German Airfields 3 - Lower Saxony For FSX
By Andrew Herd
21 August 2008
Aerosoft's German Airfields series arrived in great style with 'Island Hopping', which I reviewed earlier this year. This fantastic little addon included fifteen airfields strung out along the north coast of Germany and made a strong impression on me - we tend to pick the cream of the crop for the 'official' FlightSim.Com reviews, but Island Hopping is the cream of the cream and shows just what can be done in FSX, given a skilled enough development team. In case you haven't read the first review, Aerosoft's grand plan is to upgrade the entire German landscape, so that detailed small/medium sized airports 'bed in' to a realistically phototextured scenery. The series has been designed from the ground up as part of an ambitious program that will be organised as follows:
1. VFR Germany, which will upgrade the 'base' German scenery with 1 meter per pixel phototextures, thousands of visual reference points, custom autogen and corrected rivers and lakes (4 parts announced, of which 'West' has been released at the time of writing).
2. The 'Mega Airport' series, which will cover international hubs, like Frankfurt.
3. The German Airports' series, which will cover the larger airports (no details, but I would guess four parts).
4. German Airfields, which will be released in the form of 11 regional packs, covering the smaller fields.
Users will be free to buy whatever components they want depending on what type of simming they enjoy, but purchasing the entire set will be an expensive proposition - the one package in Aerosoft's catalog that doesn't seem to fit into the new strategy is German Landmarks X, which appears to overlap with VFR Germany in terms of the objects it provides and has to be installed in the layer below GA1. Even a conservative estimate points to around 20 packages to provide a complete FSX Germany, which means that the developers are going to have to go some if they are to complete the task before the next version of Flight Simulator is released.
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The Lower Saxony pack brings another 15 airfields: Brunswick-Wolfsburg, Hildenshaim, Rotenburg-Wumme, Osnabrucke-Atterheide, Gandarkesee/Atlas, Leer-Papenburg, Uelzen, Northeim, Salzgitter-Drutte, Hodenhagen, Verden-Scharnhorst, Luneburg, Nordhorn/Lingen, Damme and Bohmte-Bad Essen. For readers who aren't familiar with the area, Lower Saxony lies toward the north-east corner of Germany and the inverted-L shaped segment of land covered by the addon butts onto the German Airfields 1 area on its northern edge.
The package comes in a fat DVD-style box, which contains a single CD and a couple of manuals: the first is a 46 page German/English user's guide; the second contains the plates, which are necessarily a little on the small side, given the format. Whatever you do, don't lose the box, because it has the registration key printed inside, without which you won't get to first base. System requirements are given as FSX SP2 (or Acceleration), a 2.0 Ghz processor, a gig of RAM, a 256 Mb video card, 1.3 gigs of hard disk space and Windows XP SP2 or Vista. I did the review on a 2.66 Core2Duo with 4 Gb of RAM and a 768 Mb GeForce 8800GTX, running Vista SP1 and FSX with Acceleration installed and the only comment I have to make on the system spec is that I wouldn't advise running Vista in a gig of RAM, let alone Vista, FSX and an addon like this one, but apart from that, the recommendation is good, although where Flight Simulator is concerned, a faster processor is always an advantage.
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The installation is very easy, the only complicated bit being having to enter in the 21 digit registration key, but apart from that, you can leave everything to run unattended and it doesn't take long to complete. When the disk stopped grinding, I found a new Aerosoft German Airfields 3 program group on the Start Menu, containing links to a pdf version of the user's guide and a link to Google Earth which can be used to see where the fields are in reality - or at least Google Earth's idea of reality. The user's guide goes into some length about how best to set up FSX to run the addon, which is worth reading, because the phototextures which have been included in the package have been saved at a resolution of about 50 cm a pixel, so you will miss stuff if you leave the texture resolution at the standard FSX setting of 5 m a pixel. If the bird's eye view of Google Earth isn't enough to get you flying, Aerosoft have included a couple of missions, which are loaded under 'Aerosoft flights' and provide sight-seeing flights in the 172 for your convenience - one of them involves finding an escaped elephant, which can hardly be a common problem in Lower Saxony. You know, I've been thinking, it is extraordinary how many FSX addons seem to involve finding escaped elephants. A whole generation of simmers is going to grow up thinking that this is what real pilots do - I think the developers should get out more often (-:
The scenery follows the same rules as German Airfields 1 and a roughly 4 square kilometer area around each airport has been enhanced, but there are a couple of caveats. If you don't have VFR Germany installed, the joins between the photoreal rivers, roads and railroads in the GA3 scenery areas and the default scenery tiles are more obvious; and if you do have VFR Germany installed, the winter textures around the airfields are deactivated in order to 'improve' the appearance. So you can't win 'em all.
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What can I say, except, buy this and wonder why all scenery addons aren't done so well? I wouldn't have any interest in simming over Germany, were it not for Aerosoft's persistence at marketing such high quality product - I have been hooked on their stuff ever since I saw the first German Airports product and I have assiduously collected everything they have done since - as a publisher, Aerosoft is nothing if not consistent.
Island Hopping is an absolute classic and Aerosoft set themselves a tough task with regards to following it up, but although Lower Saxony isn't quite as eye-popping as the islands, it still manages to be quite stunning; which is saying something, since Lower Saxony is one of the less interesting places in Germany, being more or less completely flat. OK, it does have a few hills, but they are few and far between and you gain the impression that the rest of the landscape doesn't totally approve of them. The airfields have a good mix of hard and grass runways and vary from glider sites to small municipal airports, but by definition you don't get any of the majors - for that, you will have to buy the German Airports series. The best way of describing the fields themselves is probably to say that you won't see better outside the GeoRender series, which has the major advantage of only tackling one airfield at a time and in any case isn't available for FSX at the time of writing, which means that these are the best small airfields I have seen for FSX. The buildings are all very believable, with crisp textures that hold up until you get really close in and there is plenty of detailing on the individual fields, including airfield furniture (literally, in some cases) and custom fuel pumps to replace the ubiqitous default set. The grass textures in particular are very well done, but thanks to the high resolution of the photographic textures and careful placement of the AutoGen, the scenery stays believable right through the takeoff and climb out, and for once it is possible to fly around at circuit height without the ground below degenerating into a sloppy mess. The relatively tight 4 k limit to the phototextures around the perimeter of the fields means that you will need VFR Germany if you want to use visual reporting points - unless of course, these are present already in FSX, which they generally aren't - but the best news is that the edges have been reasonably carefully blended in and unless you really go looking for joins, you won't see them. As an example, if you look at the very top edge of the screenshot on the right of the first row, you can see a join, the key being the way the road suddenly cuts out at upper right - but you have to be looking for it to see it.
The winter textures aren't the best bit of the package, although
they are OK - all the developer appears to have done is to desaturate
the summer textures, so that you end up looking at a grayscale
landscape. It works, after a fashion, and it blends fairly well into
the default textures surrounding the airports, but I wouldn't regard
the idea of them going AWOL with VFR Germany installed as a suitable
excuse for crying into my stein. The screenshot above left is a
composite, showing a blend between the summer textures at the top and
the winter textures at the bottom, which pretty much makes the point.
Ordinarily, the winter textures wouldn't be anything to particularly
criticize, but the rest of the package is so damned good, I had to
find something to nit pick at (-: Just take a look at the large shot
of the lake in the second row of screenshots on the right and tell me
that the shoreline doesn't look real.
Overall? German Airfields is going to be a truly great series, if these two addons are anything to go on. Normally, I review an addon and delete it from my hard disk as I mail the review to Nels, on the basis that I almost certainly won't have time to use it again before I have to do another review. But German Airfields are staying on the drive. Respect, Aerosoft!
Andrew Herd
andy@flightsim.com
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