Austria Pro 2002

By Andrew Herd (17 July 2002)

eaders with long memories will recall Austria Pro 98, which was, in many ways, a ground breaking add-on for Flight Simulator. That package was one of the first to provide a VFR scenery for an entire country - and had it not been for the deficiencies of FS2000, it would have been a classic. It was difficult not to respect the vision of the developers, even though Austria Pro 98 was hamstrung by the limitations of texture loading in FS98, which were manifest as slow loading times and see-through mesh. Even so, if you turned the visibility down to 15 miles and flew low and slow, the scenery was a revelation.

Austria Pro 98 seems to have died with Papa Tango and while I think there may have been an upgrade for FS2000, if there was it didn't work well enough to keep the software on my system. I threw out the manual only a few weeks ago, mourning the obsolescence of an interesting package and marvelling at the fact that flight simulation products were once sold with ring-bound guides that included approach plates. Those were the days.

Now I'm wishing I had kept the binder after all, because Austria is back, big time. The new version of Austria Pro has nothing in common with the old one beyond its name and developer, but the good news is that it has been specifically developed to work with FS2002 and that like its predecessor is based on satellite, digital and vector data. What you get is 175000 km² of custom scenery where all the major rivers, roads and even canals have been painted where they should be in real life. No more do watercourses perform gravity defying feats, zipping up steep slopes like mountain goats; the Inn is a broad river that loops around town, rather than a disappointing smeary trickle; and even the roads - in general - stick to the valleys where they belong. This is FS2002 as you always hoped it would be.

I guess Austria always was a natural choice for this kind of scenery, not least because FS2002's European mesh is much coarser than its US counterpart. In Austria Pro the detailed mesh and custom textures mean that you get a far better impression of what it feels like to fly over Alpine valleys, or at least you do if your PC has the muscle to keep up. Flugwerk (the developers) have included 54 airfields which range from small grass strips right up to Vienna International and it is theoretically possible to fly the scenery armed with nothing but a 1:500000 sectional.

The VFR experience is enhanced by numerous off-airport details, like beacons, bridges and highway intersections - a feature which immediately caught my attention because the vast majority of FS sceneries view their responsibilities as ending at the boundary fence. If you do any real flying, you will know how valuable such features are - without visual reference points (VRPs), for example, just finding where some airports are is next to impossible on a hazy day, even when you are only a couple of miles away.

Aerosoft were also kind enough to send along a copy of Austrian Airports, which complements Austria Pro by adding detailed sceneries of the fourteen biggest and best known Austrian fields. I looked at the packages together and separately, but will concentrate on Austria Pro.

The original Austria Pro was no speed demon even on the most powerful systems available, but the new version really comes into its own in FS2002 - as long as you have a fairly beefy PC. I tried it on a couple of machines and wouldn't recommend running it on anything less than a 1 Ghz Pentium - 1.5 Ghz would be safer. My main machine is a 1.7 Ghz Dell with 500 Mb of RAM and running complex aircraft models like the FlightOne Cessna 421 shown in the shots I had a few scares, seeing less than ten frame per second (fps) at times. This was despite having my target frame rate set to 18 fps - which is the secret of running FS2002 smoothly with complex packages like Austria Pro.

The reason for locking the frame rate down is that if you set a realistically low figure, the sim won't throw everything it has at the aircraft; leaving more cycles to spare for displaying scenery and AutoGen. Even so, there were times, particularly when I was flying down the valleys, when I could see hardly any AutoGen, which is a sure sign that the processor is struggling. Frame rates were slightly better with the default aircraft, but I still saw 10 fps with the Baron during an approach to LOWI at night - the night lighting on this scenery is worth seeing, by the way. There are seasonal textures and while they have more than a slight flavor of FS2000 scenery about them, they are certainly adequate.

The developers have taken full advantage of several new features of FS2002 and there is some neat stuff to see if you fly around for long enough, like smoking industrial chimneys, signs on the major roads and flashing beacons on top of many mountains. Unfortunately, the beacons mostly have hard-edged FS2000 style lights, but it doesn't detract too much from the overall effect.

So much has changed compared to the default scenery that you could fly around for a long time before you saw it all, which makes the package good value for money. The airports are the least good thing about Austria Pro and while they are a definite improvement on the defaults, but they aren't that big a deal and simply do not compare to the stunning sceneries that Aerosoft released in their German Airports series (volume 1 of which includes Innsbruck, by the way). Taxiway placement is kind of sloppy at the minor airports, but as far as I can tell, every one has been enhanced.

Where Austria Pro majors is in its depiction of towns, which have many custom buildings, bridges and other landmarks. Okay, so some of the textures on the buildings are eye-smartingly garish and there are a few bad joins here and there, but on the whole I can live with it, not least because the developers have thrown in a landclass file which covers the entire country - which means that where there should be trees, there are trees, and where there should be towns, you get towns.

Austrian Airports - a separate, but compatible package to Austria Pro - is billed as including detailed sceneries of the fourteen "biggest and most known airports and airfields of Austria". The author, Stefan Rausch, should be known to many flight simmers for his FS2000 sceneries. The collection includes Wien-Schwechat, Graz, Klagenfurt-Wörthersee, Linz-Hörsching, Salzburg (Wolfgang-Amadeus-Mozart), Innsbruck-Kranebitten (shown in the screen shot here), Dornbirn/Hohenems, St. Johann in Tirol, Zell am See, Wels, Krems/Langenlois, Vöslau, Zeltweg, and Wiener Neustadt. In addition you get a thick manual which contains airport charts, approach plates and transitions. Alert readers will have already spotted that there is an overlap with Aerosoft's German Airports volume 1, which includes Innsbruck. Before I began the review, I dealt with this by moving all the GA1 LOWI .bgl files into a backup folder, so that there was no conflict.

The manual is a treat. Okay, so it doesn't have a ring binder, but those days seem to be gone for ever. Part of the reason for its size is that it is printed in German, English and French, which should guarantee the package a wide audience, but in addition to installation instructions and charts you also get some background on the airports. Although the entries are pretty concise, there is some good stuff in there; for example I hadn't realised that Lauda operates 767s into Innsbruck before - now that must be a interesting landing. The runway is 6500 feet long, but the average wind speed is 15-22 knots, gusts of up to 50 knots are common, there are gliders all over up to 10,000, and it gets much worse when the Foehn blows.

Austrian Airports can be installed into either FS2000 or FS2002 and while I didn't try it in the older version of the sim, the installation was uneventful in FS2002. You are offered the choice of which airports to install and I selected the lot. The developer has opted for the interesting solution of installing each airport in its own folder under "Addon Scenery", the result being that a full install creates fourteen new entries in scenery.cfg. While this is no big deal in FS2002, it is a potential gotcha in FS2000, where a bug in the way scenery.cfg is handled causes it to behave very strangely once there are more than a couple of hundred entries in it, so beware of this possibility if you still have the older version of the sim and are treading near the limit.

I'm not going to go into any more detail about Austrian Airports, because the package has already been reviewed by Terblanche Jordaan and he has done a pretty thorough job. The one thing I would add is - don't expect to see German Airports 3 here. Austrian Airports is a good scenery, but it could have been better. For example, there are several US registered 172s on the pan at Graz and some of the scenery objects repeat a little too often for my liking; for example, there is a yellow airport bus with a wonky front wheel that I got to know really well. While the textures are generally good, they are blurry in places and some of the bitmaps (including the yellow bus) could have been edited a little more carefully. In addition, when I uninstalled the package it committed the appalling sin of failing to delete its entries from scenery.cfg, which meant that I had to do it manually, or face clicking the "missing scenery" dialog 14 times during ever subsequent boot. However, given that there isn't any serious competition, Austrian Airports definitely deserves consideration.

The verdict? After a deal of thinking, I decided that if I had to choose between these two packages, my money would go to Austria Pro, though I think Austrian Airports is probably worth thinking about if you have a specific interest in this part of the world. The add-on so completely transforms Austria in FS2002 that it is difficult to imagine that you are in the same place. Yep, it does have its flaws, it would have been nice to see all the road sections join up perfectly, but then again there is so much else to appreciate in the scenery that I was still coming across new stuff right at the end of the review period. Austria Pro looks great at VFR altitudes and where else can you buy an entire country for $35.00?

The aircraft in the screen shots is Alex Cordiner's repaint of the FlightOne Cessna 421 (g-djea.zip).