Escalante And Hurricane

By Andrew Herd (5 July 2002)

ou probably get to fly there all the time, but for me, Southern Utah remains a dream. For someone who is used to flying over the UK, where three hours in a 172 is enough to take me to the most distant parts of the land, the idea of flight in an area as dramatic as the one this Georender add-on captures is something else. The interesting thing is that we don't have more sceneries like it, but then perhaps the explanation is that there aren't many scenery designers who are also such talented artists.

My first recollection of Richard Goldstein scenery was his Davis, Oregon (DAV_ORE.ZIP). released back in January 2000. That neat little strip already showed many of the characteristics that have become his signature, and it was followed in short order by North Cascades (NORTHCAS.ZIP), Darrington (DARRNGTN.ZIP), Elma Municipal (ELMA.ZIP), Santiam Junction State (SANTIAM.ZIP) and Big Bend Utah (BIG_BEND.ZIP). All these packages were FS2000 freeware and their increasing complexity made it clear that Richard was building up to something really outstanding.

That something was Flying M Ranch (FLYING_M.ZIP, FL_SNOW.ZIP) a photorealistic package that didn't so much raise the bar for FS2000 sceneries as break it into small pieces. Flying M had a 2000 foot turf and gravel runways, trees, fences, power cables and numerous detailed buildings, as well as a tough approach. It quickly became a firm favourite; its popularity only limited by the fact that it needed a powerful PC to run it under the old version of Flight Simulator (Richard has recently released an FS2002 compatible version of Flying M which will be the subject of a future review).

So it was with great interest that I saw that a package including Escalante and Hurricane Municipal airports had been released for FS2002 under the Georender label. From what I knew of Richard's approach to scenery it was clear that this was going to be the perfect antidote to the international airports that are the staple fare of FS airport designers and I am pleased to say that I have not been disappointed.

Escalante and Hurricane are about 80 nm apart, located on the dramatic Escalante Grand Staircase, which makes them excellent starting points for exploring Southern Utah. We owe the existence of this captivating little add-on to the fact that Richard lived and worked in California during the '80s and he still goes travelling and visiting friends in the Western US. What he has come up with here is a flyer's scenery, featuring two small airports at an elevation of over 3000 feet, in a level of detail which means that you are unlikely to get bored with the view, however often you drink it in. If you like individuality, atmosphere, and the feeling that at any moment a simulated mechanic is going to walk out to your Cub, wiping his hands on a piece of oily rag as he does so, this scenery is for you.

The blurb that accompanies the package tells us that Escalante is a small town on the northern perimeter of the Escalante Grand Staircase National Monument, with a runway and buildings that are maintained, but which have known better days. Hurricane, on the other hand, is an expanding airport serving a growing community. The result is a neatly balanced pair of sceneries with quite different characters - Richard states that users will feel that they have "come to know" the airports and I have to agree that he has created something so unique that it is indeed hard to forget.

The package costs $12.95 and is available as a 7 Mb download from the Flight1 website. It installs from a single .exe file, creating a program group in the start menu with an uninstall routine. In addition to the two airports, you get html documentation which includes data on the real Escalante and Hurricane airports, together with photographs, a flight plan and a most fantastic piece on "Flying the Plateau Lands" written by Richard Nathan. It isn't often that I get nearly as big a kick out of reading the documentation as I do from reviewing a package, but there you go.

Taking a look at the scenery itself, there a couple of things you have to be careful about. The first is that the package contains custom made high-res mesh, which means that if you have an
mesh terrain add-ons which cover this regions of Utah you will need to disable it to prevent conflicts.

The second issue is that the package only comes with summer textures, so you won't have any choice about the seasons if you want to enjoy Escalante and Hurricane at their best. According to Richard, "When I first made EH for FS2000 seasonal terrain textures were not possible, so the format stayed for the 2002 version as well. All sceneries from now on will have full seasons and night textured terrain and objects."

To begin with, this bothered me a good deal, but to tell the truth, I have found these airports so fascinating that I can live with it, although it would be great to see some seasonal textures released as an upgrade. Building on experience with previous sceneries, Richard has programmed three different density settings, which rely on reductions in numbers of trees on the sceneries. Nonetheless, if you fly complex aircraft models that use high-resolution textures you may have problems in spot view with non-display of ground textures, depending on your system spec.

The big deal about Georender sceneries is that they are very different to any other FS airports you are likely to see. We are all used to promotional material which warbles on about "finely detailed custom objects," for which read taxiway signs, moving air gates, AI traffic and control towers with detailed interiors and a hundred other things that have been done to death.

You won't see any of this in Escalante and Hurricane. What you do get is art - and I can hardly stress enough how mesmerising these little masterpieces are. For a start, instead of the familiar default textures, you get custom tiles built from high resolution aerial images, repainted so that they capture the feel of the region and wrapped over hand-rolled mesh. All of this goes together to duplicate the surrounding area about as well as I imagine it is possible to do, looking at the photos of the real thing - and not only that, but the scenery blends at the edges with the default terrain, so it is hard to work out where one stops and the other begins.This alone sets Escalante and Hurricane apart, because so many sceneries sit like islands in a sea of foreign textures, instead of looking like they grew up where they sit. Then there are the custom objects. Starting with rusting farm implements abandoned at the side of the runway in Escalante, they continue through Richard's pickup, fueling trucks, wire fences and legions of other items too numerous to mention, finishing with the buildings themselves, all of which seem to be individual creations, without a default hangar in sight.

I like Escalante and Hurricane more than I can say, and it remains one of the best kept secrets of Flight1's website - to find it, you have to go to the "download store" section and then follow the "scenery enhancements" link. One of Richard's aims in creating the scenery has been to avoid repetition and he has pretty much succeeded in that, barring the fact that the pickup features on both airports (okay, so maybe he just drives real fast). Yep, it is a shame that there are no seasonal textures, but for $12.95 this is a very inexpensive package - and it is so shamelessly individual that these two are right up there among my favorite airports in FS2002.

(The aircraft shown in the screen shots is FlightSim Developers' Super Cub.)