Georender Chelan Muni for FS2004

By Andrew Herd (11 August 2006)

he GeoRender sceneries should be familiar to any simmer who reads our reviews regularly, because we have covered most of them over the years. I sometimes wonder why we bother reviewing them, because in general, the small airport sceneries in this series are so good that nothing else comes near them, but with new people coming into the hobby all the time, there is always a chance that someone hasn't heard of the series, and besides, if reviewing is ever a pleasure, then taking a look at one of these sceneries definitely qualifies.

The other reason for highlighting the work of the Georender team is that I believe they provide a flight simming experience that comes pretty close to the reality that all simmers seek. Most of the airfields in the series lie relatively close to each other in the Pacific northwest of the USA, which means that once you have installed a couple or three, it is possible to fly between them and enjoy making arrivals and departures using the same kind of VFR skills that real pilots use. The reason this is possible is that while the majority of scenery developers are content to develop sceneries that end at the boundary hedge, leaving the default textures to repeat endless on into the distance after that, Richard Goldstein, the driving force behind Georender, has a different philosophy. Georender sceneries come complete with an extended area of phototexture terrain and enhanced mesh around them, which makes it possible to make approaches and fly circuits using familiar visual landmarks - which is how it is done in the real world. Addon GA airports which sit in the midst of default terrain only tell half the story; the half which is least worth telling, in my opinion. As far as FS realism goes, if we could only have either realistic airports or realistic scenery, I would far rather developers left the default airports as they are and concentrated on the scenery that surrounds them, because approaches and departures are far more interesting than taxiing. The feature that makes Georender stuff stand out is that you get to have your cake and eat it - not only do you get an ultra-realistic GA field, you get bucket-loads of off-field detail, which is done to such a high standard it will keep you coming back again and again.

So without further ado, let's take a look at Chelan Muni, which is the latest Georender venture - before you visit, bookmark the Lake Aero maintenance shop page, because there is some useful stuff here and some shots that give a good idea of how realistic the scenery is.

The package is available for instant download from the Pilot Shop and weighs in at around 80 megs, which makes it a practical download even if you don't have broadband. System requirements are given as Windows 98 or better, FS2004, a 1.5 GHz processor or better, 256 Mb of RAM and at least 64 Mb of graphics memory. I did the test on a 3.0 GHz Pentium running XP and frame rates were fine, although I would suspect that the comfort zone for running Chelan probably lies at the 2.4 GHz Pentium level and higher than that if you plan to fly a complex addon aircraft, running real weather and 100% AI. The one problem I experienced was that some addon planes can cause the scenery textures to blur, the cure being to fly a different airplane (-: I have encountered this phenomenon with other Georender sceneries and the problem seems to be something to do with overloads of the texture cache... or something like that. Planes with very detailed 32 bit textures seem to be the ones most likely to cause the problem.

Installation is straight forward, the only complication being that it is necessary to add the scenery to the FS scenery library manually before it can be run. I ran the addon with Ultimate Terrain USA installed and the pair seem to be compatible as long - needless to say - as Chelan is installed nearer the top of the library than UT. Fail to do this and the airport won't appear. Finding the place is a simple matter of using the FS 'Go to airport' facility and there is no need to use the addon scenery list.

The manual describes Chelan as the 'Emma Field' of central Washington and having taken a look at the scenery, the statement isn't far wrong. The two fields have much in common and if you don't own the earlier Georender package, there is a good argument for buying it as well, as the two are less than an hour's flying time apart.

Like Emma, Chelan boasts its own 'soundscape' which adds considerably to the realism. The sound utilizes DirectX and Vistamare's IntelliScene code, which allows the sounds to be precisely located and even tied to particular animations, so you won't hear the grass cutter in Winter. The sounds even stay active if you slew around the landscape, which is super, because there is a great deal to see - although as is commonly the case with this kind of aural enhancement, you can also hear the sounds when you are in the circuit! It would be great if there was a way to fix this, because the aero engine has yet to be invented which lets you hear crows cawing in the trees while you are downwind at a thousand feet, but this is a very minor criticism as the sounds really do add to the experience.

Chelan Municipal airfield is in Chelan County in the apple growing country at the South-West end of lake Chelan. Something like 90% of the county is unihabited forest, which means that most of the farming is done along the margins of the watercourses, the combination being particularly pleasing on the eye, with the result that the area has been a center of tourism for over a century. Given the exciting announcement on the Georender site that the developer is launching a US national parks, the flying around FS Chelan could get even more interesting, given that the North Cascades national park lies at the other end of Lake Chelan. Right now the only park that is definitely being developed is Yellowstone, but if Richard Goldstein plans to do the North Cascades and adds in some detail along the shores of Lake Chelan, then it raises the mouth-watering prospect of making flights between Emma Field and Chelan Muni over large tracts of Georender terrain. We will keep you posted.

As it is, the Chelan addon provides plenty to keep simmers amused in the meantime. The field and the surrounding farmland are full of animations that make it come to life in a way that traditional 'airport only' packages do not - not only that, but some of the animations are actually useful. One of the big problems GA pilots face flying into many fields is that if there is no-one around to work the radio and the windsock is hard to find, then other clues to the wind direction are highly necessary. At the real Chelan, the best clue is the wind turbines that litter the fields around the airport and I was able to make a highly realistic approach by doing an overhead join at a thousand feet above ground level, eyeballing the turbines and then making my decision based on the way they were facing. Yip, for once, the eye-candy has a purpose and those turbines face into wind when there is any, the only problem being that they are shut down in Winter and at night. The turbines are the least of it, because you also get animated sprinklers that throw graceful arcs of water over the ripening crops and there is the usual clutch of airfield visitors, old-timers, tire-kickers and mechanics that Georender sceneries are famous for.

Many of the hangar doors can be opened by approaching them and tuning Nav2 to the frequencies given in the manual - when you do this, animated figures appear and push the doors open for you. In addition, if you stick around, some of the AI planes will park themselves in the hangars, but as I remarked above, this scenery is best appreciated by flying around it, rather than sitting in it. That being said, there is a vast amount of detail to reward the eye and the building textures so good that each one deserves some kind of inspection as you taxi past.

For those of you who are curious, the plane in the shots is a beta of an Aeroplane Heaven Tiger Moth. I have been playing around with this fun little addon for a long while (thanks Barry), but AH seem to have their hands full developing other, even more interesting stuff, so as far as I can tell, no release date is planned at present. Planes like the Tiger are perfect for appreciating this type of scenery, because they are slow enough to let you take a look around, particularly if you use TrackIR.

The photoreal textures deserve special mention, because one of the trade marks of Georender sceneries is that all the textures lead the pack and Chelan is no exception. To a very large extent, an addon like this stands or falls on the quality of the textures it installs and on that score this one very definitely does not disappoint; the manual makes quite a feature of the 'micro-texturing' that first appeared in Orcas Island (another addon Georender field that is within reasonable flying time of Chelan) and this certainly contributes to making things seem more real. Interestingly, the RealAir Decathlon that I used in the Orcas review is one of the planes that triggers blurring in the Chelan scenery and I notice it did the same with Orcas, which is an unfortunate interaction between two of my most favorite addons, but I don't think it can be helped.

It goes without saying that you get four seasons with Chelan as far as the ground textures are concerned - you also get three winter texture variations instead of two, the additional ones being found in a supplementary folder (...\Flight Simulator 9\Georender\ChelanMuni\Texture is the place to look), which need to be copied into the main Chelan texture folder on 21st November and back out again on 21st December if you are to see a properly realistic winter. For what it is worth, the first three shots show spring, fourth screenshot shows the fall textures, the next three show summer and the last one of the winter seasons. However, the highlight of the ground textures isn't the additional variation on the winter textures, but the fact that Richard Goldstein has done what no-one else has thought of doing until now and edited the textures at the edge of the scenery so that they blend reasonably seamlessly into the default textures. The result can be seen in the third pair of screenshots from the top, which both show an edge, which under normal circumstances would be a glaringly obvious ruler-straight line on the ground where the phototextures meet the default textures. In this scenery, there don't seem to be any joins, but if you look carefully, the place where the textures meet in the left hand shot is just above the dam - on the full size screengrab you can see the green Chelan phototextures meeting the brown default textures there, but Richard has edited the edge so well that the join occurs a long a stream and it isn't obvious at all. In the right hand shot, you are looking down the join - can you see it? Again, it lies at the bottom of the valley floor and extends to the upper left, but even over the mountains the join isn't easy to find, because Richard has blended the textures on those edge tiles very, very subtly. The downside is that if you don't use the default textures, the joins will jump out at you, because the Chelan textures won't match up to the Microsoft tiles they were designed to blend with. This feature alone is worth the Gold AAA that Chelan Muni has been given, because as far as I know, it is the first time a developer has used the technique to make it possible to fly around a photoreal scenery without having the spell broken by seeing an edge. It deserves to become a standard - other developers take note please!

Verdict? An absolutely classic scenery from Georender. Although it takes some hunting around to find them, as at least three different publishers are involved, all the packages in the series are worth getting, the highpoints until now being Emma Field and Orcas Island, but Chelan is easily up to the same standard and in some ways offers more, thanks to the edge texture blending. I can't wait to see the National Parks series.