures and then build the parts to fit the pictures. Then simply "map and paste" the texture in place. This does save time I admit, but isn’t very hard to do. This seems to be the way that most teams are heading these days. I’m fine with this as long as the mapped size is of the right size to maintain the detail of the photo. In this add-on the aforementioned procedure looks like the way they went. The interiors look very real, like cut from a picture, and exterior textures, outside of logos, are well done. If done from scratch, whoever did them did a good job. Although these corporate jets are not at all hard to paint, there is a good quality to these textures, so the overall look of the project is well done and works out well with the dynamic shimmer and tinted glass. Conclusion At the end of this test, I would say this is a fine product that anyone would like to have in his or her hangar.
It isn’t as featured as other offerings from Eaglesoft due to the use of FSDS v2, but it is still a good well designed and functional add-on. It flies nicely with great ground manners, awesome call-outs and some interesting additional features that are a good touch. Because this was not as "featured" as some other products by Eaglesoft, I could not give this add-on as high a mark as the Citation II. The lack of a fully functional VC is the only reason I could go no higher in my assessment of this product. This doesn’t mean this is a bad unit to get; it is a great add-on, but as it sits today, it’s in need of a dynamic VC upgrade to get it on par with other top offerings on the simulation add-on market. |
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