Things-To-Come Alaska Cinematic Volume 1 For FS2004

By Andrew Herd (12 May 2006)

laska Cinematic is the product of a new partnership between Richard Goldstein, Raimondo Taburet, Peter McLeland and Things-To-Come, a relatively new publisher on the FS scene, best known for the quirky but diverting Lunar Pilot package. The product we have under review here is the first in what promises to be a series of Alaskan photographic sceneries, and if AC1 is anything to go by, we are in for a treat, particularly as Richard Goldstein has dropped a broad hint that some Georender airports might be produced for the area in the near future.

The boxed version comes in a DVD-style case containing a CD - there is no printed manual, but installation is a straight forward matter of sticking the disk in the drive and following the prompts, the only complication being that it is necessary to manually add the scenery area into the FS scenery library before it will appear. This shouldn't faze anyone as full instructions are provided and nothing complicated is involved.

Hardware requirements are a 2.0 GHz, Pentium, Celeron or Athlon processor, with 512 MB RAM, a 128 MB video card and 600 MB available hard disk space. A download version is available, which contains the same scenery as the CD-ROM but lacks some bonus videos provided with the boxed version. The installation creates a program group under the start menu with links to the Things-To-Come website and to an html manual. Perhaps the most interesting feature of the manual is the 'performance tips' section, which includes several paragraphs on optimizing FS2004 to run phototextures; since most photoscenery manuals are understandably coy about drawing attention to the dreaded phenomenon of 'the blurries', I was fascinated to discover that the developers not only acknowledged that ground texture blurring could occur, but that they had some ideas about how to limit it that I had never been privy to before. I tried the suggestions and they work much better than anything else I have ever seen, with the result that I could fly the Flight1 Pilatus PC12 in high speed cruise around the scenery without experiencing any serious attacks of blurring at all - and those episodes I did experience soon sorted themselves out. I am going to have to experiment, because it is always possible that the relatively small area covered by the scenery means that there is a high chance of a required texture tile being in the cache, and this protects the user from blurring, but all I can say is that it worked for me. The only problem is that the fix requires a manual edit of the fs9.cfg file, but as long as you back the file up before you fiddle, you shouldn't run into problems.

Once the scenery is installed, you will have 4,250 square miles of summer phototextures wrapped over a detailed mesh, the main features of the area being:

1. Anchorage and surroundings
2. Chugach State Park and Chugach National forest
3. Knik Glacier, Lake George Glacier, Surprise Glacier, Spencer Glacier
4. Portage Pass, Port Wells, American Pass, Summit Lake
5. Knik Arm, Turnagain Arm

All of which are set in a rich Alaskan mix of mountains, rivers, glaciers, lakes, valleys, canyons, marsh, coves, coastline and billions of lurking no-see-ums, although very fortunately the latter haven't been built into the scenery. There are 26 airfields within the area, but although these have been modified to sit as naturally as possible in their new surroundings, there aren't any new buildings, so fans of Richard's fabulous small airfield sceneries will be disappointed, though not, I suspect, for long. Fans of night flying can look elsewhere, because there aren't any night textures.

Photoscenery afficionados will, I suspect, be looking at this product askance, given that it covers less than 20% if the area of one of PC Aviator's MegaSceneries, but as the title implies, Alaska Cinematic has a few tricks up its sleeve. For a start, it covers some of the most interesting mountain scenery in Alaska and flights east from Anchorage are a real pleasure, as the plane flies over a panorama of awesome peaks and deep valleys. True, in a jet you leave the phototextures behind pretty quick, but Alaska Cinematic has an intimacy typical of Georender packages and demands that you get down low and slow to appreciate its finer points - because this is a photoscenery like no other. What Richard Goldstein has done is to overpaint quite considerable areas of the source textures used to create the scenery and the results are absolutely stunning - if you have any doubts, take a look at the large version of the thumbnail below left.

It is, I realise, quite common for developers to graphically manipulate photographic scenery textures en masse, but this is usually confined to bread and butter editing aimed at fixing color casts and ensuring compatibility with Flight Simulator. What no-one has done, until now, is to edit large numbers of texture tiles on an individual basis, with the intention of enhancing the appearance of country and mountain areas. In retrospect, it makes sense that Richard Goldstein should be the one who broke the mould, because above all his sceneries are known for their gorgeous textures. Given that Alaska Cinematic doesn't have any additional airport scenery, all of Richard's effort has been poured into turning the ground phototextures into something really special.

The package also contains mesh by Raimondo Taburet, who should be well known to FSC regulars, having contributed numerous freeware files to the library over the years. By and large, the elevation model is excellent, but I came across a couple of problems, including a 'permanent wave' where the sea runs uphill towards the threshold of Elmensdorf AFB's runway 05 next to the docks. This wouldn't matter so much if Elmensdorf wasn't right next to PANC and if Elmensdorf's taxiways were better executed; as it is half the signs appear in the middle of the tarmac and there are places where the taxiways do not meet the runways. Elmensdorf is in your face every time you turn north out of PANC and given that the latter is the biggest airport within the scenery area, you are likely to overfly the air force base fairly often. The other problem, although one which is not admittedly caused by the scenery, is the famous Girdwood Glitch. The Girdwood Glitch is caused by one of a half dozen or so bugs in the FS2004 mesh - others include a lake, half of which is 15,000 feet below sea level and spires 100,000 feet high, scary stuff. At Girdwood, the elevation of a river next to the airport is too high, which results in a thousand foot high mesa right next to the airport and a runway so soft that the plane drops through it. An unofficial freeware fix is available, courtesy of Joshua Robertson, but although that sorts out the mesa, it still leaves floating runway textures, but since Girdwood is well within the area covered by Alaska Cinematic Volume 1, I was expecting to find that Raimondo's mesh would include a fix for the problem, but it does not. However, apart from these two issues, the quality of the mesh is generally good.

Other than a slight cyan cast which is common to many Flight Simulator photosceneries (and is something you soon get used to) the textures are beyond criticism. As you can see from the screenshots, hand-edited autogen enhances the perspective, lending the package a depth that many phototextures lack, thanks to Flight Simulator's flat lighting. Richard's airbrush has clearly been busy on most of the valley floors, so that the roads and rivers are much more believable at low altitude than they normally are on this kind of scenery. Once you pass 5000 feet, it is difficult at times to forget that you aren't flying over a real landscape and above the alpine, the icefields and glaciers are a graphical tour-de-force that leaves other phototextures eating their dust. Everywhere you look, color and perspective have been subtly enhanced and the overall effect is so dramatic that in the final analysis, I can forgive the failure of the package to fix Girdwood and those crappy taxiways at Elmensdorf. The blurb describes the package as 'awe inspiring' and awe-inspiring it most certainly is.

As ever with sceneries targetting popular areas, there are some compatibility issues and if you own Ultimate Terrain Canada/Alaska, it is worth visiting the Georender support site as a couple of patches are available. The same page has a freeware AI traffic download, coded by Peter McLeland, which is only 3.5 megs in size and well worth getting as it adds considerably to the enjoyment of the addon - and if you want to find out what flying around the area as a real bush pilot is like, you might try Mort Mason's Flying the Alaska Wild, although I had better warn you in advance that this is a book people either love or hate.

Bush pilots are going to love this scenery, because apart from Girdwood, all the strips offer their own flavor of challenge. The best news is that Volume 2 of Alaska Cinematic is now out and doubles the size of the area flyable in Volume 1 (which will be required for Volume 2 to be installed). The new volume includes:

1. The Kenai National Wildlife Refuge
2. Quartz Creek, Lawling and Moose Pass
3. Kenai Lake, Barbara Lake and Skilak Lake
4. Cooper Landing, Nikishka, Soldotna and Kenai itself

A free update to the Volume 1 textures is included in the package, which promises to add even greater realism to the Anchorage Metropolitan Area.

So, there, in a nutshell, is Alaska Cinematic. Like all products, it has some flaws, chief among which is the rather sparse packaging - a printed manual would have been nice, as would an automated routine to install the package into the FS scenery library. Given that this is Alaska, it would have been good to see some winter textures, but that being said, as a day VFR scenery, Alaska Cinematic is about as good as it gets.