FeelThere Florida Landings For FS2004 And FSX
By Andrew Herd
23 May 2008
FeelThere have established themselves as a mainstream Flight Simulator developer in a remarkably short time - looking back, we have reviewed quite a few of their products in the past couple of years. The first package of theirs I reviewed was the ERJ 145LR Pilot in Command, which was closely followed by the Cessna Caravan Deluxe for FS2004. Then came Wilco's 737 Pilot in Command, and steady stream of other planes have followed, including a Legacy, a CRJ and the Wilco fleet 777 pack, all of which have been competent at the very least. Florida Landings is, as far as I know, their first scenery.
The package is described as covering 'over 5000 square kilometers of South East Florida including photorealistic surrounding of its main airport Miami', the blurb continuing to say that the sixteen included airport's taxiways have been realigned and adjusted so that they blend realistically into the surrounding terrain. According to the website, 'the source image is a 1 foot/pixel combination of satellite and aerial image for the best possible resolution colormatched to the default FS scenery allowing borderless transition into the default terrain'. AutoGen has been adjusted around the airports and you also get seasonal changes as well as night scenery. The rivers and lakes are landable and a total of sixteen airports are included, the full list being: KMIA, KOPF, KTMB, KHWO, KFLL, KHST, X51, FL31, 78FD, 04FA, 14FA, 22FD, FA35, X44, X46, FL6. What you don't get, or at least I think you don't get, is enhanced mesh or any custom scenery at the airports.
Anyway, let's take a look.
The package is just under a 500 Mb download from the Pilot Shop, which seemed a good deal for 5000 square kilometers, which is about 3100 square miles. By my calculations, assuming the area is square (which it isn't), the scenery is roughly 70 km, or 44 miles on a side. When I unzipped the download, the answer supplied itself, because you get both the FS2004 and the FSX versions of the scenery in the zip. Installation was a no-brainer, involving no more than double-clicking the exe and entering the copy protection key code, after which the scenery installed itself without any further intervention.
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No minimum system specification is given, which is hardly a surprise, because photosceneries don't impose any performance load on Flight Simulator, given that the game has to load ground textures anyway, regardless of whether you have a default installation or a custom scenery installed. The only time an addon photoscenery does impose an extra load on Flight Simulator is when it comes with higher resolution textures than the default set for the area involved, in which case there is some kind of penalty for loading the higher-spec tiles. I did the review on a 2.66 Ghz Core2Duo with 4 Gb of RAM, a 768 Mb GeForce 8800GTX video card, Window Vista SP1 and FSX SP2.
What is a photoscenery, I hear people ask?
The quick explanation is that the FSX world is built from a terrain mesh, over which a grid of ground texture tiles are laid to form a believable-looking landscape. There is a huge variety of tiles available from which FSX chooses on the basis of data known as 'landclass' which tells it which kind of tile to put where and this is how it builds up a believable looking landscape. If the database says that a particular ground coordinate should be a city, in goes a city tile, and if it says that the area is steppe, in goes a steppe tile. Now because the grid relies on geographical coordinates, it is possible to substitute tiles based on satellite or aerial photographs for the default landclass tiles, so that instead of flying over a generic landscape, you can fly over one which looks real. The effect has to be seen to be believed, but I was a convert to photosceneries roughly ten seconds after I saw the first PC Aviator MegaScenery, which was several versions of Flight Simulator ago.
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Checking out the Start menu showed a new FeelThere Florida Landings group, which contained a link to the FeelThere downloads page and an uninstall icon - there doesn't appear to be any documentation supplied with the product. On the site, there are charts for six of the fields, for some reason compressed in WinRAR format, which means you can't rely on Windows' built in unzipping facility - annoying, given that since all the compressed files contain are pdfs, which could have been dealt with easily by using a standard zip file. WinRAR is available as freeware from here, with the link you need somewhere in the long list of different language versions; just don't buy a copy, because RAR is a minority interest. I downloaded the KMIA RAR just to see what was available and it un-rar-ed into 34 different charts, all the high quality official plates; otherwise, Florida Landings is what might be called 'document light', so don't expect to find any help files, or whatever. I guess it isn't that complicated a product, but an introduction giving a picture of the area the scenery actually covers would have been helpful at the very least. Speaking of which, by flicking backwards and forward between the airport list and the map and by doing some flying around, I established that the area covered is roughly rectangular and centered on Miami International (KMIA), extending from just north of North Perry (KHWO) down to just south of Homestead ARB (KHST), but not including the fun-sounding Ocean Reef Club at 07FA. The furthest east the phototiles extend is to the privately owned Stolport at FL31 and Lindbergh's Landing (FA35), so if you get Flight Simulator loaded in map mode, you can get an idea of what you are buying - alternatively, take a look at the screenshot supplied.
While the website is undoubtedly correct in describing the source as a '1 foot/pixel combination of satellite and aerial image', what I am looking at is bog-standard 5 meter per pixel satellite derived phototextures over the majority of the scenery. The acid test is that setting the ground texture resolution slider down to anything less than 5 m in FSX made no difference whatsoever to the quality of the ground textures and while there definitely is a mix of satellite and aerial photography in the scenery, don't go expecting to see anything like the quality of PC Aviator's new FSX MegaSceneries, like SoCal, because that is not where this addon is at - and if it was, the textures wouldn't load in FS2004, which can't display resolutions at better than 5 m per pixel anyway. So, although the textures may have been sampled from photography some of which has a resolution as high as one meter per pixel, the way they have been subsequently processed means that you can't display them at any greater resolution than 5 m per pixel, even in FSX. That being said, the quality of the textures is uniformly high, although they do display a certain amount of the cyan cast which is typical of satellite photography - even PC Aviator satellite-derived textures in their FS2004 sceneries exhibit this. The cast is definitely more noticeable in certain lights, particularly at midday with unlimited vis, as the screenshot below left shows, but you get used to it very quickly.
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End of 'bad' news, beginning of good news.
The good news is that instead of creating a rectangle of phototextured ground scenery tiles and plonking it down in the middle of the default terrain and being done with it, FeelThere have made an reasonably determined attempt to conceal the edges. It isn't perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but it is definitely good enough not to smack you in the eye when you fly over an edge, unless you are purposefully looking for the join; which is a huge advantage in a scenery covering a small area like this, given that you are never far from an edge. If this is the first phototexture scenery review you have read, one of the biggest problems with addons of this type is the place where the phototextured tiles end and the default tiles begin - normally the developers do nothing to conceal the 'joins' and, given the way nature abhors straight lines, they can be incredibly obvious. Okay, so one side of this particular scenery happens to be the coast, but I'm still impressed. Needless to say, the blending will only work if you are using the default FSX scenery textures; if you have installed a third party set, the join is liable to be fairly obvious. The right hand screenshot in the second row shows a join above and to the left of the Lear, while the Aerosoft Twin Otter is flying over the only really noticeable join in the scenery, which is at the southern end and even that isn't too bad compared to the ruler-straight lines that are the one drawback to the PC Aviator photosceneries.
Florida Landings being a 5 m per pixel scenery, the textures break up if you fly much below 2,500 feet above ground level, but at any height above that, the addon makes the area look extremely real indeed, as the screenshots confirm. As the man says, the airports have beeen blended in quite carefully and the runway alignments seem to agree with the plates, although I didn't check every single one. If you want to know why the default runway alignments sometimes don't, remember that magnetic variation varies and alters runway headings over time (-:
Seasons? Yeah, you do get four seasons, all of them identical, as far as I can tell, which is about right for Florida. You could read the blurb as saying that you get four different seasons, but if you do, it would take sophisticated computer analysis to figure out what changes - but when you bear in mind that some photosceneries don't display any ground textures at all outside of the summer months, be grateful for what you get. Anyway, not much changes in Florida. And the night textures are an improvement on the default set. Other than that, the AutoGen realignment seems to work and as long as you are content with the default airport buildings, the scenery is pretty good. If you bought the FS2004 version already, a free FSX update for existing customers is available from here.
The developers state that some FSX users may experience black frames around lakes, which can be cured by resetting the texture resolution, although I didn't experience this. Another potential issue is that the FSX vehicle traffic is not compatible with the scenery and tends to go off-road in some areas, so FeelThere recommend disabling the feature when you use the Florida scenery - since I don't believe too many simmers enable the AI road traffic, I don't see this as too much of a problem.
Verdict? Interesting addon, but a bit of a curate's egg. The
choice of area is good, the phototextures are fine as long as you
don't want the higher resolutions that FSX can offer, the lack of a
manual is a niggle, the choice of RAR compression for the plates is
wacky and it would have been great not to have to do all the
detective work to find out what exactly the area was the scenery
covered, but on the whole I do like the product very much. The edge
blending is a real feather in FeelThere's cap and if Florida Landings
had installed with a manual and the plates, it would have got an
Armchair Aviator, even without any custom buildings on the airports
and with 5 meter per pixel resolution. Why? Well, take a look at
those screenshots - it must be one of the most visually interesting
areas in the States you could choose to fly over and no-one has
thought of doing it before.
Andrew Herd
andy@flightsim.com
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