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his
product is a follow-up edition of Apollo Software's Europe 1 scenery,
and complements Europe 2 and 3. Europe 1 Pro covers 500
airports, 300 navaids and 400 maps in Germany, Switzerland, Austria,
Netherlands. It adds ground textures and static and dynamic scenery.
The test machine was a Pentium II 350MHz with 64Mb RAM, and a Diamond
Stealth II G450 running at 1024 X 768 X 16 bits color.
Installation is straightforward. It offers the choice to install the scenery for Flight Simulator as well as Combat Flight Simulator. The installation wizard offers to install FS98 Patch 1 too. This may seem odd, but the reason may be clearer if you read the list of patches applied, which contains adjustments to altitudes and sensitivity of your aircraft's navigation instruments. After Flight Simulator is started again, the scenery database is rebuilt. If you have H. Schroeder's FSNav installed, you will need to rebuild those databases manually by running the FSNavDBC tool. One anomaly that I noted is that some navaids are duplicated: this is most likely because I loaded the shareware Jeppesen database into my configuration some time ago. For instance, two Rotterdam PS NDB beacons was present at slightly different coordinates and elevations.
After the installation, we checked how much disk space was used. It was only a total of 43.25 Mb. This surprised us. When exploring the CD, it became somewhat clearer: while the CD was 740 Mb in size, the majority of space was consumed by demos of the product itself, an upcoming ELSA Erasor TNT2 video card, and AVI's of other Apollo products. If you compare that with the Southern Californian Scenery Expansion Pack, you'll see that the latter takes up 121 MB of disk space.
It comes with a hefty 260-page reference guide. It includes Airport, SID's
and STAR's for all airports supported by Europe 1 Pro. There are also two
Jeppeson low altitude enroute charts included. These are quite cluttered by
all details, comparing these to some real life UK flight maps. I suppose
that once you really get used to all the details, it'll be okay.
On our first flight we took off from Amsterdam Schiphol airport. Some B747's and smaller jets in KLM paint scheme were parked or being pushed back. The transparent glass buildings and dynamic scenery are nice, but not always complete. The new Schiphol tower is placed amidst a green patch, while in reality it is surrounded by multistory parking lots. Another remark that can be made is that the tower view seems not to be positioned where the new Schiphol tower is placed. The Schiphol tower is new, so that may explain it.
We took off and flew north. We saw the "Afsluitdijk", a dyke that separates the North Sea and the islands from the "IJsselmeer". The static scenery details are nice: light houses with real intermittent lights on the islands Terschelling and Texel, the ferry to the islands, boats in the harbor of Den Helder. The coastline shows a more realistic surf texture, similar to the textures seen in Combat Flight Simulator.
Then we moved to Innsbruck in Austria. I moved the aircraft to see what happened to the control tower's windows: the mountain behind it was visible as I moved.
Switzerland: Zurich taking off during sunset, and heading for the mountains. We saw snowcapped mountain ranges and I followed a Swissair jet making its departure. The movement of dynamic scenery is quite realistic.
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Peter Nauta
p.nauta@flex-it.nl