Hi Everyone:After buying the Hong Kong 2004 video real scenery by Flight Soft, I thought I'd give some feedback for the forum members in case there are some of you thinking about buying it.First of all, if I was to score the overall quality and detail, it would get an 90/100. It is excellent in its detail of the high-rise buildings in Hong Kong and Kowloon islands and the old Kai Tak airport. The night scenery is even more amazing and the lights of the highrises are quite breath-taking. There are many pre-set scenic flights which one can choose from "select a flight" menu in FS2004 and the documentation is very good, explaining how to approach Kai Tak from various points.Now the bad parts - the scenery seems to include ONLY the high-rise buildings and some of the low buildings like the Chinese shops and port buildings but there are many empty spaces between the high-rises with nothing but a ground texture which looks like "flattened-out" houses or other street scenery. So you get large areas of nothing but flat empty city in many places. Also the elevation mesh for the surround mountains is truly horrible. The mountains have these pointy peaks which look more like FS98 or 2000 quality scenry than it does like the amazing scenery that 2004 is known for with complex peaks etc... and my details setting for MIP MAPPING, texture etc... are on high (except MM which is set to 4). Suffice to say that my other SRTM 76M meshes look great so the problem is with Hong Kong 2004.Also, the other airport - the new Chek Lap Kok (now replacing Kai Tak as VHHH) - also looks really primitive. No gates to speak of - just parking spots marked by yellow lines in front of the terminal buildings. Yet the Kai Tak terminal looks great so they obviously did not put much work into the new airport, even though I got an official email from FlightSoft saying that they DID include the new airport (which is outside of Hong Kong's main centre) in their scenery.In any case, I would still recommend this scenery because the buildings and the detail which went into them is truly great. But, for $39.95 US, the price is too high for a single city and for that price, I would expect the above mesh and empty space areas to be corrected.John

Your feedback is typical of many, John .... Kai Tak pretty good (excepting that the checkerboard is out of scale), tall buildings cool, but CLK an abomination! I haven't tried it myself, though; I never get any answers from Flightsoft when I write with queries.I'd be interested to know how the scenery works with other add-ons, though. Have you tried Thomas Kwong's CLK, for a start? Eddie Chen's FS2004 autogen? And SRTM mesh for Hong Kong?Check them out at my site, below. Let us know if you try any mixes, thanks.Mark "Dark Moment" Beaumonthttp://www.swiremariners.com/newlogo.jpg

Hi Mark,I was just thinking along the same lines actually - trying a Hong Kong (or general area) mesh to see if it is compatible with HK2004. I have a feeling it is not, but mesh are very easily uninstalled so it's worth a try.I do have a CKL airport from someone but don't remember who. I gave this a higher priority over HK2004 and did not see any differences in the terminal buildings (i.e. they still have no boarding gates stretching out to the planes).I'll be trying the mesh (if I can find one) and let you know.John

<<<>>>The best mesh for Hong Kong is linked from my site (just my opinion, but I've tried them all and I did live there for many years). In fact, everything for Hong Kong is at my site, excepting aircraft: I limit the site to Cathay Pacific for the most part, as that's really what it's all about.Mark "Dark Moment" Beaumonthttp://www.swiremariners.com/newlogo.jpg

There is a freeware Kai Tak out there by Roger Mole and IIRC it is work in progress.I have installed it but it has a big impact on frame rates. Sat at the end of rwy 31 looking towards the checker board I have FPS in single figures and even pulling my dispaly sliders back quite a lot there is very little improvement.If you want to try it vhhxv4v1.zip at www.flightsim.comIn the 'readme' Roger says he created it as a tribute to John Consterdine (sp?)

I installed Thomas Kwong's CHEK LAP KOK scenery and AFCAD2 file and it works perfectly with the Hong Kong 2004 scenery by FlightSoft. Except for one little anomaly: the progressive taxi lines (in pink) are not showing up at all on the pavement.I am just downloading the Hong Kong mesh now. I had not gone directly to your site until now actually. I had found Thomas Kwong's CLK from avsim or flightsim last week but for some reason, had not found the Hong Kong mesh.I'll let you how the mesh "meshes" with the HK2004 by FlightSoft.John

Hi again Mark,Hope you will read these and also all of you who are interested in purchasing Hong Kong 2004 scenery:I tried the mesh from your website for Hong Kong and it simply won't activate with Flight Soft's HK2004 payware. The mountains do not change at all. I tried to "de-activate" a couple of FlightSoft's BGL files to see if they are the cause but to no avail. When one looks at Flight Soft's Hong Kong, you actually realize that they do NOT have a mesh at all! The names of the bgl files are things like "buildings, objects, afcad, 3dobjects ..." and the larges BGL file by size is 1.9MB. When I renamed this file to ...bgl.OLD, all the scenery disappeared - buildings, airports etc... and only the mountains left over from the correct mesh I downloaded from your site (via link to AVSIM actually) was left! I tried renaming a couple of other BGL files and no change.It seems that Flight Soft did not do any accurate rendering of the Hong Kong area by using a mesh (at least a 76M would have been expected and even a 38M for the price they're charging for it). I think those BGL files are just "objects" and the mountains, while correctly placed and more or less the correct height at their peaks, are just OBJECTS, not SRTM mesh!I send Flight Soft a feedback blasting them for their ridiculous landclass (while also praising them for their amazing buildings).*sigh* ... maybe there is a chance they'll issue and upgrade.John

Hoi John,Your description of the new Hongkong scenery reminds me of the good old days in which we flew the famous checkerboard approach to runway 13 of old Kai Tak Intl.Doesnot any softwarehouse grab the opportunity to rewrite this approach, incorporated with all modern scenery features that FS 2004 nowadays offers!? It would undoubtly become a bestseller. Now we are overflying a sad and empty Kai Tak with rwy 13 closed for traffic !Kind regards,Paddy

JohnWhat about the landclass and extra autogen on my site? Have you tried THOSE with Flightsoft's scenery?<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>Paddy, you may not have been reading closely enough. Kai Tak is what we're talking about here. You can install Flightsoft's payware Kai Tak, as we have been discussing; you can install Roger Mole's freeware FS2004 Kai Tak; or you can use Thomas Kwong's freeware FS2002 Kai Tak in FS2004.Certainly, there's no need to fly default with a closed runway!Click on my banner below to learn more about Hong Kong in FS2004.Mark "Dark Moment" Beaumonthttp://www.swiremariners.com/newlogo.jpg

Hello Mark,Returning from holidays, I found your message concerning above mentioned subject.You are quite right! I was rather shortsighted at that time and did not look further than my noselength ( as we use to say it in Holland)So I rushed to your website (nice music, nice photographs!) and downloaded Roger Mole's FS 2004 Kai Tak. Having still all nav and approach plates of Kai Tak, I find myself back in the good old days.I owe you a big thank you very much for your reprimand and your hint to the solution !!Kind regards,Paddy

As you now have Roger Mole's scenery Paddy I would be interested in what frame rates you get and what plane you were using.You to Mark if you have flown into VHXX with Roger's scenery.Rgds

Vulcan,I will be off for a few days, but hope to be back coming weekend.After an ample testflight I will certainly inform you about the results of approaching rwy 13 of "good old Kai Tak" with this add-on scenery.Cheers,Paddy

I too am afan of Hong Kong and old KaiTak having spent a few years there as a child. I have also got the Flightsoft Hong Kong package for FS2002 and was very dissapointed...it too featured mere pointy polygons for mountains and sparse, rather overscale buildings. The harbour was quite nice with the static Star Ferries (shame they weren't animated!) and their terminals, and the buildings over on Hong Kong island looked pretty good. It only cost a fiver in Game so I can't really complain too much!!Roger Moles' rendition is very nice indeed but it does suffer terribly from a frame-rate issue. I have found that looking around the apron, the area that causes the sudden drops is actualy where the fire-station is located, and there are some rather alarming 'holes' in the apron that you can fall through, so there may be a memory leak in this section. Such a shame because the airport and surroundings are brilliant!Hopefully he'll fix these issues but it has been this way for a while now with no updates so he may be busy elsewhere.

I too found the frame rate drops around the apron, but thankfully didn't find the holes :-).I wondered if the textures of the planes were causing the FPS drop and did email Roger if he had any suggestions but never got a reply, pity really because it is nice scenery.

I also own FlightSoft's HONG KONG 2004 and found that the old Kai Tak looked bland and not too great-with HONG KONG 2004 it was vibrant looking and the buildings looked very Hong Kong style-some had Manadrin/Cantonese/Japanese style lettering, which looks beautiful at dawn, flying around some harbours not that far from Kai Tak were breath taking and a good improvement on the default scenery. I flew around for a while-the countryside looked like as if you were actually flying around Hong Kong and after a short while, we landed a another airport that had a very colorful looking terminal. Overall, it was an impressive improvement on the HK scenery compared to the not so good Microsoft's default HK scenery. Also I own their Fly to Hawaii (for FS2002), that I haven't tried in 2004 yet. What I tested the scenery on:Pentium 4 2.40GHz (C1 stepping-533FSB)Jetway 845GDML mobo10.0GB Samsung HD256mb RAMJetway FX5200 128MBForceware 56.72 driversWindows XP ProFlight Simulator 2004-ARNZ ATR 72 (I used the default C208 in FS2004 for my evaluation)-FlightSoft's HONG KONG 2004 -FlightSoft's Fly to Hawaii-All display settings at max. levelFinally, the scenery didn't affect the frame rate much and was still playable with maxed out graphics quality-about 22fps locked at 30fps