Lago GeoRender 4 & 5 Sceneries

By Andrew Herd (30 August 2003)

ne of the stranger and more unaccountable things about Flight Simulator - apart from the way the developers all get on so well together - is that the vast majority of sceneries feature large airports. If your experience of aviation was derived entirely from FS addons, you would gain the impression that few runways are less than a couple of thousand yards long and that most airports have at least six of them. Needless to say, that isn't the case and 90% of flights around the world are made from short unpaved runways; a case in point being Barra, in the west of Scotland, where a scheduled airline service operates from a beach - without grass and gravel strips, general (and some commercial) aviation couldn't exist.

So while it isn't surprising that Lago's GeoRender series of sceneries are popular, it beats me why other developers haven't gotten in on the act and done something similar. I'll agree that other GA sceneries can be found, but it takes a lot of searching and there are very few that compare with Emma Field, Diamond Point, or, now that they have been released, Darrington Municipal and Forks Airport - the fourth and fifth sceneries in the GeoRender set. As you can see from the screenshots, the GeoRender brand guarantees minute attention to detail and a level of realism that other products simply don't achieve.

There is a price to pay for all this, of course. We have gotten used to our airports being designed using a broad brush and delivered in half dozens - whereas Lago's sceneries cost 19.99 euros ($22.65) for a single field. Yep, they ain't cheap when you think that if you hunt around, you can get a clutch of international airports for five bucks a pop, but on the other hand, if you really look hard at what you get for those five dollars, it isn't quite in the same league. GeoRender packages are designed down to the last tree and oil drum and their users take for granted a level of detail that you just can't get elsewhere. Fly from Darrington or Forks a couple of times and I guarantee that Flight Simulator will never seem the same again.

So if the GeoRender series is that good, how come they haven't taken over all of FS? I guess there are a couple of reasons why not: first, it takes a long time to baby sceneries like this through the research and design stage; and second, they demand reasonably fast machines to look at their best. This is the Catch-22 of FS scenery: if it looks good it ain't fast, and if it is fast, it ain't good. No rocket science is involved here; the bottom line being that more polygons it has to display, the slower Flight Simulator runs - and when it has to load photographic textures on top, you had better have some serious horsepower to stick them on screen. Ultimately the choke point in Flight Simulator is the CPU, rather than the graphics card, because the processor is has to deal with the flight dynamics, the physics engine, weather, ATC, AI planes and control and engine management way before it starts worrying about fancy stuff like scenery.

The minimum spec that Lago give for the two sceneries is:

• Pentium II 750 MHz
• 64 Mb RAM
• 30 Mb hard disk space
• FS2002 Standard or Pro (FS2004 upgrade scheduled for early September)
• Windows 98 or better

The developers recommend a 32 Mb 3D card, 128 Mb RAM and a 1.0 Ghz Pentium. Personally, I would treat this as the minimum spec, because the sceneries stretched my 1.7 Ghz Pentium and I was down to 15 frames per second on a 3.0 Ghz machine at times. Doing an approach in a fancy addon plane to either field on a sub 1.0 Ghz machine in anything other than blue sky would kill frame rates stone dead.

Now under normal circumstances, after setting the target frame rate at about 18, you can leave Flight Simulator to work out its own priorities about what to display, but GeoRender 4 and 5 introduce some new considerations. The first is that many of the objects disappear unless \settings\display\aircraft\aircraft texture isn't set to 'massive'; and the second is that dynamic scenery must be set to 'extremely dense' to see any moving vehicles and aircraft. In this respect the GeoRender sceneries dpeart from the norm because they don't use AI traffic, a decision that Lago say they made because it allowed them to create more complex tracks and to include chopper animations. That being said, the fields are hardly crowded and only boast four tracks between them. The other problem is that by and large, neither of the sceneries is compatible with third party mesh, since they incorporate their own - if you do have a favorite mesh that includes the area, the only advice I have is to experiment and see how well the fields pair up with it.

We'll deal with GeoRender 4 first - Darrington Municipal, which is a 35 Mb download from Lago's website. After downloading the file, using the on-line payment system generates an unlocking code which is sent by email. Installation is automatic and creates a program group in addition to unpacking the scenery into your Flight Simulator setup. The routine also installs a Lago item in the FS2002 menu, which can be used to check the version number should you ever need to upgrade.

The manual is a standard Lago pdf, which gives just about enough detail about the real airport to whet your appetite before describing the display settings needed to show the sim off to advantage. The addon includes a large number of incredibly convincing custom buildings, some of which have smoke effects and there are also fireworks on Memorial and Independence days. The field is only 500 feet above mean sea level, but there are mountains all around and it pays to start your turns soon after take off if you don't want to make friends with the trees. Needless to say, there is more to it than just a few hangars and trees and as is rapidly becoming a tradition with these sceneries, when you switch the engine off you can hear birds in the woods, aircraft engines and even noises from the hangar - just don't transfer there too quick from Emma Field because they are the same birds, engines and hangar noises. There are a couple of flight plans thrown in and I enjoyed using the scenery, even if I landed a little left of the centerline the first time I came in (but I do like that Robin). There are trees at either end of the runway, so you have to think a little about the approach.

Darrington is one of Lago's less complex sceneries in terms of the field itself, though it compensates by providing thousands of acres of custom textured terrain which make local VFR flights a pleasure. Forks Airport is larger, with a more extensive range of buildings and this time it lies in the foothills, rather than nestled among the mountains themselves. The approaches, you will be relieved to hear, are clear of trees, but someone has thoughtfully strung wires a couple of hundred yards back from the threshold of 04. Wires are one of those things that real pilots worry about the whole time, because the vast majority of them aren't marked and they aren't easy to see, either, so it is nice to see them in FS sceneries now and again. The download is 49 megs this time and installation uses the same process, creating all the folders and program menu items automatically, so a total beginner could install it as long as he or she can handle remembering which directory the download was saved into and double click it. The airport is accessed via the S18 identifier in FS2002.

Forks is at just under 300 feet AMSL and the runway is 2400 feet long, which should be enough to get anything except the Lear down on (and you can always try it). Once again, the field is not far from Seattle, and if you have Flying M Ranch, Diamond Point, Emma Field and Darrington, you will be able to put together a pleasant afternoon's flying between them - the only drawback being that it will cost you more than $100.00 to buy them all. Depending on how you see these things, that's a bargain, because you don't have to take into account any fuel or maintenance, but it would be neat if Lago offered the set at a discount.

Circuits are left hand on 04 and right hand on 22 and there isn't much else to know about the place, other than it is in Washington State and blue skies as shown in the screenshots aren't exactly common. These sceneries will really come into their own when they are upgraded to be FS2004 compatible, because scud running is an essential skill in this part of the world. Lago assure me that they are in the process of updating the installer and dlls and that an FS2004 patch will not take too long to complete.

One of the things you will notice about Forks is that the countryside around it shows noticeable seasonal variations, so don't get used to using fields as landmarks, because they change as time passes. There is a factory near the 04 threshold which belches smoke, a highway sign complete with bullet holes and a monument to the loggers who cleared the Pacific Northwest. As a bonus, you get a startup situation and a touring flight plan.

One of the best things about these sceneries is that because they are modelled on real fields, you don't come across any of the peculiarities common to FS small field packages - such as fantastically tough approaches. While there are real fields with badly obstructed approaches, they aren't that common in reality because no-one except a madman would choose to risk their life if it could be avoided. That being said, I have a book somewhere around the house called 'Fly Idaho' which features several strips that make my hair stand on end and I fly from a place that is regarded as reasonably challenging.

I didn't find any serious bugs with either of the packages and although I experienced some disappearing buildings when using spot plane view with the Robin, it didn't happen with other planes, so I think the issue may be due to some strange interaction between this particular plane and the scenery.

I am a serious fan of the GeoRender series. While the releases have centered on Washington State, GeoRender 2 is a hot and high field in Bryce Canyon National Park. There is also a near companion to the set in the form of Escalante and Hurricane, a Richard Goldstein Southern Utah package which was marketed by Flight1 at one time and for which I can no longer trace a vendor. Richard is credited in Lago's documentation as being responsible for the concept and overall design of the GeoRender series and if you take a moment to scan through the screenshots in the other reviews, you will notice a strong family resemblence between them all as a result of his involvement.

There is no doubt that these packages are classics and they deserve to sell really well. In my experience of using Flight Simulator, you tend to take stuff like this for granted and then one day, you realise it isn't available any more - so it is extremely good news to hear that Lago plan to upgrade the series for FS2004. If you enjoy this kind of airfield, but want to stick with freeware, you ought to try the bush sceneries by Naji Chehabeddine, which first appeared for FS2000 and nine of which have been upgraded for FS2002 - and given that Washington State and Alaska aren't that far apart, some really interesting flights could be organised between them all.

Andrew Herd
andrew@flightsim.com