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A couple of weeks after the underneath review was written, BAO provided the users with a patch that's taking care of the mentioned pauses. With this patch applied, Europe-1 runs as smooth as any of the other commercial add-ons.
Download the patch EUR1PT.ZIP (40106 bytes).
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first sight it will look kind of strange that the authors of
EURBGL are reviewing the Europe I scenery add-on. However, since we
are familiar with both the real world area this add-on is covering as
well as the technical part of it, we felt people might appreciate it
if we gave gave our point of view with respect to this scenery.
However, since this scenery add-on is really giving us the creeps because the big amount of pauses (every 20 seconds we're getting a 2 seconds pause), writing a very detailed and in-depth review was impossible for us.
Europe I comes with, amongst others, a DOD-like set of charts that could be hard to read for some people. The installation of the program, making use of the standard add-on installation routine, is very easy, though. Once the scenery has been installed, the user can select one of the situations (STNs) that are included or position himself on the airport of his choice through the World/Airport menu. It is a pity that the authors of Europe I, the Alting brothers, did not take the trouble to sort the available runways (and countries) in alphabetical/numerical order.
After take-off one of the first things the user notices is the high amount of pauses that are caused by disk I/O. For the high level of textured detail, the user has to pay dearly ! About every 20 seconds, when flying the Lear, one is confronted with these irritating pauses. Although the artistic impression of the scenery is stunning at some locations, we had rather seen some "flyable" scenery that would take us in a smoother manner to a destination. We made a lot of flights in Europe I. We were amazed to find out that for example the detail for the South-Eastern area of Amsterdam is inaccurate. Objects are included for that area, which in real life are not there. A bunch of "poles" are reaching for the skies and we cannot determine what they are representing.
In our opinion, the level of detailed objects for the city of Amsterdam is far too low, compared to the number of detailed objects in Rotterdam. It was this way in the Holland scenery for FS4 and the Holland part of Europe I seems to be just a reworked version of this Alting Holland FS4 scenery. The number of boats floating in the river Rhine is outrageous and having a big impact on the framerate as well. True, in real life the river Rhine is handling a high amount of boat traffic, but we feel that if we want to see boats in a software program, they should be in a sail simulator rather than a flight simulator.
Despite the many I/O pauses a flight into Frankfurt airport got completed and from there we continued to Innsbruck. The sights of the Austrian Alps is magnificent. A job very well done here.
From Innsbruck we continued to Zurich's runway 16. Here we found out, that the ILS/DME did not give the distance to the Touch Down Zone, which is usual in Europe, but instead gave the distance to the localizer, positioned beyond the far end of the runway.
We feel, Europe I could have been great if the authors would have prevented these irritating pauses, although the artistic style used is very good, flying around in this add-on is a nerve wrecking experience. It was good to see, however, that PAPIs and the correct approach light systems were used, this is not the case with the other European add-on, Paris. Here VASIs are used where PAPIs should have been.
Hans vanWyhe made a flight in Microscene's Japan scenery for comparison's reason, here's what he found:
In order to see how things should have been done, I installed Microscene's Japan scenery. To give Europe 1 the benefit of the doubt, I decided on making a flight in Microscene's most dense area, i.e. the Kansai-Narita trip. Flying this route it occured to me, that my framerate was lower than normal, but seen the high amount of details and the vast amount of mountains, this was very understandable. Most amazing thing on this trip was, that I did not get any pauses at all, that the framerate did not sink to an unflyable number, this contrary to Europe 1. In Europe 1 even in a part of Holland where no detail was to be found, the framerate was slightly higher than in this very dense Japan area. And in Holland no mountains are to be found ! (Pauses galore, though !).
Another distracting feature in Europe 1 is the fact that some ILS frequencies are getting overruled by VORs. Rotterdam's runway 24 ILS is getting blown away by the Volkel VOR, same thing in Frankfurt, here it is the Spangdahlem VOR that's kind of dominant. BAO says, go into your Navigation menu and select VOR 2, that will solve it. Big deal ! This is just a very annoying work around for a bug that easily could have been prevented in the first place.
Furthermore some wrong VOR frequencies have been used. Fribourg, Allersberg and Nienburg amongst others do have wrong frequencies.
Then most of the ILSes that are equipped with a DME can be received at as much as 56 miles out. This is very unreal and not according with real world navigation.
In the cases that the ILSes are equipped with DMEs, the Alting brothers (designers of Europe 1) have chosen for the US way of placing the DME. In Europe DME's are linked to the glideslope in order to give a distance readout to the Touch Down Zone. In the Americas this is not the case, here the DME is linked to the localizer, situated somewhere beyon the far end of the runway.
Then finally, all ICAO identifiers for the former GDR airports are wrong. Recently all these airports got "ED" identifiers to replace the former "ET" prefixes. The military airfields in Germany are also renamed, they now start with "ET".
To conclude this review, we only can say that with some more detailed objects, where is Cologne's worldfamous Dome ?, a bit more accuracy with respect to the navigational aids and a lot less pauses, this add-on could have been as good as Japan. Unfortunately it is not. From a local software store I heard, that Apollo, the BAO distributor for Europe, has announced that for Europe there will be an updated release available soon. We really hope these pauses are taken care of in that release.
We have been trying to find a solution for these most irritating and frustrating pauses during the last 2 weeks. We removed all other scenery from the FS5 directories, reinstalled FS5 and Europe I several times, switched display modes, turned textures off, dynamic scenery off, tried all possible kinds of configs and different PCs, but couldn't find a way to work around these pauses.
Send feedback to: Hans vanWyhe
Dusk view of Amsterdam