Perfect Flight Deluxe Great Britain Scenery
by Iair Arcavi (11 May 1998)
Contents:It comes in a pretty average sized box, nothing too flashy. In it, there's the CD, the manual and a map. The manual includes the installation instructions and a list of all of the nav aids in the package, their frequency, coordinates, code and range. It also includes a list of all of the included airports, their height, runway numbers, closest nav aid frequency and the ILS frequencies if available. Unfortunately, no airport diagrams are included.
The map covers the area of the scenery (England, Wales, Scotland and the Channel Islands), and includes navaids and airports, but it's not as detailed as the Jeppesen charts. It still is, however, pretty helpful and is consistant with where things are in the scenery.
According to the box, the requirements are the following: Pentium 75, Win 3.11 with 8 megs of RAM (for FS 5.x) or Win 95 with 16 megs of RAM (for later versions of FS, including FS98), SVGA graphics card and a 2x CD-ROM. These requirements don't seem harsh, but with a P166 and 64 megs of RAM, I still experienced pretty low frame rates and a few pauses here and there.
Installation:Supposedly, the installation is a very simple.
Pop in the CD into the drive and wait for the autorun to kick in. The rest is supposed to be all about
clicking "Next" and choosing a directory.
Well, I put in the CD, the autorun was activated and it looked like it was going fine. I went through a few steps of the installation but before I could get to the part where the files are actually copied, I got a message saying that I need to run FS Europe (that comes in the FS98 CD) from my hard disk. In order to do this, the message said, I must autorun the FS98 CD, and select "Setup". If I do not have this option, the message continued, I was to remove FS98 and reinstall it while selecting to copy FS Europe to my hard disk.
I don't think so!! There was no way I was going to remove FS98 and reinstall it, just for an add-on scenery pack.
Well, I E-mailed the guys who made this at "Instant Access" and a few days later I got a response. They sent me a list of where the scenery files are supposed to be (in what directories), so that I could install it manually.
Without going into any details (e-mail me if you want hear them), I managed to, eventually, get the scenery installed.
Performance:After finally getting it installed, I must say, I wasn't really expecting much. However, the textures and mountains are very nice, and the airports are pretty detailed. They are complete with taxiway centerlines, holding points, runway signs, terminals and hangars. The city center in London is, as you can see, also pretty dense with buildings. Unfortunately, all of this comes at a cost. The frame rates are a bit lower than usual (when in "Very Dense" mode), and I experienced some very annoying 1-3 second pauses, especially in the London area.
If you have some pretty good equipment (better than my P166 in any case) and you enjoy England, you might really like this product.
Because of the nice airports and textures it is really a joy to fly in. The only problems I found were
the installation, the pausings and low frame rates and the occasional transparent terminal (see picture).
In any case, it's somewhere between old freeware sceneries and revolutionary payware ones.
All in all an enjoyable product, for those who can afford staying pretty high above the minimum requiremnts.
Perfect Flight Deluxe Great Britain is published by Instant Access.
You can visit their Web site at:
http://aerodrome.instantaccess.com/.
