Cloud9 Fly The Lakes

By Andrew Herd (30 December 2005)

he Italian Lakes and the part of Lombardy that lies around them has attracted tourists for centuries, many of whom would agree with Henry James, who once remarked that he couldn't describe the beauty of the area, nor would he try if he could. If a novelist like James found himself lost for words, who am I to fill the gap, save that I remember being driven through the area as a child and being spellbound by the reflection of the snowy peaks in the still dark water of the lakes. According to my mother, we never stayed there, just passed through, but the memory of roads that clung alternately to mountain and shore stays with me, as does a minds-eye view of a sailboat on a lake and a little cafe squeezed between the roadside and a vertical wall of rock. The lakes surely are an interesting place and it doesn't surprise me one little bit that Cloud9 have chosen to provide a scenery of the area.

“Fly the Lakes!” is, as the developer points out, a pleasure flight scenery. The only airport of any size is Lugano (LSZA) and that has a 1350 m runway - just under 4500 feet - which means that it is in the frame for turboprop twin operation using planes like the Flight1 ATR. Of the three other fields, Como is a seaplane base, Calcinate del Pesce is used by gliders and light aircraft and Sondrio is a club field with a pilot experience restriction in place because of its situation in a relatively narrow valley surrounded by high peaks. Locarno airport is within the scenery area, but doesn't appear to have been enhanced, nor has Venegono airport, so there is always hope that the next version of the scenery might include these.

I reviewed version two of the scenery, which doubles the area covered by the first release, taking the total area up to 6500 square kilometers (2500 square miles). Compared to version one, the expansion means that the entire shore and all the islands in lake Maggiore are included and it also brings the two club fields, so it is well worth getting if you bought the package when it first came out. In addition to the airports, the scenery includes a detailed mesh, accurate placing of roads and railways, new landclassing and relatively large amounts of off-airport detail in the form of landmarks and even animated ferries. You also get customised AI and as if that wasn't enough, a SeaMax amphibian, which is a nice freebie, just don't expect anything in the class of the F-104 - and there are five flight situations and a couple of flight plans.

Although a boxed version is available, the package I reviewed is a 99 Mb download and as usual with Cloud9 products, a 'try before you buy' option allows you to install the scenery and fly around for seven minutes before it deactivates and vanishes to reveal the default FS landscape. If seven minutes isn't enough, you can take another look by exiting FS2004 and then reloading it again and again, ad nauseam. It is hard to understate just how useful the trial option is, because the major problem with complex sceneries of this type is advising users about the sort of frame rates they can expect on different systems - with Cloud9 packages, this isn't a problem, as potential buyers can find out if the scenery is usable for themselves. For what it is worth, the suggested minimum system spec is a 2.0 Ghz CPU with 512 Mb of RAM, 250 Mb of hard disk space and running Windows XP or 2000 - the developers recommend a faster CPU if at all possible. Support can be found here and a quick scan revealed that users seem to have few issues with the product.

If you decide to buy the download version after the trial period expires, a cunning bit of programming allows you to make the purchase without leaving FS2004, although in order for this to work, you have to be running Flight Simulator in windowed mode. To do this you need an active Internet connection and once the product has been purchased, it isn't necessary to connect to the 'net again. The activation process ties the product to the PC it was bought with, although if you save your order number, it is possible to reinstall the software fairly easily.

Once the package has installed itself, a new group appears under the Cloud9 banner on the program menu with a link to the 39 page manual, which contains just about everything you could care to know about the scenery and the SeaMax. There are several pages of maps and information about the airports, together with some plates for Lugano, which is interesting thanks to an approach whose slope bears an uncomfortable resemblence to the Cresta run. I flew it a couple of times in various planes and came to the conclusion that it is probably a good thing that FS2004 doesn't simulate vertical wind currents that well, because I suspect they are a real problem in real life at Lugano, thanks to the topography.

The best way to describe the scenery is as a European version of FSAddon's Misty Fjords, only with better weather - the two sceneries have much in common, their magic lying in a pleasing mixture of mountains and water. Both sceneries kind of sneak up on you; I loaded Fly The Lakes (FTL), took a look at it, thought 'Yeah, another set of airports and sailboats' and then came back to it, flew around for a while and changed my mind. The FTL scenery area looks much more real than the default scenery thanks to the same formula which works so well in Misty Fjords: good quality mesh; an enhanced road network; great landclassing and plenty of off-airfield scenery. When it boils down to it, the fun to be had using these packages comes from flying over a landscape that lets you recognise the small town you flew over last week, rather than in your face heavyweight airports, and if you are a GA simmer, FTL stands out from the crowd because it offers something to look at nearly every minute of a flight.

When I first loaded FTL, the mountains all had a stepped appearance, which went away when I edited FS9.cfg and reduced the TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL value to 19 - I had increased it to 21 in order to enable 19 m mesh resolution when the FS9.1 patch was released. This is the one issue which may deter potential purchasers, because reducing FS2004's mesh res back to 38 m will potentially cause problems by degrading other sceneries, notably Horizon's VFR Terrain product for the UK. Knocking the value back to 19 fixed the stepping in FTL and after that, I settled down to pass the time seeing the sights.

The four fields are about as varied as you could wish. Lugano - shown in the top row of screenshots - is a commercial airport which is busy thanks to numerous tourist and commuter flights, with Darwin based there and operating a Dornier 328 and SAAB 2000s on the Lugano-Bern-London City route, Flyaboo taking Dash 8 Q 300s to Geneva, and Swissair ATRs to Zurich. There is a steady flow of executive jets and GA traffic to back it up. Como, in the shots above, is for seaplanes only and has an interesting curved approach that leaves you pointed directly at a large ketch tied up to the quay; I would advise staying clear of it, because anyone who can afford to keep a boat of that size on the Italian lakes almost certainly has the kind of business associates one does not wish to meet.

Calcinate is a sleepy glider/light GA field where nothing much happens, unless you count the guy who pushes open the hangar doors when you park near them. There are plenty of animations built into the scenery, including ground handling vehicles which move alongside if you pull into stand B1 at Lugano; hangar doors that open at Como if you tune Nav1 to 113.10 and moving hangar doors at Sondrio, the last of the four fields. As I mentioned earlier, some of the ferries steam around the lakes, but none of the sailboats move, which means that the approach to runway 10 at Lugano is always flown over the masts of the yachts you can see in the very top left pic. To be fair, if they weren't there, final wouldn't be any easier, because some kind person has stuck a conifer plantation right on the threshold just to make incoming pilots think a little.

The SeaMax amphibian is a good choice of plane for flying around this kind of scenery; in terms of quality, it is on a par with the default planes, and you get two liveries, the white and blue one shown here, and a yellow one. The first thing to say about it is that if real SeaMaxes fly the way the sim does, I want one, because for all the plane is powered by a Rotax, it climbs like a good 'un, trims hands-off in cruise and has a full flap approach angle that Cessna would be proud of - if your first flight is one of Cloud9's approaches, I suggest yanking the throttle the moment the plane loads in FS and dropping some flap, or you will overshoot. The SeaMax is built in Brazil, which not only has 8000 km of coast, but enough rivers and lakes to keep the keenest fisherman happy for the remainder of his natural life, so I guess it isn't surprising that a plane like this was conceived there, although I must admit it came as a big surprise to me as I had never heard of the manufacturer. Besides the possibility of landing on water and on conventional runways the versatility of the operation enables landing on water and taxiing to land and vice versa. Performance is in the microlight class with a very low stalling speed of 36 mph, the downside being a cruise of 115 mph - which means you won't get anywhere fast, but given the nature of the scenery, that isn't really too much of a problem. If you visit the ...\Flight Simulator 9\cloud9\SeaMax, you can find a copy of the real SeaMax manual and all the checklists. The 2D panel is shown in the top right screenshot - the virtual cockpit (VC) being a slight let down, but perfectly functional.

FTL being the sort of package that is better experienced than described, I have stuck in some extra shots to show a flavor of what is on offer. With a beta of the upcoming new version of Flight Environment loaded, FTL looks a million lire ($605 at current exchange rates), mostly thanks to the way the landclassing and mesh work together. Looking at the shots in the group of four above, you can see the way towns and villages spread along the roads and shorelines, and flow along the valley floors, just the way they do in real life. The landscape is one of the few areas of Flight Simulator that still needs improvement, especially because outside the US, Microsoft have left us with low quality mesh that makes the Alps look like spoil heaps and the Appenines like molehills. Because of this, Cloud9 advise installing a third party mesh, because this eases the pain when you fly off the edge of the scenery and are confronted with the default mesh. If you choose to follow their advice, Pietro Mauri has posted a wide variety of freeware meshes in the file library, or FSGenesis do a 76.4 m European mesh that covers all of Italy, with much else besides for a paltry $9.95.

Looking closely at the airports, the textures are good, with some very neat detailing - tufts of uncut grass around the taxiways at Calcinate caught my eye - and the overall effect is not only believable, but extremely colorful. The quality is on a par with the German Airports series or Gary Summons' UK fields if you have any of those, which means that it isn't in the GeoRender class, but then nothing else is, so I was more than happy with it and Calcinate and Como are real gems. As I mentioned before, the major impact FTL made on me was not when I was at the airports, but when I was flying between them, because the landscape looks so believable from the air and that experience alone is worth every penny of the asking price. By and large the rivers behave themselves and flow down the channels they are supposed to and although the match could have been better in one or two places, it was as good as I have seen in comparable products. I would love to see Cloud9 go wild and do a mesh/landclass/lakes/rivers/roads/roads product covering the entire north of Italy - as far as I am concerned, they could forget doing anything with the fields other than ensuring they are at the correct elevation, because that part of Europe provides some of the most interesting and attractive VFR flying in the world and FTL just lifts the edge of the cover and lets us take a peek at it.

I don't get to review that many sceneries and most of the ones I see tend to focus on airports. To my mind, this misses half the point, because flight is about being in the air, not on the ground. One of the points which consistently gets made is that the majority of simulated flights aren't completed - either they are terminated in mid-air, or the plane is slewed nearer to its destination, or fast-forwarded, or whatever. The reason for this is that there isn't much to see in the middle of an FS flight, quite the reverse of what real flying is about, most pilots viewing landings as the penalty you have to pay for getting such a good view on the way. In the last year or so, the penny has finally dropped and developers are beginning to release products which fill in the space between landing and taking off in Flight Simulator. So far we have only seen a few really good VFR packages, but Fly The Lakes is one of them and Cloud9 are to be congratulated on releasing it.