VFR Real Scenery

I wandered lonely as a Cloud, That floats on high o'er Vales and Hills. The classic writings of Wordsworth one of the greatest poets that England has ever seen. The green and pleasant land that drifts seamlessly across the whole country could not be more finely described as by the words of this man. From the white cliffs of Dover to Hadrian's wall, mile after mile of unspoilt beauty, rolling hills, lakes, fields of golden corn and acre on acre of forestry.

We have seen the simulator scenery change drastically over the years, when things were simpler, a giant blue blob which was supposed to portray a lake, a stick with prongs making its way in the virtual world as a tree, oh dear, but life is not as bad these days. We have the technology, we certainly have the design forethought to bring together packages which make and give the virtual world a much more realistic viewpoint.

For many real world pilots, the use of VFR (visual flight rules) gives much more enjoyment then the FL300 brigade! We need to be able to pick out landmarks, we want to see the monuments, we crave for exciting city panoramas. With this latest release from Just Flight, it might just be the case that at last we have what before we only dreamed about.

Just Flight and Infoterra Ltd have teamed up to bring the first volume in what will eventually be a four disk set. South East England, including Kent, known as the Garden of England is the first of these releases. The latest technology using state of the art aerial images, brings the whole area alive, this really is what you would, and, do see, when flying over the area.

Many pilots in the UK learn to fly using VFR and by this token never before on such a level as this been as possible as it is now. The art of flying this way means you do not have to use complicated instruments for guidance and navigation, sit back with a cup of tea (virtually of course) grab a map of the area you would like to visit and mark off a few landmarks to help you on your way. The rest as we say is pure indulgence. Sunday mornings in front of the PC have not been this good since Astraboy.com started, sorry I divulge! NO seriously this is as good as it gets and as real too if you can pardon the pun, which has been used more than once before.

Lets take a look at the package we are presented with, first you get two disks in the set one contains a mesh upgrade, more on this later.

The main disk is straight forward in installation nothing to worry about at all, you must have a DVD-ROM drive which most users will have these days on their systems. Options also come as to which type of scenery you would like installed although this can be changed later, selecting 2m over the 1m will be more space saving, but the reduction in quality is that minimal you may not even notice.

The South East of England volume covers a substantial area, including all Greater London, Kent. Sussex, Essex, Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, parts of Hertfordshire, Bedfordshire, Buckinghamshire, Surrey and west Sussex. That is quite an area but there is more, the towns covered include Canterbury, Folkstone, Dover, Brighton, London, Basildon, Colchester, Ipswich, Norwich, Cambridge, Peterborough, Luton and Watford. A massive area with much to discover.

The beauty of this package is no matter when you fly be it day or night it all comes with a superb resolution, delivering quality night lighting and glistening water effects.

No matter what kind of scenery you require at the end of the day it all boils down to the system specifications on your PC, the more power you have the better for programs such as this to run alongside your flight activities, if your system is slightly low than you will have to make the relevant setting changes in the sim to bring it to a standard you and your PC can cope with.

One interesting fact with this scenery package is, that when installed into FSX it actually runs quicker than the default scenery! Now that is one claim that really pricks up the ears! But it does seem to be true, the way this is done in layman's terms are by overlaying the whole of the default scenery with a carpet, the carpet being the VFR package. Because its produced in a single piece there are no joins, so nothing to interrupt your processor when trying to define the next area to fly over, clever hey!

Lets take a look at the mesh, a second disk has been provided to upgrade the mesh at specific points throughout volume 1. A nice touch, as having spent so much time developing this product nothing has been left to chance in release. Another quick point for reference is that the main delay was due to Microsoft releasing their new operating system, Vista. Real VFR is compatible with this new system which means no messy patches to download over the coming months.

Here is some techie stuff and do not ask me to explain how this works but it does and it’s good, and, well read on!

When you start to look at how all this data is collected and transformed into what we see, I guess we could do with the Discovery channel making a program on it, for most this will not matter since they see the sights above and around the area where they live.

For others it’s a pretty ingenious system that allows us to view the realism.

In FS2004 4.8m was the best level that could be obtained for scenery, in the FSX that has been shrunk to a minute 1m, now what that means is that each individual dot on the image represents one square metre on the ground. So you can imagine already how clear and exact this new scenery is compared to what we have used previously. That is not all, mesh has a big impact on the whole picture, so where does this lye in the scheme of things? Well the default mesh used in FSX is a whopping 76m between each reference point, what VFR has achieved is bring this down to a solitary 9.6m. The same applies as above when I told you about the scenery coverage, so in this case smaller is better, just do not tell the wife that!

As we progress through these early days of FSX, developers, publishers are all hard at work finding solutions to questions that have concerned many over the last few months. It seems that Just Flight has done the hard slog and put the time and effort into another masterpiece of programming. Its no accident that they keep providing quality software for the Flight Simulator market and aslong as we have the quality like this it will guarantee a very rosy future for all fans worldwide.

Wordsworth started this and he should end it too,

 

For oft when on my chair I sit

In vacant or in pensive mood,

As aircraft flash upon that inward eye

Which is the bliss of solitude,

And then my heart with pleasure doth see,

My one and only VFR Scenery

 

Alright, alright, you get my meaning. If you are a VFR flyer than go get this now, stunning quality and scenery that actually speeds up your sim! Now that is something to tell the grand children.