France VFR - Guadeloupe For FS2004/FSX

ne aspect of flightsim which maintains many peoples interest in the hobby is its ability to be expanded. Take just the scenery area alone, there are a multitude of both freeware and payware sceneries (practically all available here at FlightSim.Com either in the file libraries or the Pilot Shop) with many different approaches to enhancing the view out of the cockpit. Included in these are add-on airports, mesh upgrades, photographic textures, repainted textures, landclass updates, corrected roads and rivers data, right down to individually modeled buildings, etc. It makes you wonder sometimes if Microsoft shouldn't look into renaming it "World Sim"!

The France VFR team have a good philosophy when it comes to scenery development in that rather than taking a large area and enhancing part of the scenery within that area, they have improved smaller areas but more comprehensively. By that I mean instead of offering just photographic textures of a region they include with them re-modeled airports, individually placed autogen and lots of added objects to help bring the local flavor to life. Their scenery for Guadeloupe continues this theme and as I hope I can show you, makes a VFR flight around this central Caribbean group of islands a real joy.

Guadeloupe is roughly midway down the Caribbean island chain and like many of them has had a somewhat troubled past with various nations claiming sovereignty over the centuries. France first gained an interest in Guadeloupe when the French American Islands Company chose it as prospective colony in 1635. Britain and Sweden also had a look in at some stage but eventually France took control in 1815 after relinquishing their interests in Canada. The history of Gaudeloupe is evolving even to this day with St. Martin and St. Barthelemy (also modeled by France VFR; read a review here) leaving the group in February 2007 and becoming separate French overseas collectivities. Guadeloupe now comprises the two main islands of Basse-Terre and Grand-Terre, along with the islands of La Desirade, Les Saintes and Marie-Galante and all get a work over in France VFR's offering.

The 80 MB download (or CD if you prefer) includes the installer, Word docs in English and French and a patch installer to bring this primarily FS2004 scenery up to FSX standards.

Installation is a little tricky. For some strange reason the installer assumes you already have France VFR's La Martinique scenery installed and if you don't you are directed to get stuck into the FSX file structure deleting some files and copying others. I find this odd in the age of self installers and is definitely something France VFR need to address as I am sure this will put a few potential purchasers off. That said, many of us are used to this sort of thing when installing freeware so I am sure there will be others that won't be bothered at all by this and I must say I have seen a lot worse installation routines.

Having a look into the program menu after installation reveals an uninstaller, PDF manuals in both French and English, and a chart for each of the six airports included, again in PDF format. This is a nice touch, again not something you get with many add-on sceneries.

OK, let's go for a flight. I started at the main airport Le Raizet-TFFR. The loading of the flight took an awful long time the first time I ran FSX after installation but I am not sure this wasn't my PC having a "moment" as after that first flight the loading times were not a lot longer than standard. This is good news when you consider the included photo-textures. Le Raizet airport had been very well modeled and there was plenty to have a look at there. Immediately after take-off I noticed the additional AI traffic. There was a lot more happening here with road and water traffic all being increased. In fact having taken a flight using the default scenery first as a comparison I hadn't noticed any road traffic before. All of the airports here are close to the coast so it's not long before you notice the work France VFR have put into re-jigging the coastlines which look a lot more realistic as a result.

Climbing up to 2500 feet the photographic textures really start to show themselves off and looking towards the hills the effect is superb. Unfortunately though it is these same textures which tend to let the product down as far as FSX goes. The FSX patch did nothing to bring these textures up to the resolution standard of FSX and below 2500 feet I would even go as far as to say they look "dated", giving the whole scenery the typical FS2004 "leopard spots". It just goes to show how quickly you get used to a new edition of flight sim. The standard FSX textures are much sharper at low level as can be seen by the comparison shots but as many FSX users will know are also much blander in their coloration.

FSX screen shot

France VFR screen shot

The main islands are where there is most going on. France VFR have depicted the slightly industrial feel of the port area very well with large storage tanks, cranes, etc. There are cruise ships and tankers in dock and out among the islands you can spot ferries amongst the increased leisure boat traffic. An added bonus is that none of this seemed to affect the frame rates adversely although I did see a slight drop around Le Raizet. Having the frame rates set at unlimited in FSX got me a fairly constant 50 fps and although in the main they stayed the same with the scenery installed I did see drops down to around 20 fps in this area. See the sidebar for my system specification to gauge how it may perform on your own system.

The enhanced mesh included is worth a mention as this is a big improvement over the default and shows off the peaks of the islands very well. The photo-textures here really making a difference too.

The buildings of the smaller airports don't add an awful lot but this is due to the fact that there is so little there anyway. It was nice to hang around at one of the samller airports though just to watch the AI microlights hopping in and out.

To sum up I would say as an FS2004 add-on it works really well and represents great value for money as it is such a complete package. As an FSX add-on it is let down to some degree by the textures, by the time you are up high enough for the textures to look OK you are then too high to take in all of the buildings and objects added. I hope that the France VFR team are looking into a purely FSX version and if so I will be at the head of the queue.

Keith Hackett
keith.hackett@btinternet.com

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