Flight 1 Ultimate Terrain Europe for FS2004

By Andrew Herd (5 September 2006)

icrosoft wasn't kind to Europe - fly over it in FS2004 and you see roughly the number of roads that we had in Roman times. Okay, I admit that those roads did last a long while and that we were still using them in the Middle Ages, but we have made lots of progress since, even if the people in Seattle haven't noticed. Last time I looked, Yorkshire definitely had more than three roads and several of them were freeways. We even have bridges now, but as Flight Simulator has it, the place looks a little... underdeveloped. Whole towns are missing, you only get a few of the larger lakes - most of which are nowhere near the correct shape - and at times it is easy to believe that each country has only been allowed one railroad. Take the underwhelming mesh into account and you are left wondering how anyone ever managed to reach the Matterhorn, let alone bother climbing it.

If you need better mesh, there is no better place to turn than FSGenesis, which sells self-installing packs that cover just about the whole of Europe, but if you want to indulge in VFR navigation, you have a problem, because once you leave the coast (sometimes even when you are on the coast), the lack of roads and accurate towns and water means that there is insufficient detail to do much more than follow major rivers and navigate from VOR to VOR. Various addons are sold that solve the situation for particular countries, the best of which are the England and Wales Photoscenery packs, VFR Netherlands and Switzerland Professional; otherwise, simmers wishing to go to the next level are left to fend for themselves.

If you are familiar with the Ultimate Terrain Alaska and Ultimate Terrain USA packs, then Ultimate Terrain Europe needs no introduction, but many simmers on this side of the pond never venture far out of Europe, given that the continent offers every kind of landscape on a small enough scale to get your head around. Simmers living in the US or Australia may find this hard to imagine, but a one hour flight from Austria in a light aircraft could take you to any one of nearly a dozen different countries, depending on which direction you set course. Much of Europe is very densely populated, which means that we don't just have roads, we have lots of roads, confusingly large numbers of which twist and knot around each other and trail off every which way, which makes it very easy to become uncertain of your position. Just because you are following a road doesn't mean it is the right one, which makes it essential to cross check your position by identifying towns and rivers if you are flying VFR - because controlled airspace is much more of an issue and in most European countries, it isn't possible to fly for more than half an hour in a straight line without running the risk of flying into some. VFR navigation therefore assumes a much greater importance than it does in less populated parts of the world, where the chances are that if you find a freeway, it is the freeway you are looking for, and not some imposter trying to lead you astray. If you want a good example of this, the last time we flew into Blackpool, ATC told us to fly no further south than the A55, because that effectively forms the northern edge of RAF Warton's zone. To simulate real flights in Europe, you need roads.

The version of UT Europe that I reviewed was a two part, 1.4 Gb download, making it the largest addon I have installed to date for FS2004 - by the time you read this, a boxed version may be available, in which case you can skip the rest of this paragraph. As with every recent Flight 1 product, the first step towards installing the download version is to purchase a key, after which the best method is to use their downloader tool to handle the process of getting the files. For an app of this size, the downloader tool is a great idea, because it can handle interrupted downloads and corrupt files and runs in the background without interrupting other tasks. Once it announces that the download is complete, you can more or less rely on having a working file, putting an end to the traditional nail biting that goes on in the last few minutes of a large file acquisition, when you wonder if it is going to work or not.

When the installation is complete, the next step is to run the setup and configuration tool that is accessed from a new Flight One group on the start menu. Otherwise, the contents of this group include a 29 page product manual, a chart showing the approximate coverage (most of what I know as Europe), a performance tuning manual and a texture configuration tool. Flight1 suggest a minimum of a 1.6 Ghz Pentium with 2 Gb of hard disk space and a 128 Mb video card, but with all the options maxed, the 3.2 Ghz Dual Core Pentium I used for the review gasped for air at times with all the options maxed. The setup and config tool gives you access to a huge range of options and together with the texture configuration tool, allows you to set up the package any which way you want, including the ability to change the options as many times as you like, just as long as you exit FS2004 first. There are eight options for setting up the roads: 'base road enhancement', which only puts the major roads into FS2004; 'add paved urban minorroads', which I only recommend if you have a liquid cooled quad core system; 'add paved rural minor roads', which adds everything in between the first two options and challenged my system slightly; 'add dirt roads'; 'add roads classified as bridges', which is another way of saying that UT installs roads that cross water, leading to a potential conflict with FS bridges, as these roads are 'flat' on the water surface; 'add roads classified as tunnels', which puts roads over the tops of mountains rather than having them begin and end where the tunnel mouths should be; 'flatten motorway/highway roads' and 'add flattening to other major roads', which cuts away the terrain some in order to allow larger roads to pursue flatter gradients. The last feature definitely makes major roads look more realistic, but there is an associated performance hit. The sixth option is to uncheck all the boxes, which leaves you forty bucks poorer and staring at the default road set.

Middle right of the config applet (below the teethmarks where the dog got at the applet, but if you click through I managed to save the larger version) is a set of options that let you do stuff like turn all the FS2004 bridge objects off and remove misplaced FS2004 landmarks and buildings. If you opt to keep the bridges and turn bridge roads off in UT, you run the risk of coming across bridges marooned in the middle of rivers which have changed their course as a result of their more accurate placement by the package. Having never been that much of a fan of Flight Simulator's bridges, which are few and far between, I turned bridge roads on and bridges off when I installed UT Europe and was pleased with the result. It would be great if the package automatically generated generic bridges where the roads cross water, but unless a bridge is a real monster, they don't stand out that much from the air if you are above a thousand feet, so flat roads across the water will do for me. Checking the 'misplaced' options more or less ensures that you won't get objects in the middle of lakes or in the sea and it is worth doing because UT Europe changes some areas of coastline a fair bit - for example, you will notice lots more sandy beaches.

That brings me to the water options, which allow you to enhance lakes, coasts and rivers; enhance streams; and turn off all the FS2004 streams. The option to adjust the 'stream offset' in the UT USA config applet is gone and instead you get a default stream depth below the surrounding terrain which is more realistic than Microsoft's take on the subject. Checking 'add extended river flattening' is also a good idea if you are using the default mesh as it cuts down the number of rivers that FS2004 has meandering up the sides of mountains, but it doesn't add much to good third party meshes as the rivers should all run in their proper beds. 'Enhancing water bodies' brings a very accurate set of water data to the sim that you will not want to be without and 'add wet season waterbodies' makes some, mainly southern European, streams and lakes dry up in the summer, although this is based on educated guesses by the developers, rather than firm data as far as I can tell. A new option to the UT series is the ability to remove coastlines from smaller water features, which will deliver you from the well known FS2004 bug which leaves little pockets of water trapped behind river shorelines.

The other options deal with railroads, landclassing and night lighting. As far as the rail is concerned, you can either have enhanced railroads, the default railroads, or no railroads - I went with the enhanced ones. Checking the landclass options is pretty much compulsory because doing so brings you many more small cities and towns than Microsoft saw fit to include and it also fixes some problems which inevitably occur if you have 'enhanced lakes, coasts and rivers' checked. One thing I discovered during the review is that if a third party product changes a coastline, there is a good chance that a landclass value will not be defined for that particular area - and when this happens, FS2004 cannot display land, so squares of water appear instead. Needless to say, UT Europe provides some “fill-in” landclass values for these areas, since it transforms the coastlines and adds some new islands, but this leads to a new danger, which is that some coastal airfields may theoretically end up partially in the sea. There are many other land polygon options, including the facility to add detailed industrial harbors, to add detailed commercial building areas, to add detailed golf courses and to add city parks.

The texture configuration tool will be familiar to users of earlier UT products, giving you five different options for street light textures, three for road surfaces by day and another three by night, five options for traffic density and the chance to use UT's special urban night textures. All in all, there isn't much you can't change - but before you start tweaking, make sure you read the performance tuning manual first, because UT Europe stresses FS2004 more than a little. The advice in the tuning manual is very well put, but some of the advice may freak newbies out a little, as it involves running a command prompt, editing the FS9.cfg file and downloading a third party disk defragger. But go to a little trouble and you will find that your flights out of Madrid look like the shots in the row above, instead of the usual Nowhere's Ville, Flight Simulator. And anyone with artistry in their heart has got to admire that loop in the river Seine in the row of shots two above - try finding a view like that in a default FS2004 installation.

How does UY Europe work in practice? Very well, as far as this simmer is concerned and I think the screenshots speak for themselves. Flying out of just about any airport in Europe takes you into an adventure over a countryside transformed by a realistic road network, with towns dotted all over a landscape that once was covered with repetitious green and brown tiles. Europe has much denser development than the US does on average and at long last it is reflected in FS2004, the new textures making a considerable contribution to the 'look'. I elected to run without coastlines on rivers and lakes, which makes for a considerable improvement if you fly at GA heights and above, given that you aren't constantly confronted with water whose shorelines don't fit. Doing the screenshots inspired me to take some VFR flights out of fields I know well and I found it extremely easy to fly out of Teesside (now Durham Tees Valley, EGNV) along the A19 and then down the A1 to Harrogate, before turning right to fly into Leeds Bradford - which is what I was doing in the de Havilland Comet in the top screenshots, which show Knaresborough coming up on the right, with its two distinctive lakes. My impression is that you could do the same just about anywhere else in Europe, if you know the terrain well enough, and if you don't, just drag out the appropriate chart and you should be able to work it out for yourself, just like PPLs have been doing since the first flight was made.

My enthusiasm for UT Europe does not mean that it is without problems. If you replace one large set of data with another, there are bound to be some funnies, and UTE is no exception. The first one I came across was, by chance, at EGNV, where a railroad runs under the approach lights for 27. Needless to say, this is not the case in real life and it may not affect a default FS2004 installation, but if you have Gary Summons UK2000 EGNV installed, you will have to warn rail passengers to look out, because his airport is definitely in the right position, but the line is not - the line actually snakes around the airport close to the north-eastern edge, but not that close. On the other hand, the river Tees is vastly improved and the harbor at Teesport (widely thought to be Tolkein's inspiration for Mordor) is spot on, as far as outline is concerned. Another clash occurs with one of my favorites, VFR Terrain, which installs a land/water mask that conflicts with the one provided in UT Europe, and given the number of other European scenery addons, I am sure readers will be able to add to the list. Again, as is clear from the Madrid shots, in cities there is a tendency for roads to have less respect for buildings than they should, which no doubt is the price of progress. But, UT Europe does so much to change the landscape for the better that I ended up uninstalling VFR Terrain and installing the appropriate FS Genesis mesh instead.

With all the road options checked except for 'add paved urban minor roads' I suffered from quite significant stuttering on my 3.2 Ghz dual core Pentium, but that was with Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Acrobate reader and three instances of Internet Explorer running on a machine whose hard disk is best described as messy. Unchecking 'add dirt roads' and following the instructions in the tuning manual mostly cured the problem, which was solved by shutting down all the other apps and defragging the disk, but the message is that UT Europe does post a lot of extra data through the processor and the inevitable result of making FS2004 more realistic is to slow it down, but what a result.

Highly recommended. If you live east of the pond, buy it.