Lake Stephanie

By Roshan Shariff (19 September 2000)

Introduction

Lake Stephanie is one of a series of four scenery packages, (five, including Eagle Island) by Don Moser. This lake is big enough for water landings, and additionally has a gravel runway and a grass strip. It is a vacation, hunting, and fishing outpost, situated about 65 miles from Valdez, Alaska. There are a number of cabins, each with a pier. Static aircraft are present near the runway and at the piers. Deer and other animals abound, and they have the unhealthy (and maybe fatal) habit of wandering too close to the runways. Overall, this is good scenery for the bush-flying VFR enthusiast, and is packed with eye candy.

   

Installation

The installation is nothing unusual, copy the files...add it through the scenery library...and enter flatten commands. There is a patch available which is supposed to fix the multicolored lake. I don't know how it looks without the patch because I installed the patch immediately after installing the scenery.

Features

There are a lot of visual features. There are stunning log cabins, that look like they're straight from a photo. Their night lighting is awesome. Look at the screenshot of the night-lit cabin. The trees are the regular ones found in most scenery. There are planes parked at the piers. Most of the planes are Beavers, there are also a few Cubs. There are float versions at the piers. The water textures are the standard FS2000 water textures. The gravel texture is not so fine, but it isn't bad. The grass strip textures are great, they have wheel ruts on them. A useful but rarely found feature is the runway called a "water start". This isn't present in most scenery with a floatplane-capable lake. You have to start at the runway, and slew to the water. Not any more! With Lake Stephanie, you can start right on the water, perfectly positioned to get a long stretch of water in front of you and shorter than normal trees at the other end so that you can fly above them. Being 12 years old, I've never seen a real Beaver or a Cub, so I can't attest to the accuracy of the static planes. But they look almost exactly like Fred Banting & Yannick Lavigne's DHC-2 Beavers (look at the screenshot), so they must be pretty accurate. There is no dynamic scenery, but this can be easily added with a tool like FSTraffic. There are static animals, so far I've seen deer and a bear (there are also moose), but they are flat as pancakes. I suspect it is quite difficult to make 3D animals, so it's okay. The texturing on all structures is great. As can be expected with such a natural setting, only the cabins are night light. There are, however, runway lights. The general look and feel is great. The placement of all objects is functional and well chosen.

Negative Points

This is great scenery, but there are a few, negligible faults. The most serious of these is the design of the piers. They are not textured, just plain brown, which looks unnatural. A log texture like the cabins would look great. They are bordered with white and other almost fluorescent colors, which stands out against the rest of the beautiful scenery. This is one possible area of improvement. The gravel texture looks kind of funny. I'm completely ignorant about scenery design, so I don't know if it can be improved with the current technology. It doesn't actually look bad, just a wee bit unnatural. Otherwise the ground texturing is as good as any other scenery. The water textures could be replaced with one of the improved textures floating around the web. It doesn't look bad, but it would look even better then. Don, if you happen to read this review, maybe you could make these improvements in your future scenery. None of these points detracts from the drop-dead good-looking scenery, and they are far outweighed by the features.

   

Summary

Lake Stephanie is a must-download for VFR bush flyers. The best planes for this scenery are Yannick Lavigne and Fred Banting's DHC-2 Beaver pack and their Piper Cubs. This scenery isn't required for big iron pilots, as you can't see it from cruise altitude, and gravel and grass strips aren't exactly meant for jumbo jets. However it is highly recommended for anyone who flies anything smaller than a 737. I give it 97 out of 100 points.