La Reunion

By Ron Salt (16 December 2005)

Isle de la RÉUNION: VFR la France!

“It belongs to the French, Mr.President. They don't have any oil.” (Briefing Memo, Director, CIA, to CIC)

It was a remote, uninhabited volcanic pustule on the face of the Indian Ocean, 450 miles east of Madagascar, when the Portugese found it in 1513. Napoleon 1^st decided it would make a handy lurk for grabbing a piece of the East India Company's action so he mined it for his nascent Empire (“Le cendre-tas c'est le mien, Josephine.”) Garrisons attract camp followers. Africans, Chinese, Malays and Malabar Indians were imported to hale, draw, dhobie and no doubt supply a modicum of negotiable affection to the occupying force. In 1869 the Suez Canal opened and L'Ilse de la Réunion lost whatever significance its position merited on the world stage.

The forgotten Réunionese survived quietly as citizens of La Patrie through the subsequent centuries of international savagery by growing sugar-cane on the arable bits (about 14% of the 2,500 Km² total) until migrating flocks of the gaudy avian species known to twitchers as Common Bermuda-shorted Package Tourists began arriving in the early 1970s. Three quarters of the indigenous working population is today employed in 'service industries'. There were 776,948 permanent residents as of last July. The island is still administered from Paris, 10,000 kilometers away as the Airbus flies.

So what has all this to do with the price of apples? Quite a lot, as I hope to demonstrate.

   

Is this (as some may be tempted to sneer) really “As Real As It Gets”? Microsoft's notorious hype is merely a trifle economical with words. Three more are implied and must be added to make sense of the slogan. They are, of course, “For The Bucks”.

   

To feast their eyes on the really Real McCoy, less naïve flightsimmers need only log onto the FlightSim.Com Pilot Shop where they may download the Ilse de la Réunion that Microsoft omitted – at a price. It weighs in at 77.2 megabytes and installs into 113.04 MB. After running the downloaded install_reunion.exe, two new subfolders appear in your main FS9 folder, France VFR in the root and Reunion in Addon scenery. The latter contains all the bgl and txt files. France VFR holds the documentation, in several PDFs, and an uninstaller.

Jean-Marc Allenbach, Jean-Jacques Preudhomme and Henri Flageul are credited as the Beta development team, but there is very little that's discernably beta-ish about their scenery. There are 24 screenshots of it on the France VFR website, but they don't, somehow, do justice to the fine quality and attention to detail. The Piton de la Fournaise vent in action is awesome. Lava bombs obey not only the Newtonian laws of motion but also those of thermodynamics. Land at one of the two ultra-light fields – very hard to spot from the air, they are – and in little while you may see one touch down.

It seems to be an article of faith in our community that FS2006 Is Just Around The Corner. Every previous version upgrade was marketed on the back of a radically novel feature, each one purporting to narrow the gap between the virtual and real world flying experiences. Photo-real global terrain seems the most obvious Next Big Thing, until one looks at the logistics of delivering it. The going rate for British unreal estate is a tad under 9 pence per 100 square kilometers (£0.0886/Km² x100). That's the cost of raw UK VFR Photoscenery, from Horizon Simulations, inclusive of the high-resolution digital terrain mesh sold as a separate package. The photomosaic map alone adds 169,314 files to the load on the scenery engine. There's no way photo-real terrain can be made to fit the concept of Flight Simulator as a one-box game with a global user base.

France VFR's Isle de la Réunion, at over 60 pence per 100 square kilometers (£0.6017/Km² x100), looks expensive at first sight, but the price includes a set of .agn files totalling over 40% of the 2,250 photographic texture maps, with supporting object libraries of local vegetation and buildings. Taking into consideration the areas of heath, talus, lava field and washout, forty percent is enough to ensure the impression of complete 3D coverage, like the default scenery with Autogen® set to display at high density. Horizon's UK photoscenery doesn't include any .agn files at all; purchasers are invited to take pot luck from the free database at http://www.vfraddons.co.uk , a voluntary project started last April by a group of designers whose agn output currently stands at around 14% of the country.

Isle de la Réunion is, like FS2004 itself, a fully-fledged product aimed at people who want to enjoy everything that state-of-the-art flight simulation on a PC has to offer, with the absolute minimum of preliminary faffing about. It includes two detailed airfields (four if you count the ultralight bases), AI/ATC traffic flying real commercial schedules in their operator's actual liveries, lots of startup situation flights and some neat little surprises. There's a sectional chart, plates and timetables ('Grille Horaires', strangely apt when one considers the Laurentian fate of passengers condemned by delayed departures to roast in under-cooled airside lounges). The aerial photo-mapping, by Institut Géographique National, is bright, crisp, seamless, and free from seasonal anomalies. On my old 2GHz clunker, handicapped by a slow IDE drive, it's up and running in two minutes fifteen seconds flat. (My UK VFR setup averages eight minutes on a good day.) Frame rate holds steady at the preset 25 fps lock-off, so the default Bell 256B is almost flyable and my touchdown write-offs are down to no more than one in four.

   

The question that intrigues me the most is, how many flight simmers might buy this scenery? In 2002 there were only 150,000 internet users on the island. Taking the number of hits on the most popular UK VFR add-on as a guide, a calculation based on comparison of the numbers of internet users in the UK, France and L'Isle de la Réunion in 2002/3 suggests the French sales potential lies between sixteen and seventeen hundred copies. At the asking price of $23.99 that's worth around $40,000. I can't see Bill Gates crying into his Bollinger over missing out on that.

On the other hand, third-party quality scenery that can be pulled down from the web on the installment plan makes FS2004 look a better buy, extends its shelf life, and paves the way for alternative marketing strategies, at no further development cost to Microsoft. Messianic Redmond-watchers may find FS10 a long time aborning. My guess is Godot will probably arrive before it.

Acknowledgments

Statistics are taken from the C.I.A. World Fact-book at http://www.cia.gov

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