Introduction The first volume in the VFR Real Scenery series, for Southeast England, was covered last summer by AVSIM staff reviewer David Rogers. In this review, I will be looking at the last two volumes in the series. Vol. 3, Wales and Southwest England, “covers all of Wales, Cornwall and Devon and parts of Somerset, Dorset, Herefordshire, Worcestershire and Cheshire,” including the towns of “Truro, Plymouth, Exeter, Barnstaple, Taunton, Weymouth, Bristol, Cardiff, Swansea, Aberystwyth, Caernarfon, Shrewsbury, Hereford, and Chester.” Vol. 4, Northern England, “covers all of Yorkshire, Lancashire, Greater Manchester, Durham, Northumberland and Cumbria and parts of Merseyside, Derbyshire and Humberside,” including the towns of “Sheffield, Leeds, Bradford, Doncaster, Hull, Manchester, Liverpool, Lancaster, Kendal, Carlisle, Newcastle, Middlesbrough and York.”
Before we go further, let’s be clear about what the product is and is not. Even though I just named a bunch of towns, VFR Real Scenery does not add 3D landmarks to the landscape, and it is recommended that you turn off autogen altogether. The default objects (such as airport buildings) will still be there, but at ground level the absence of autogen will make everything look flatter. It is not really a product for tubeliners, either. While it can be used for IFR, it is best enjoyed from small planes and helicopters. What is it then? Unlike the default scenery, which uses a variety of generic scenery tiles to represent what a given location ought to look like (based on whether it is urban or rural, arid or humid, etc.), VFR Real Scenery displays aerial photographs of the real landscape, stretched over a high-definition model of the underlying terrain. Because the photographs usually have shadows, the result looks three-dimensional, even without autogen. There is also more variety: even in agricultural regions, there are no two fields that look exactly the same, so that when you fly into a new region, you won’t see a new arrangement of familiar objects, but something entirely unique. Installation and Documentation
A map, shown here, details how the series is divided into four volumes. For this review, I installed two volumes, covering the north and west. Each volume comes on two DVD's (one of which is double-sided) and includes a brief, 16-page user’s manual. This explains how to install the software and gives recommended settings for Flight Simulator. Autogen should be turned off completely, because it won’t match the underlying ground scenery. Scenery complexity is also supposed to be turned down to “very sparse” for the same reason, but I ignored this recommendation and didn’t notice any serious conflicts; maybe it’s because I was flying in primarily rural areas (or over cities which are not highly developed in Flight Simulator), but I would suggest that you at least try this slider at your normal setting. The installation process will be faster or slower, depending on the speed of your hardware. When you are done, you will want to defragment your hard drive (or at least the Just Flight sub folder, which is under “Program Files”). There is an option, if you are low on hard disk space, to install a lower-resolution version of the scenery, which ought to look pretty good (compared with what was possible a few years ago), but will have half as much detail as the standard version. I didn’t try the low-res option, although I can imagine that it might be useful on a laptop (provided that the laptop was powerful enough to run FSX in the first place; most aren’t). Charts are not included, which is common for Europe-based scenery products, even ones that are marketed for VFR. Unlike U.S. charts, most of which can be reproduced free of charge, European charts have to be licensed, and that adds to the cost of a product. Getting the correct charts, if you don’t live in Europe, is possible if you’re willing to pay for overseas shipping. A decent compromise, if you live in North America, is Operational Navigation Chart E-1; this covers all of the U.K. at a scale of 1:1,000,000 (which is half the scale of a VFR sectional) and costs about US$10 with shipping. Of course, if you live in Europe you will want to get the full-scale charts.
Image Quality For photographic ground scenery, the main determinant of image quality is the photo source: whether it was taken from a satellite or airplane (aerial photos are generally sharper and more detailed), whether it was taken in clear weather or hazy, whether it was taken with good equipment by a competent operator, and what form the photographs are delivered in. For VFR Real Scenery, the photo source is identified as GeoPerspectives, a commercial supplier of aerial photography for all of England and Wales. In a project this big, some variation is to be expected, in clarity or color.
On the whole, though, I never detected any bad-focus shots, and color banding (which results when you join footage from two different shoots or takes) was minimal.
As delivered by GeoPerspectives, the photos have a resolution of 25 centimeters per pixel; which is to say, that the smallest object you can see in the source photographs is about one foot. After processing by Just Flight, this resolution is reduced to 1 meter per pixel; which is to say, that the smallest object you can see in the finished scenery is about one yard. Any smaller than that and it probably will not be distinguishable from neighboring objects, even if it’s a different color.
This is a massive improvement over what was possible in the previous version of the sim, and if you care at all about what the ground looks like while you are flying -- you might not if you fly mainly tubeliners -- the improvement is evident right away. In FS2004, the maximum resolution was 5 meters per pixel, which meant that you couldn’t make out objects smaller than fifteen feet. Where you really notice the difference is close to ground level. In FS2004, photoscenery looked blotchy under 2,000 feet above ground level (AGL); and for best results, you wanted to fly even higher. Now you can fly under 1,000 feet AGL and the ground textures will still look sharp. Theoretically, it’s possible to make scenery for FSX that’s even more detailed (with objects visible as small as 7 cm), and in the next year we’ll see products that take advantage of this extra capability. But those products will not likely be large-scale photo sceneries, because that much detail, multiplied by thousands of square kilometers, would consume massive amounts of disk space (and place higher burden on our already heavy-laden CPUs). We’ll get there someday, but not this year and probably not next year either. That’s ok: what we have now is already very good.
Is it as good or better than the competition, VFR Generation X by Horizon? This question has been addressed by other reviewers, with comparison screenshots. Since I don’t have the Horizon products, I can’t add much to the discussion. On one point, at least, there is general agreement: the Horizon scenery has brighter, more saturated colors. Whether the Horizon colors are too bright, or the Just Flight colors are too dull, is not an easy question to answer. On the one hand, it’s a cop-out to say that’s all just personal preference, because if that were really true, then reviews like this one would be useless. At the same time, one’s notion of what England and Wales look like from the air varies according to which areas one has seen, in what season, at what time of day, under what weather conditions, and whether it was a dry year or a wet one.
Presumably, someone with a lot of experience, in various flying conditions, could make a definitive judgement. I don’t have that experience, so I fall back on a phrase from Shakespeare. “Rich, not gaudy”: that’s how I would describe the colors in VFR Real Scenery. By “rich,” I mean varied with tints and shades. For example, I have had on my desktop for the last two weeks a screenshot of the Nantlle Valley in northern Wales. The dominant color is green, but how many greens are there? More than I have names for -- and that’s what I mean by “rich.” Beyond Image Quality What else, besides image quality, makes a good photoscenery? Like nearly all such products, VFR Real Scenery has only one season, spring; again, that is standard. At night, lighting will be visible on major roads and in towns; this is a common feature for this type of add-on, but not quite standard, and I am glad we have it here. As mentioned earlier, there is no autogen, but there is a higher-than-default terrain mesh (10m vs. 76m); in my experience, the effect of this is less noticeable in the mountains than in the plains, where it can be seen giving a 3D look to highway overpasses, hedgerows, and even bridges (where I’m not sure the effect is really wanted, since it makes the water bulge upward).
As with other photo sceneries, default roads are disabled throughout the coverage area and replaced by images of the real motorways (including whatever vehicles happened to be on the road when the photographs were taken). Moving traffic, though, is not disabled and follows the same roadways as in the default sim. At airports, there is a potential for two kinds of problems, both of them minor. The first problem arises because of the more detailed mesh, and results in the airport looking slightly elevated above its surroundings. This is a common problem with terrain mesh, for which there is a known workaround, but as of this writing only one developer that I know of, FS Genesis, has actually implemented it in commercial products. The second potential problem is runways and taxiways that are slightly misplaced in the default sim, and which therefore show up in the wrong place over the photographic ground textures. To fix this is a big job: it is necessary to hand-edit the default runways and taxiways, so that they match with the underlying scenery, and that has been done with good results; the match is not always perfect, but it seems to be as good as we can expect, short of recreating the whole airport.
One special challenge of photoscenery products is water. Photographs will, of course, include water in them, but they won’t act like water in the sim. That is, you won’t be able to land on them with a floatplane and they won’t shimmer, reflect light, or carry boat traffic. Trouble is, carving out simulated water so that it matches the photograph is a painstaking task. In the packages that I have reviewed in the last couple of years, I have see it done well, relatively well, and hardly at all. In this package, it is done well. There is a nice effect, which is new to FSX, whereby the image of whatever rapids, foam, or boat wake happened to be on the water when the source photograph was taken is superimposed on the reflective surface of simulated water.
That effect isn’t unique to this product, but the matching of photograph and shorelines is carefully done, so that the illusion of real water is preserved and even enhanced. It must have been the work of many hours. The one thing that did seem to be missing was boat traffic on the inland waterways. You do see boat traffic, for example, in the mouth of the Severn, but once you move inland it seems to disappear. I noticed this in another product I reviewed earlier this year, which was also based on photoscenery, and constructed on a similar scale; I don’t know the explanation, but the problem doesn’t seem to be unique to this product. Performance
Unless they include autogen, which this one doesn’t, photo-sceneries tend to have better frame rates than other types of scenery, because there’s less for the rendering engine to calculate. Expect, then, to get better frame rates than you would have had for the same area in the default sim. On the other hand, photo-sceneries are more prone than other types of scenery to blurring. This is a limitation in Flight Simulator, not a defect in the add-on, and while FSX has a new format for photo sceneries (which this product does take advantage of), the new format does not seem -- on my system at least, to result in fewer blurries -- although it does use less disk space. With my hardware, I had the best results (meaning, the clearest ground textures) when I stayed under 150 knots. This isn’t to say that you can’t fly faster (or, using slower hardware, that you will be able to fly at the same speed without blurries); it all depends on your system and how it is tuned. I noticed that when I did go faster (up to, say, 230 knots), the blurries would clear up if I maintained a more or less constant speed. Again, this has nothing or almost nothing to do with the scenery product, and everything to do with the rendering engine in Flight Simulator; my impression is that it calculates what it will need to display based on your current ground speed. When that ground speed goes up (or down, when you reduce speed for approach), it seems to recalculate its priorities, and if the calculations remain valid, the scenery will come into focus again at the new speed. At least, that is my impression after several hours of testing, and then checking my impressions against another product that I reviewed earlier this year.
Bottom line: this product will perform about as well as other products in its class (i.e., photo-sceneries with no autogen). Conclusion Volumes in the VFR Real Scenery series are 22 Pounds each or 75 Pounds for the whole four-volume set. I had been waiting for this product a long time. As a college student, I lived in England for about a year and traveled as much I could; I left the island only with regret, vowing one day to return. I have done that only once so far in the real world, but with this add-on scenery, it has been possible to revisit many of the trails that I hiked in my college days, but from the air now instead of the ground.
In preparation for this review, I planned my routes so that I could see as much of the coverage area as possible, but there were many places which my routes did not reach to; and of course the places that one has seen already was not exhausted by a single viewing. This is beautiful scenery to fly over, and the more you see of it, the more you look forward to seeing it again. |
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