RealScene FS

By Andrew Herd (8 November 2000)

Part 2 of a series of reviews by Peter James and Andrew Herd

first came across Eddie Denney's scenery early in the year, when he began the mammoth task of uploading his freeware US mesh scenery to FlightSim.Com. The new scenery was a revelation - FS2000's angular hills were gone, replaced by gorgeous rolling landscapes. There was, of course, a price to pay: not only was the scenery a huge download, but it installed via scenery.cfg, with the result that there was a noticeable frame rate hit. Although Eddie ran the scenery on a modest Pentium, my judgement was that to use clouds and complex panels would be tempting fate on anything less than a 466 MHz machine. The other problem was that the scenery was only for the US, leaving the rest of us thinking 'If only!' Well now it is 'If only' time, because Eddie has released a new version of his scenery for FS2000, and if you buy the complete package, you can enjoy mesh scenery wherever you go. The bonus is that the scenery replaces FS2000's default terrain files, which means that the mesh is tightly integrated into Flight Simulator and runs at the fastest possible speed, although there is a noticeable performance hit, probably due to the more complex nature of the terrain FS2000 has to load.

The scenery comes in a two CD package if you opt to buy the complete scenery and there is an install routine that copies all the files you need into the correct directories without any need for user intervention. If you do not have autorun enabled on your PC, there are succinct instructions on the inside front label. The software makes backups of the original FS2000 scenery files and includes an unistall routine should you wish to remove the mesh, although it is necessary to manually delete quite a few files if you ever need to do this - instructions are included on the CD.

The first thing I noticed when I ran the scenery was that FS2000 GPF'd in style. I was running an early version and after some discussion with Eddie I downloaded an (80 Mb!) patch, I was up and running with no reliability issues at all. Only a few pioneering users are likely to experience this problem, and it was caused by a software bug which affected areas between the Prime Meridian and East 020, so if you never fly outside the US, you will not experience it. It is however, worth getting the patch if you are having problems and the eight files which comprise it can be found on FlightSim.Com.

The new scenery covers the vast majority of the world, with the exception of part of Alaska and an area in Switzerland, which are both affected by missing data in the original survey files. This means that you can fly through the Austrian passes, cross the Himalayas, admire the beauty of New Zealand's South Island and barnstorm the Norwegian fjords, all from the comfort of your own chair. If you are new to mesh scenery in Flight Simulator, you will notice a few things. First, a number of airports will appear either to be in depressions in the ground, or on top of slight hills, due to disagreements between the height Microsoft thinks the runway should be at, and the survey data on which the mesh is based. A few airfields have steep hills immediately at one end of the runway, and this is usually caused by the fact that FS2000 can't handle sloping runways - if the field is on a slope, the mesh will reflect it but FS2000 won't, and a hill blocking your take off is what you see. All these anomalies can be fixed using the flatten switch, if your favourite field is affected and Eddie supplies details of how to do this in the help files. The only other trouble I have come across so far is small depressions near coastlines. These pits are distracting to begin with but they are uncommon, only occur near the coast and you soon get used to them. Eddie says that they seem to be caused by missing survey data and he can't figure out how to cure them yet, but don't let them put you off, because the rest of the package is too good to let a minor detail like this get you down.

I decided to test the scenery with a series of flights, which will be posted on FlightSim.Com as part of this review. The first flight I made was from Sola in southern Norway to Tromso, in the north of the same country. The aircraft's track takes you over some of the most beautiful scenery in the world, becoming steadily more dramatic the farther north you fly. As it happened, I made the trip in some of the worst weather northern Europe had experienced this year, thanks to FSMeteo, and when I took the comparative screenshots I had to clear the skies up a bit - but as a fully paid up member of the Armchair Aviators Association, my conscience is clear (-:

For the curious among you, I used Arne Sundsbo, Svein Holbo and Charlotte Korsnes' Norway 2000 package, which is why the airports look different, and I flew in an SAS Fokker F50, by Rob Bennis, with a panel by Espen Oijordsbakken, reviewed here. Be cautious though, the panel is not for the fainthearted, and it doesn't have all the bugs out of it yet. I used ProFlight 2000 to generate an ATC adventure, and the flight was uneventful apart from high winds, rain, a good deal of turbulence, and the fact that I had to request a higher flight level to get out of cloud at my flight level.

Throughout the flight, where two screenshots are shown side by side, the screenshot on the right is the RealScene FS mesh and the screenshot on the left is the FS2000 default scenery. All the comparison screenshots were taken from the same position and altitude.

By now I hope you can appreciate why Peter James and I are so excited about this scenery. As I remarked when Eddie released his freeware scenery of the US, Microsoft can no longer hope to release the next version of Flight Simulator without mesh terrain; but Eddie has beaten them to the draw and I think his software is a 'must have' for flight simmers with adequately specced machines. I ran this review on a 733 MHz Pentium with 256 Mb of RAM. You can run the scenery with less memory, but there is a tendency for pauses to occur every ten minutes or so. My impression is that frame rates should be adequate on anything running at more than 400 MHz, but at the lower end of the range you may find that complex aircraft or weather will knock frame rates down to unacceptable levels.