French Polynesia Series
By Phil Colvin (October 30 2002)
ow would you like to explore
a sparkling tropical paradise, where things are so vastly improved that
your Flight Simulator 2002 is virtually remade? Where you can almost feel
the breeze and hear the waves! Trust me, we're talking about a combination
of downloads that you'd expect to pay a lot of money for as an add-on
package, and once again they're all free thanks to some very talented and
generous people. I'm going to be spending a lot of time in this part of the
world - and thanks to one of the downloads I'll mention, anyplace there's
water. I'm covering three different kinds of download here because of the
tremendous impact they have together, and because I was motivated to try
the second two by Bill Melichar's recomendations in his Polynesia readme
files.
First of all, we have Bill Melichar's French Polynesia downloads. Just one add-on would have been a nice place to visit occasionally, but how about seven? This upgrades the region in a major way. First there was Tahiti International, then Bora Bora Airport, then airfields for Moorea, Huahine, Raiatea and Maupiti. Finally I just installed Bill's Bora Hotels download, which he announced would be his final effort in the French Polynesia series. Great job, sir! Combine these new airports with Rolf Keibel and John Applegate's French Polynesia terrain mesh and Ed Truthan's ocean textures and water effects, and you've virtually reinvented your sim!
Each of the airports has static aircraft, night lighting and added palm trees in the vicinity. And depending on where you visit you'll also find service vehicles, busloads of tourists, parking lots full of brightly colored cars and luxury resort hotels, not to mention outlying villages. Tahiti, for example, includes a seaplane base, boat docks and a whole regatta of ships offshore. Many such improvements are around all the airports you'll install. Maupiti's Mount Teurafaatiu even has a summit airstrip that's very challenging, but you'll need to install the terrain mesh I'll mention - back to that later. And topping it all off is Bill's Bora Hotels download, with four hotels, the town of Vaitape and my favorite part, a series of bamboo piers extending far out from the shore. Bill gives due credit in this particular package to John de Langristin for most of the boats and all of the bamboo structures. All these improvements take a part of the world that is highly generic by default and transform it into a region where you'll definitely want to go island-hopping. One little flaw: there is a stand of palms growing out of thin air past the edge of the cliff at the Teurafaatiu airstrip. If you read this Bill, could you fix that when you get around to it?
And those downloads aren't all you can do to beautify the islands - not by a long shot! Bill reccomends you install Rolf Keibel and John Applegate's French Polynesia terrain mesh for Combat Flight Simulator 2, and after giving it a try I heartily agree! This new mesh adds tremendous detail to the default landscape. New, impressive mountains appear in places like Bora Bora and Maupiti and the shape of the coastlines becomes far more varied and exact. And the visibility of the terrain is quite good; you can see many of the islands in the chain from miles away as you fly from one to the next. Furthermore, unlike some mesh downloads, it doesn't appear to interfere at all with AutoGen. Although the readme file warns of "numerous issues", on my system I've had no problem at all using it in FS2002. My system is a one gig P3 with 384 megs sdram and a 64 meg GeForce 2 Ultra.
And we're still not done! The coup de gras to our island improvements is also one that you can enjoy all over the world. It's Ed Truthan's Environmental Water Textures Library, along with his Water Surface Effects package for FS2002. Most likely I needn't mention this part to many of you, since these wonderful downloads have already both been recognized with FlightSim.Com Developer's Awards. I saw them available on the site of course, but had already been disappointed to the point of apathy by other water texture replacements, so never gave them a try. These textures and effects are so diverse and customizable that I can only mention them here; they richly deserve their own detailed review (could be wrong, but I didn't see one yet)! Suffice it to say for the moment that water is now far more beautiful, more varied by location and believable than it was. You'll find yourself going back to places you haven't visited in awhile because the water just wasn't commensurate with the rest of your sim environment.
By the way, for those interested, featured in many of the screen shots
is Mike Stone's
Grumman Goose. Also used are the
Piper J3 Cub by Steve Small, Yannick Lavigne, Manuel Medel and
Aaron Swindle,
and Greg Pepper's
Beech 18.
Just take a look at those before and after screen shots. Looks like a whole different product, doesn't it? Only the aircraft and sky are the same. I know I say it in just about every review, but it really does never cease to amaze me how many ways we can add to and upgrade the MS Flightsim series thanks to the labors of so many freeware developers of sceneries, aircraft, utilities etc. If we want to, on a daily basis! Thank you so much, everybody. And while I'm at it, thanks to the folks who maintain and update the web sites! It's no exaggeration at all to say that you increase our enjoyment of and enthusiasm for our hobby a hundredfold.
Phil Colvin
gimpyfoot1@yahoo.com
