Ireland
By Bert Zengerink (15 February 1999)
here
is a new scenery on the web that is absolutely worth a further
look. I'm talking about IRE_V1.ZIP, a file which includes Ireland
and Northern Ireland. This project is outstanding in many ways, one
of them being the choice of the area by its creator Terry Shields. In
the end Ireland is one of the most beautiful countries in Europe, a
fact drastically overlooked by the Microsoft tycoons in the United
States; like most European countries the large island next to Great
Britain only got assigned one airport, namely the field near the
capital Dublin. Of course Ireland is worth more than that. Its green,
moist landscape is unique in the world, as are the countless castles,
scattered all over the country as a result of Ireland's rich history
that is much, much older than the history of aviation.
The default FS98 scenery dramatically fails to capture the
characteristics of Ireland. And that's exactly where Shields
forcefully jumps in, actually in a very simple manner. The main bulk
of the Ireland textures are provided by two "seed.r8" files which
have to be put in the main FS98 texture directory. Be sure not to
forget this, or else your Ireland won't show any textures at all,
apart from the ones for airports and mountains. The rest of the
installation is pretty much like most other freeware sceneries:
create a new folder anywhere on your hard drive for the scenery. Next
create the well known subfolders "scenery" and "texture", put the BGL
files in the first, and the main texture files in the latter.
Activate the scenery in the library in FS98 and you're ready to fly.
Of course Terry Shields included an elaborate instruction for the
installation.
However it's not just the rendering of the landscape that makes a
scenery attractive. The airports in it also have to be appealing.
Also in this area Shields' scenery is far from disappointing.
Ireland isn't a densely populated country, so there aren't many
airports. The scenery counts forty-one airfields of which the
majority are small. Every airport though has enough detail to make a
visit worthwhile. Even the smallest ones have trees, bushes, an
occasional gate, houses or hangars. On two of the airfields we can
even find dynamic scenery.
Shields included full documentation of every airport, its
characteristics, VOR's and NDB's in his scenery, in Word as
well as Wordpad format. He also threw in a map of the country, on
which you'll find the locations of the airports and main
navigational aids.
To perfectly run the scenery I would recommend a reasonably fast
computer. On my Pentium 200 MMX, with 32 MB RAM and a Monster 3D, I
got somewhat disappointing frame rates, somewhere between 8 and 12
frames per second. I must add that I did most of the flying in heavy
weather in an aircraft with a frame rate consuming panel. Still, I
think a Pentium II will be a better machine to fully enjoy the
Ireland scenery.
All in all this scenery is a definite must have. I guess every European simmer knows what I am talking about when I mention sceneries like Norway, Sweden or Yugoslavia. These are great freeware sceneries. It's good to know we can add Terry Shields' Ireland to this list.
Bert Zengerink
Download Ireland
ajzengerink@castel.nl