Lago Georender 2 And Twin Otter

By Andrew Herd (30 January 2003)

aving reviewed Georender 3, with Lago's Ultralight package, I realised with a start that I had missed out Georender 2, which sounds like one of the more interesting sceneries Richard Goldstein and the Lago team have done. So I turned to the enormous, tottering stack of downloads which fills my hard disk and began to sort my way through it. In the process I realised that Lago must release about one in ten of all the new releases we see for Flight Simulator, which isn't bad going, when you consider that they appeared to be dead in the water only a couple of years ago.

It might interest you to know how the market for FS add-ons works. The traditional route for add-on developers is to work up a few freeware packages and, if they are successful, to go on to do payware, although that doesn't always happen and some stay with freeware throughout their careers. If you read our article on how flightsim aircraft are developed, you will realise that it is a very complex process and much the same applies to scenery, so it is common for programmers to band together and share their talents in the creation of products. Sometimes, programmers find other like minded people and form their own teams, but often the glue that holds them together is the organisation that markets their products, Lago being a good example of this type of arrangement. Independent teams either sell their products direct, like FSD, RealAir Simulations or PSS; or they use a publisher like JustFlight, or FlightOne, to do the packaging and sales.

Richard Goldstein is a good example of a developer who has paid his dues in freeware and moved on, his specialty being cameo sceneries that are among the most believable I have ever seen in FS. The other day, I caught myself typing, 'This scenery looks so real I could easily believe it was a Goldstein product,' which goes to show how good the man is. We have reviewed many sceneries which Richard has been involved in, including Escalante and Hurricane, Flying M Ranch, Emma Field, Diamond Point and now we have Bryce.

Before you read any further, take a moment to load FS2002 and go visit Bryce (KBCE). There isn't much there, is there? Just a few huts and a runway and it looks like a hundred other FS fields, dull and uninteresting, no particular reason to go there despite its proximity to Bryce Canyon National Park. In the real world, every field is different, I remember going to Sturgate once (EGCS, several thousand miles from Bryce, in Lincolnshire, England) and being entranced by its immaculately preserved World War 2 tower and the Antonov biplane up for sale next to it. I still fantasize about buying the Antonov, because it must be about the largest thing that can be flown on a single engined PPL. Anyway, Bryce is like Sturgate - when you see what it looks like in reality, you want to visit it - and Richard has made it look about as real as you can get (yeechhh, must think of a different way of saying that <g>) in FS2002.

Even with Georender 2 installed, there isn't that much at Bryce, but when you pass 2500 feet above, it makes you think, 'Yeah, I think I'll take a look down there.' This is where your problems begin... heh, heh. If you are 2500 feet above Bryce, you are at 10,000 feet ASL - I can only recall having gone that high on a couple of occasions in a light aircraft. The airstrip is operated by Steve Winters of M&S Aero, who does shuttle flights to Las Vegas and sight-seeing trips down the canyon, so maybe we'll take a look see.

The runway is 7400 feet long, but then it needs to be at this altitude. Bryce is available for emergency landings by regional flights and the largest aircraft to set down there was an American Airlines MD-80 which had an electrical fire. The pilot described the arrival as 'exciting but safe,' which inspired me to have a crack myself using FlightOne's DC9 - he's right.

Georender 2 is available as a 22 Mb download (only) from Lago's website and costs 15 euro. The minimum spec for running it is 750 MHz Pentium III with 128 Mb RAM, 30 Mb of free hard disk and Windows 98 (SE), Windows ME, Windows NT (SP-4), Windows 2000 Workstation, or Windows XP. Note that Windows 95 is not supported. The download and installation presented no problems and created a new program group as well as a link to the manual from the desktop. It is worth noting that the scenery comes with two different meshes and there is an option to manually edit the setup to use the lower quality set, as the high detail mesh will significantly impact on frames on sub gigahertz machines. The Bryce mesh is so extensive that it impacts on Richard's Escalante and Hurricane scenery, if you have that installed, which is a shame - the mesh terminates virtually at the threshold of one of the runways and the only way to fix it is to deactivate Bryce in the scenery library. It is worth mentioning that if you manually edit scenery.cfg, there is a danger that these new Lago sceneries can disappear and the only way to get them back is to reinstall them, as far as I can see.

Bryce comes with all the usual Lago goodies, including aircraft tracks driven by their own software and you can taxi right inside the main hangar, if you want. Depending on the time of day you will see planes flying over, landing and departing and listen to sounds of work going on in the hangar and in the surrounding desert. You get a couple of flight plans - to Salt Lake City and back - and if you have Escalante and Hurricane, you can fly there too, although those sceneries are marketed by FlightOne and you have to cope with the mesh incompatibility. It would be in the interests of everyone to sort this one out, because they make a good pair - Escalante is less than 30 nautical miles distant, Hurricane just over sixty.

Bryce exposes a couple of interesting flaws in FS2002, the first being that its ground layer wind model doesn't work this high up! I have noticed this in the past at Telluride and (I think) at Aspen, both of which, come to think of it, would be great sceneries for the Goldstein/Lago approach. The solution is to use something like FSUIPC, which fixes all kinds of other FS bugettes and is free, but there is a manual work around given in the manual. The second is that FS2002's autostart doesn't work reliably at altitude, mostly because it doesn't like turning over engines with the mixture set fully rich - which is fair enough, when you think about it. Leaning is the key to flying high, so remember to do it if you don't have autolean set! The other thing you must do at places like Bryce is to have indicated airspeed set - many people try to fly in FS without doing this and while it won't cause any problems near the ground, it will once you are higher than a few thousand feet. Real airspeed indicators don't give you true airspeed and there is no good reason I can think of for using it in Flight Simulator. It is possible to fly normally aspirated planes from Bryce, but you will find that turboprops are better, because they don't run out of air - the source of all the problems at altitude is that the air is thin.

So I cast around looking for a turboprop and what should I come up with, but version 1.1 of the Twin Otter? Now even Lago would admit that this sim has had a more complicated than usual development, but to be fair, the guy's have stuck with it, issuing a welter of patches until finally, almost phoenix-like, the Twotter has risen from its ashes.

Once again, the Twin Otter is only available as a 36 Mb from Lago's website, at a cost of 20 euro. For this, you get four different versions of the plane: wheeled, on floats, amphibious and on skis; and sixteen different liveries, ranging from the British Antarctic Survey to a private US registration. If you buy Bryce, you get another Otter, sat on the lower right hand edge of the parking lot in the screen shot above, but you can't fly that one (-: All the screen shots show the wheeled version, but the other variants are just as good - I particularly liked the amphibian.

The download and installation went fine, creating the usual program group and leaving me to read a 31 page manual. For all that anyone who is familiar with the Caravan ought to be able to get it in the air, remember we are hot and high here, so it is worth skimming through the literature, not least because it is a relatively complicated panel. The Twin Otter was designed in the sixties as a big brother to the DHC-3 Otter, its twin PT-6s allowing it to fly further and faster, while carrying more payload; yet still capable of operating off the same runways. The Twin Otter borrows its predecessor's wings and fuselage, stretches them and adds double slotted trailing edge flaps and ailerons that droop together to boost STOL performance. Production ceased in 1988 with the 844th hull, but the planes live on because they are so useful and all kinds of modifications have been retrofitted over the years.

Why does the Twin Otter go well with Bryce? Well, this is a bush plane, par excellence. The last encounter I had with one was in the Scottish Highlands, where it was operating off the hard sand below the high tide mark - and that was a scheduled flight. If you think 'big turbo-beaver' then you are in the ballpark, and it is just as fun to fly.

The visual model is good without being super-detailed. I have seen Gmax planes that have modelled the rivets around the windshield, but the Twotter doesn't go quite that far. There is some restrained panel line detailing and the doors, wheels and control surfaces have been worked over, but if you open the doors, the interior has had a great deal of attention paid to it and the collection of aerials on the top of the fuselage would have my mother hanging out the washing in the blink of an eye. The effect is certainly pleasing on the eye and best of all, it doesn't kill frames - I found the Otter extremely well behaved in this respect, which added greatly to the enjoyment of using it. The cockpit and interior can be lit and I recommend doing at least one night flight just to see it.

The liveries vary from the so-so to the excellent, but the general standard is acceptable and no bleed throughs occur anywhere. One or two of the textures did show blurring and that slightly dull, glaucous appearance that reflective textures seem to be prone to. My very critical eye spotted a few irregularities in body lines - as in the screen shot shown left, but on the whole the standard of painting was good.

All the control surfaces move and yes, the ailerons do droop with the flaps, (I checked). There are some neat animations of opening doors and the wheels roll, which is just as well - I can't recall the last time I saw an FS plane where they didn't. As far as I can see, the undercarriage legs don't flex and I landed the sim as hard as I could trying to demonstrate the feature. One place where the animation departs from reality is that the flaps can only be lowered in stages, but this is a limitation of Flight Simulator. It would be good to see this fixed by Microsoft, because many aircraft, the Twin Otter included, let you put the flaps wherever you want them and being limited to three stages isn't quite as real as it gets. On the other hand POH's usually specify fixed amounts of flap and everything in Flight Simulator is an approximation, so maybe we shouldn't worry. Should you be wondering where the flap position indicator is, it is on the riser there, just above the whisky compass.

The flight model wasn't exactly the best feature of the original Twotter release, but that is now ancient history and the sim flies better now, just within the characteristics I would expect of this class of plane, albeit with a slightly high rate of roll and rather faster response in most axes than is appropriate for a 6000 pound plane with a 65 foot wingspan. It also 'floats' more than might be expected when flaring at the 75-80 knots. The real DHC-6 is reputedly an interesting plane to fly, because for all its size, it combines seriously good short field performance with approach speeds comparable to those of a light aircraft, but the sim flies more like a small twin than a big one. Were it to be perfect, Lago need to address this.

The secret of the Twin Otter is in the low loading of its advanced wing and those big flaps. At sea-level, the takeoff run is only 700 feet and the ground run is a paltry 515 - virtually the same as a Cessna 172, which is nearly four times lighter. Performance takeoffs in these planes are done by dropping twenty degrees of flap, applying full power and holding the yoke fully aft until the wheels come off - before pushing the yoke reasonably briskly forwards to gain flying speed.

Generous ailerons give you control right into the stall and all in all, just about the only problem you might run into is getting the power and speed wrong on approach, which is the way of all turboprops. The end is always the same - you chop the throttles because you are too high and then find the engines won't spool up in time to prevent the subsequent undershoot! The other problem is that in the sim at least, you need to be careful about late flap adjustments, because the trim changes may be too great for you to cope with. For what it is worth, the approach is generally flown at 85 knots/flaps 20, going to full flap on short final if needed and touching down at 70 knots. Like the FSD Porter, the Lago Twotter simulates beta pitch (retard the throttle to idle, then press and hold F2 until the engine note changes, hit F1 or move the throttle lever to go back to idle) which is used much like reverse thrust, with the exception that it can - completely unauthorised this - be used to slow down steep descents. I had great fun playing around doing almost vertical approaches with it, but just make sure that you disengage beta by blipping the throttle before landing, or you will have some spectacular accidents. The manual contains a 'do it by numbers' flight from Brussels to London City, which I recommend working through if you want to get a feel for the plane.

The sim has one of the best hand drawn panels I have seen. There are pros and cons to these - on the one hand, they eliminate the shading, focus and perspective effects which are difficult to eliminate from digitally photographed panels, on the other, you need a good artist to produce a half-way convincing panel. Lago has a good artist. When you first load the 2D cockpit view, you will find half the instruments obscured by a massive bar which supports the yoke, but this can be removed to give an unobstructed view. There are numerous subsidiary panels, popped up by clicking on the unobtrusive legends on the bottom left edge of the dashboard. The radios on the main panel work, by the way, it is just that lazybones here didn't switch them on before he took the screen shot.

The first big surprise with the panel is how non-standard it is, but I have checked and this seems to be how many Twin Otters were fitted out. It is a little unnerving using an RMI rather than a DI to fly a heading, but logical in a plane that isn't fitted with an HSI. An RMI doesn't need to be reset against the compass all the time and you don't have to keep cross-checking two instruments to work out drift when you are flying a VOR radial. This is a transitional panel which belies its age, though once you get used to it, it poses few problems - it just takes a little bit of adjustment to stop looking at the VOR1 display, which is where the DI would have been if the Twotter had one...

Scanning across the panel, the rest of the layout is fairly standard, with the engine gauges stacked up in the center and the radios on their right. Some liberties have been taken with instrument siting to shoehorn them into the view, but that is inevitable. Almost every section of the panel, from the radios to the annunciators, can be popped up and viewed in detail, as shown left. The only two windows I haven't shown are the autopilot and the enlarged flying panel view.

I couldn't detect any problems with the operation of the panel, but given I have zero hours in Otters and my knowledge of them is vicarious in the extreme, I couldn't say whether everything works the right way or not, but allowing for the fact that 20 euros wouldn't buy you a single switch for a real plane, the developers have programmed all the features to work as I would expect them to do. The autopilot takes a little bit of getting used to, but otherwise is very like the default AP, with much the same functions. As with all FS2002 autopilots, it isn't terrific at shooting an ILS, but we Twotter pilots fly those with our head outside the cockpit, anyway. For what it is worth, you have to have the autopilot popped up to have more than an vague idea of which VOR radial you are tracking, because the VOR1 card lacks numbers and the only source of precise data is the repeater on the AP. Interesting. I have never seen anything like this in real life, but it doesn't mean it isn't so. A peculiarity of the autopilot is that if you set it up with the plane flying a nav or heading hold and with alt hold in and then switch off the power, the AP keeps on flying the plane and you have to power it back up in order to switch it off. I think this may be a bug...

One of the joys of Twin Otters is the engine controls, which right are up there on the roof. In my opinion, there is nothing like hanging from a set of throttles on takeoff to make you feel like a real pilot, as you chew your cigar and remember you must shave sometime in the next fortnight. The developers clearly realised that they would lose all the impact by sticking those big levers on a vertical panel, so they have created one of the few convincing perspective effect overheads that I have seen in FS. The only shame is that you can't physically grab the handles as you hurtle down the runway, but hopefully it is only a matter of time before one of the FS hardware suppliers rises to the challenge and puts us out of our misery - if so, I will be first in line to do the review. I may even shave for the pictures (-:

Twin Otter pilots use the overhead in every phase of flight, because not only are most of the switches up there, but the flap control too. All the panels have night lighting and if bilious green is the correct color then I am glad I have never had to fly one of these planes after dark.

One thing I noticed about this and other panels I review for Flight Simulator is that they are designed more to show off the instruments than for visual flight. Flying an approach using the 2D panel in the Twotter is tricky, because unless you descend at more than three degrees, it is easy to lose sight of the threshold - which isn't a problem in the real plane. Using the VC doesn't entirely solve the problem, unless you jiggle the eye point around, but if you swap from one cockpit to the other, make sure you do it on long final, as it takes time to adjust to the different view point.

The sound set is okay, but not outstanding. Which means it isn't bad, but neither is it good - I trust that makes it clear, right? The main problem I have with it is that it is one of the few sets I have listened to recently which features any kind of cycling; where there is noticeable repetition of sounds. Unfortunately, the sound that repeats is a 'boom' right at the middle of the cruise engine setting sound and while I am sure that many people won't notice it, I found myself cringing every time I knew it was coming around. It isn't that objectionable, but the rest of the package is good enough to deserve a little bit of editing here.

There is a sophisticated VC in which virtually all the instruments seem to work and everything appears to be animated. One thing that is missing, rather annoyingly, is the flap position indicator - if it was a question of priorities, I would far rather have had one of these than moving pedals. You do not get a virtual cabin, but the developers have presumably taken the view that if you can't do without such things you would go out and buy Passenger Simulator instead of FS2002. I have yet to see a really good virtual cabin and the better they are, the more of a performance hit they impose, so I can do without them, but you may have other ideas. On the whole, the VC is very well done graphically, without any of the chunkiness that marred the virtual cockpits in Lago's Ultralights (virtually the only thing that wasn't spot on in that package, by the way).

Now this is a passive VC, which means that you can't use the knobs and switches and Lago have chosen to get around it by making all the sub-panels available as separate windows, which means that you can pop them up in VC view using the appropriate key combinations. As we know, Wilco have found a way to allow the mouse to be used in the VC of the 737 that comes with Airport 2002 Volume 1, so it is disappointing to find that other developers haven't cracked the problem, though no doubt Wilco are smiling all the way to the bank. Whether you get on with the idea of popping up 2D windows in a 3D cockpit depends on how you use Flight Simulator, but I still don't think that the VC as it stands is the answer to all our problems. Nevertheless, Lago have made a brave attempt at taming it and it works. If you have a second monitor, you can stick all the subpanels on that and fly all the way on the VC.

While I think of it, Lago have stuck in a free copy of Active Camera with the Twotter, one purpose of which is to indulge your narcissistic tendencies as you use it to watch fly-bys, but the major advantage of which is that it allows you to pan around the VC with the mouse. I have found previous versions to be a little buggy on my setup.

And now, FX: drums roll... for the verdict. Well, what do you think? C'mon, you should have a reasonably good idea of whether you want to spend your money by now. Okay, if you want it, I will tell you my view, but be warned that my idea of value for money and yours may be wildly different.

Bryce, aka Georender 2, costs virtually nothing in FS add-on terms and although the airport itself doesn't boast a huge range of buildings, what it does have is top class and don't forget all the mesh that goes with it. So, it gets the thumbs up and not only that, it leaves me keen to see what Richard Goldstein and the Lago team come up with next, because I like their sceneries a great deal. Personally, I think Lago should negotiate to take Escalante and Hurricane back from FlightOne, upgrade it and sell it as a pair with Bryce.

The Twotter? Hmmmm. My feelings about the plane are colored by the state in which it was first released on an unsuspecting flight simming world, but at long last, Lago have managed to put the package to rights and it deserves its popularity. In choosing the Twin Otter, Lago made a smart choice of plane and it will sell for much the same reasons as the PSS Dash 8, although the two sims represent radically different approaches to the same problem. My preference is for photoreal panels, like the ones included in the Dash 8 and the DreamFleet 177, rather than hand-drawn ones, like the Twotter, or the FlightOne DC-9, but my view might change if all hand-drawn panels were as good as the one in this latest release from Lago. If the 'boom' could be got out of the sound set and the flight model tweaked one last time to make the plane a little stiffer, then I would have no worries about the Twotter - as it is, all I can say is that it kind of gets under your skin. I liked it a lot.

Buy Georender 2 here
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