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think I would not be too far off the mark if I said that probably more than half of all FS2000 pilots spend most of their time flying around North America and Western Europe. Just have a look around at the majority of add-ons that are available, and you will definitely notice a western bias. I myself am no exception - most of my flying happens over southern England, the Western US, and western South Africa (which is my home). This is really a pity, because FS2000 includes all of the world to fly over, and the chance to explore exotic new places is just a flight plan away.
Sadly, the good folks at Microsoft seem to have foreseen the fact that most of us would not wander too far off the contrailed path, so the scenery for the eastern parts of the globe is a little sketchy at times. A good example of this is the scenery which makes up Hungary, and specifically Budapest. Budapest is a major European city, with 1000 years of history, and (more importantly to us), several airports. However, the off-the-shelf Budapest which is included with FS2000 only includes Ferihegy International. Fortunately for us, Andras Kozma, himself from Budapest, has decided to do justice to this city, and his Budapest Millennium package is attractive enough to make you want to pack your bags right away.
Budapest ME (millennium edition), is only compatible with FS2000, and is available either as a download or on CD through the Vistamare website. Before you decide to go for the download version, let me warn you - this puppy weighs in at an awesome 133 MB. Yes, one hundred and thirty three megabytes. If you own a 56K modem, you can look forward to a happy seven and a half hour download on a good day, and if you have to pay for your phone calls by the minute, a real trip to Budapest might be cheaper. Fortunately, a CD version is available, or you could consider joining a cult which provides its members with broadband internet - believe me, it's worth it for this package.
The installation uses the standard installer, and for me went with no problems. Once you install, you get mesh scenery of the city, five airports, a comprehensive manual in English, and photo realistic textures for the entire city area. The complete install requires about 250MB on your hard drive. After I installed, I started up FS2000, and selected Ferihegy. The disk drive whirred for what seemed an eternity, and FS2000 crashed. Repeated attempts turned up the same problem - a crash every time. A quick visit to the Vistamare homepage and a patch download later, I was able to run the scenery with no further problems.
Once I took to the air over Budapest, I immediately discovered why this package is such a large install. The entire city is covered by beautiful, photographic quality textures, detailing every last house and park. These bitmaps are each 1024x1024, and there are many, many of them tiled over the city area. The Danube, rather than being a pointy blue ribbon (as it is in the standard FS2000), becomes a graceful, majestic, wide sparkling presence, which becomes an enormous aid to VFR navigation - after only two flights around the city I was already able to find my way around quite easily without becoming lost (this is quite a feat, as I have not been to Budapest in reality). At night, the major roads and boulevards light up, with the "moving dot" effect, leading to a convincing scene of a bustling city.
Apart from the textures, a very detailed mesh creates the bumpy landscape of Budapest, with its many hills and valleys (which are of importance to many of the approaches around the city). With this mesh, the probability of a CFIT accident in bad weather becomes real, and approach plates (included in the manual) become essential. The terrain is topped off with many well modeled buildings and bridges, creating the impression of a crowded city. Apart from the videos of FS2002's "Autogen" scenery, this is the most convincing city I have yet seen for FS2000. Not only are the general apartment and office buildings created in high quality, but the important historic buildings (such as St Stephen's, the Royal palace and many others) are created in great detail - perfect for a little aerial tourism.
Of course, all the other stuff is really candy - the true test of any scenery package is how well the airports are created, as this is the part of the package you will be interacting with the most. Budapest ME includes 5 airports, and they vary in quality from the awesome to the mundane. Ferihegy is the only airport in the city large enough to airliners, so there is lots of scope for the GA enthusiast. For the military minded crowd, Tokol airbase is included.
I will discuss the Ferihegy separately (as this is undoubtedly the star of the package), and the other four airports together. Three of these are grass strips, and all have parked aircraft, photo-textured buildings, accurate taxiways and all the other good stuff. One thing that caught my eye was the large number off trees that surround the airports. Although the trees are essentially flat (as they are in all other sceneries as well), the clumping of the trees really suggests vegetation rather than billboards. Of these small three GA airports, my favourite is without a doubt Harmashatarhegy. This little strip has 500 foot hills on one end of the runway and power lines on the other! I had great fun flying in and out of this one, and just goes to show how scenery this realistic is a lot more than simply eye candy. The fourth airport is Tokol airbase, which I was a little disappointed at. The quality is not up to the same level as the rest of the package, being more like an old FS98 freeware release (no offense to the fleet of FS98 scenery designers, of course!). Still, the airbase contains many buildings, camouflaged HAS, and a general military air.
Ferihegy is a sort of odd, decentralized airport, with terminals spread around a large area (not unlike Heathrow). I have not been to Ferihegy myself, but after slewing around Budapest ME's version, I have no doubt that I can find my way around without a problem. This is the most detailed airport I have ever seen, and I have seen some of the best. The level of detail easily surpasses anything imaginable, and it is all where you will see it during a flight. The gates and jetbridges are in extreme detail, and even the road signs are clearly readable. Not only are the buildings rendered in awesome detail, but the textures are clear and crisp. I was amazed at the amount of work which must have gone into this masterpiece. There is a large number of static aircraft parked around in various stages of turn-around, and even these are of a much higher quality than we are used to. I can think of no single gripe that I have about the detail and level of workmanship of this airport. Budapest ME has raised the bar as far as airport scenery design is concerned, without a doubt.
Now for the not-so-good news...
Sadly, no product is perfect, and this is no exception. Firstly, there is no dynamic scenery at all, although Vistamare has promised that this is on the way, and will be available freely. For those of you that cannot wait, the good news is that the default FSTraffic ILS aircraft will takeoff and land from Ferihegy correctly, but the other four airports have no traffic at all.
Although the package provides those wonderful satellite photo textures of the city, only the summer set is included. If you fly in the middle of winter, you can still expect green parks and leafy trees. Vistamare explains this by pointing out that if you wanted a complete four season set of textures, the package size would have been enormous.
Another downer is the fact that some of the objects in the city (specifically some of the bridges across the Danube) have been taken directly from an FS5 version of Budapest, and so look a little out of place. This is also the case with Tokol airbase, as I have mentioned earlier, although this is generally not noticeable unless you are doing some crazy swan-burning 10 feet off the Danube.
The final bit of bad news is that Vistamare reports that if Budapest ME is found to not work under FS2002, they will not be creating a patch to fix this. It is too soon to tell if this is going to be an issue or not, but seeing how Microsoft has revised the terrain engine in FS2002, there is a risk. If you plan to stick with FS2000 for the long haul, however, then this should not pose a serious problem.
As you can imagine, scenery this detailed is not going to run very fast. My machine is no slouch - an 850 MHz Thunderbird with 256MB RAM and a GeForce 2 GTS, and I was getting about 10 frames per second on a good patch, using the default aircraft, and about 7 using the Phoenix 747-400. For me, about 10 FPS is the absolute minimum safe flying rate, so I am worried about this aspect of this package. Also, the loading times for this scenery are high - about 20-30 seconds or more - patience will be required. If you are wondering why this scenery runs so slowly, I did a little experiment and discovered that it is in fact the textures which are mostly to blame. I reduced the terrain texture size from 1024x1024 to 256x256 (effectively reducing the memory requirement to 1/16th of the original), and suddenly my frame rates doubled! Perhaps Vistamare will provide a smaller texture set for users with lower end machines.
Overall, I was well impressed with this product - it truly represents the state-of-the-art in terms of scenery design. Some may criticize the fact that it does not represent a city which is more likely to appeal to the average flyer such as San Fancisco or London, but to me that's the attraction - finally a new place to fly, and new places to explore.
This is an amazing product, but be warned about the type of machine that is required to run it. If you do have the tonnage to cope, you are in for an interesting and rewarding time indeed. Now If I can only find where I stashed all my Malev and Aeroflot downloads...
Dave Nunez
Visit the publisher's web site here:
Cape Town, South Africa
faybs@iafrica.com
www.vistamaresoft.com