Introduction Welcome to New Zealand. From the world, which brought the spectacular Middle Earth scenery of the epic blockbuster Lord Of The Rings trilogy, comes Christian Stock and Roger Smith’s MSFS New Zealand. New Zealand covers a landmass of over 266,200sq km of pristine landscapes on two main Islands, each with they’re own unique and amazing characteristics, of vast mountain chains, volcanoes, lush rainforests, coastlines and deeply indented fiords. This exquisitely detailed combination package gives MSFS a New Zealand it so richly deserves To be thorough, I downloaded a New Zealand tourist map to familiarize myself with the scenic highlights and spent a few hours flying the default scenery attempting to find them with little success. I had no trouble at all finding these geographical treasures after installing the RBE – New Zealand Add-on scenery. Installation and Documentation Installation of my CD version; which includes the RBE - MSFS 20m Mesh Scenery; RBE - MSFS Topo Scenery; and an updated Landclass version, was fairly straightforward and simple. The CD will open an installer, which includes separate install wizards for each program as well as the included manuals. Before proceeding with the installation, I read over the two manuals. These manuals are 7 pages each, are easy to read and follow overview and pre-installation tips. Removal (and you’ll want to do this anyway) of any previously installed New Zealand meshes as well as a quick check of the MSFS fs9.cfg and scenery.cfg files, will avoid any conflicts. Honestly, I’ve never checked these files before and this was a simple step as outlined in the manual. My system required no further adjustments and the Install wizards, with a complete or custom option, installed the files to my FS9 addon scenery folder with the options I selected. A further step of Add Scenery to the MSFS scenery library is required and also outlined in the manual. Even if RBE – New Zealand is your first add-on scenery program, this is a simple typical installation for a scenery add-on.
My Virtual Flight Starting out my VFR flight of this immensely diverse landscape, I chose the Capital City of Wellington with a plan in mind to fly the North Island first. Just off from Wellington, it was strikingly obvious the visual addition of the 20 m Mesh Scenery that I was going to be making a lot of diversions on my flight. I would probably end up pushing my freshly re-painted Aeroworx King Air past its envelope in those turns to take a second look. There is a vast amount of area covered throughout New Zealand, and I found myself continuously wandering off my flight plan with a choice of over 350 airstrips, including private farm airstrips and some in very remote accessible locations. Whether it was the installation choice of rural or urban roads, I tended to follow the numerous river systems only to change course again to follow detailed railway tracks.
This exceptional scenery package is a true diamond for your scenery collection. With simple variations in MSFS weather and time settings, there is a realism in this add-on that I have yet to experience as a whole with any other scenery in my collection. Flying this picturesque landscape in dawn or dusk lighting settings, enhances the experience with the additional shading and lighting. Some of my personal favorite flights were started out from Greymouth, following the coastline and the Southern Alps of New Zealand heading to Mt. Cook or Queenstown. Unfortunately, this scenery does not support beaches with animated waves and designer Christian Stock chose not to further delay packaging the RBE – New Zealand Scenery by attempting to sort out the limits of MSFS technology.
This New Zealand scenery has also inspired several airport scenery add-ons, both freeware and payware, to compliment this package. I would expect several more in the future. A simple New Zealand search in your favorite site such as AVSIM, Windowlight, NZ Paintshop, will find an addition of your choice. Unlike some scenery add-ons that attempt to over add autogen scenery, the New Zealand Mesh and Topo Scenery is kept in check and what we have here is an impression of the true untamed New Zealand. This makes for a unique unexplored type of flying experience. Bring Your Camera Following my downloaded tourist map, I spent more time pausing to look around and take screen shots of the New Zealand highlights. I find myself flying with this product more than any other scenery add-on in my collection.
Technical Stuff This top quality Mesh and Topo Scenery is based on geographical vector and elevation data from a LINZ (Land Information New Zealand) national mapping authority data set, provided by GeographX Ltd. The data has a detail of 1:50,000 ;a horizontal accuracy of 20m and a vertical accuracy of 10m making this dataset extremely accurate. Additionally the LINZ data set has been completely scanned not once, but twice, and errors have been removed to ensure the highest degree of quality possible. By default, MSFS does not allow you to use meshes of such a high resolution and downgrades them internally. Enabling the 20m high resolution mesh requires the FS9.1 patch for FS2004. Performance
As completely impressive as this product is, even more impressive is the performance. The recommended system specifications are: 2GHz processor, 512 MB RAM, a mid-range graphics card (e.g., Nvidia Geforce 4 Ti), and 550 MB of hard disk space. CPU power and main memory are only secondary for this scenery. A mid level system will run this product just fine. I experienced no impact on frame rates at all with max MSFS settings for my desired display running several add-on aircraft, traffic and weather all simultaneously. The only thing slowing down my incredible New Zealand flight sim experience was my constant pausing to have a look around this marvelous scenery and take a screen shot. From the Red Baron Entertainment Website: Quote from Dave Walley, Chief Pilot - Check and Training Westpac Rescue Helicopter Trust " We use the Red Baron Entertainment NZ scenery from GeographX Ltd in the Auckland Rescue Helicopter Trust helicopter simulator. It enables us to accurately fly ‘virtually’ to any destination in our operational area, and know that the coastlines, mountains, lakes, roads and even power pylons are in the correct place. This is extremely useful in training for real life situations, where the terrain might otherwise only be known by reference to two dimensional maps. We are currently trialing use of the very accurate mesh as a preflight aid to real missions, again as a means of gaining knowledge literally of the lay-of-the-land. Great technology."
Adding It Up Well to sum it up, as true to life as this RBE – New Zealand Combo compares, so does the statement "you get what you pay for. Diamonds don’t come cheap, so if the 60EUR Combo price tag was enough to scare you off like me at first, it was only moments into my flight that my quest for realism was realized with the quality of this package. There is a real value here with the area covered and variety of terrains New Zealand has to offer. I found myself straying away from my long distance high altitude flights and returning to the enjoyable VFR scenic tours that hooked me to MSFS. This is a premium package that I keep returning to, even choosing simpler and slower general aircraft for my flights. This package also offers me a new dimension to hone my flight simming skills. |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
