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FScene Fall Textures / Carenado's Cessna 210
By Terblanche Jordaan (16 December 2003)
e've waited long
enough for a Cessna C210 to show up on our screens. Sure there have been
various attempts by designers to recreate the C210 for MSFS but I
must say, as soon as one saw the effort you deleted the aircraft and
sell the metal for scrap, hoping the cash will one day buy a decent
Cessna C210. Well the time has arrived!
Carenado has done it again with their superb design of this very
popular aircraft. Depends on where you live in the world but in South
Africa it must be one of thee most popular aircraft ever bought by
farmers, businessmen and safari operators. It's powerful and could
land anywhere from a ground road to a grass field. You could load five
passengers with you and still climb to over 7500' with ease. The
maintenance is relatively low compared to its Beech and Piper rivals.
Enough of the blah-blah sales talk, let us get into the plane and
take a trip in Europe and the US.
I've decided to take two short trips. The first one starts in Europe
at the beautiful Lugano (LSZA) airport on the border between Italy
and Switzerland. I've installed the incredible Mesh Scenery for the
area from
Lago to add a little spice to the trip!
We will be flying over the mountains and have some farm and town scenery on this short trip. We will overfly the small town of Lugano as well as the larger city of Milan, giving us plenty opportunity to compare the default and FScene textures.
It is not my first review on the textures by Ruud Faber but this man knows what he is doing and soon after the release of FS2004 he had the first textures updated and out for an update on the default textures. When you get into the C210, the first thing you notice is the detailed panel. The gauges are beautifully rendered and also authentic to the era that the C210 was conceived. You have a larger IFR panel and a VFR panel for those visual landings.
We take off from runway 01 and climb to 3000 feet over the city of Lugano. With a precision turn we head back to the airfield and here we could see the first BIG difference in the textures on the ground. Remember the flight was taken on November 1st 2003 and it is FALL with every color turning to those wonderful deep yellow gold and purple brown maroon's...
Now let me begin by saying that I for one like the new textures of FS2004. Boy-oh-boy, I have a few other complaints about FS2004 but not the textures. What Ruud did was to compliment these wonderful default textures with some textures that will enhance and others that will bring to light certain areas. His textures are exactly the same size as the default ones and you will not compromise any frames per second by replacing the default ones with his.
Notice the more green and brown color that stand out, as well as the absolutely incredible VC that Carenado created for the C210. Every gauge is clickable and very clear to read. As we pass the airfield and go over the lake we pass a small town and here we see the real difference between the default and FScene textures.
Closer to Milan the difference becomes even more apparent and as we start our descent we look back at the mountains in the back and for a moment your screen becomes a window to what it looks like in real life. We land at Milan (LIMC) airport and as we turn to final I hit the gear lever and switched to the outside and the detail of this model made my jaw drop. You could even image seeing the hydraulics pumping a few black spots onto your T-shirt.
The lights and reflections are very well done and the gear moves exactly as the real aircrafts. It's a pity that FS2004 has no better control over the sensitivity and 'feeling' within the controls because I've flown many hours in a real C210 and my Microsoft Force Feedback 2 with all the settings within FS2004, are still too sensitive for most of the aircraft. Now, when you do your conversion from a C172 to the C210 (like I did) the first thing you have to learn, is to control your airspeed. The C210 is fast - very fast! And if you do not plan your descent and especially your approach, you will most definitely cock up your landing. But Carenado got that right as well. You really have to be careful when you approach your airfield and do your checks!
After landing at Milan, we could have a cup of coffee and then ask
Scotty to beam us up and down to Washington State in the USA where we
will take our second trip... Our second trip is from a small
airfield called Grand County (KMWH) and we will fly a cross country trip
to KYKM and for that we have to uninstall the Europe Textures and
install the USA Textures.
Ruud has provided us with a very nice utility that will do the switches for you. Once the utility is installed you could simply install the textures that will write itself to the folder of your utility and then within the utility it will write itself to the destination of your FS2004. When FALL has pasted, you will get your WINTER textures and this will install it for you automatically.
So we take off from KMWH and we climb out over the small town. The difference in scenery texture is more apparent in the US as within Europe. I do not know why and I guess it has something to do with the landclass that MSFS uses in the US. What I mean by saying this is - in Europe the FScene textures blend much better in with the other default textures that you have not overwritten. I did find the differences sometimes annoying simply because the disparity are just too obvious (see the next pictures). And it seems that in the US there are much more farm textures used as within Europe and it seems that some of the farm textures have not been edited by Ruud, making the contrast just too visible.
If you look at the pictures takes shortly after take-off you will see in the FScene picture the beautiful green of the farms and then the color of the drier 'desert look alike' ground in the back.
We overfly VOR EAT and turn left to our destination. Look at the screenshots of the VC of the C210 and notice that you could even click on the VOR1 and VOR2 gauges for heading readings as well as the heading on the RMI. We approach our destination with a feeling of worth and thankfulness to Carenado for adding to our joy and hobby and for Ruud for his dedication to make the textures of towns, farms, cities and forests look so much more real than in the default scenery.
The C210 will cost you $17 and could be ordered from the Carenado web site with a big bonus to it: no paranoia over copyright, no hidden codes and files all over the show! You buy, you pay, you get, you install, you fly, you enjoy! And there is no greed ... just a price that fits everyone's pocket - because what else could you buy on the web for $17? Worth every cent.
The frame rate on the C210 did get a little hiding on my older P4 1.7 MHz with 512 DDR RAM and a FX5600Pro 256 DDR video card. Not much - I would say about 3 - 4 frames/sec. I suspect that the model and paint job (with all the bitmapping and extra paraphernalia) has something to do with it and not the panel.
The FScene Texture will cost you €19 for a set. That means you pay €19 for the USA & Canada Fall textures and €19 for the Europe Fall Textures. And they are available from www.simmarket.com or you could visit Ruud Faber's homepage to find out more.
As for now the following FScene2004 files are available:
