Aerosoft Real Germany 2
Aerosoft German Airports 1 (Update)
Aerosoft Commuter Airliners: Eurowings Professional (Update)

By Andrew Herd (5 October 2004)

Real Germany 2

'Real Germany 2' is a new photographic texture/mesh package which simulates a 52,800 km2 area of north-east Germany, including Berlin/Brandenburg, Saxony-Anhalt and northern Saxony. When the review copy reached the top of the pile, I checked out the Aerosoft website for a Real Germany 1 package with the aim of reviewing the pair together, but if one exists, the publishers are keeping it well hidden.

There is potential for confusing this package with Aerosoft's 'Scenery Germany' series, which is a mesh/VFR landmarks/airfields package, and uses landclassing to provide a more realistic landscape than the default Flight Simulator environment. According to the publisher, Real Germany 2 and Scenery Germany 1 can be used together, though there are likely to be conflicts between later packages in the two series. The reason for this is that Real Germany and Scenery Germany attempt to do more or less the same thing using different methods, and depending on the order in which they are installed, one will to some extent overwrite the effects of the other where volumes address the same area. Hopefully, by reading the reviews in tandem, if you need to make a choice, you will be able to work out which package is most appropriate for your type of simming.

The package comes in the rather nice old style Aerosoft box and contains a 34 page manual written in German and English, a just about adequate chart (approximately 300 x 400 cm) of the area, three CDs and the usual registration card. Recommended hardware spec is a 2.8 Ghz Pentium with 512 Mb RAM, a 3D graphics card with 64 Mb RAM, 2.1 Gb hard disc space under the FAT32 file system or better - I tested the package on a 3.0 Ghz Pentium with 512 Mb of RAM and had no problems with it as far as frame rates were concerned. Installation was as fast as you would expect, given the size of the package and requires a keycode entry; a choice of language is offered early on, so it doesn't matter if you can't read German. Updates are provided on the third CD for Canary Islands and for German Airports 4 for FS2004.

In common with all photographic texture addons, FS loading times are greatly extended. My machine spooled up to the 47% mark at normal speed as FS2004 loaded, following which there was a dramatic slow down while the bar crept forward to 57%, giving me enough time to fix an espresso. This delay can be shortened by unchecking \options\settings\display\extended terrain textures, but the price is blurred textures in the distance.

Note that only summer textures are provided in Real Germany 2. This will annoy some simmers to death, but in defence of the developers, the package would otherwise have occupied 12 CDs and taken up more than 8 gigs of hard disk space. While most landscapes look pretty much the same in spring, summer and fall, the lack of winter textures is a potential problem in Germany, which gets reasonably frequent snowfall in winter. In common with every package I have seen of this type, where the textures end, there is a sharp and noticeable line where the default textures take over. However, when you bear in mind that every town, village, field, lane and road is depicted exactly where it is in real life, there are many compensations.

As you can see, the textures are okay, but nowhere near as good as the ones provided in the VFR Photographic Scenery of England and Wales. At 2500 feet (top screenshot, this altitude being typical of most GA flights in Europe), the effect was just about acceptable and at FL100 (screenshot below) and above it was fine. The chart included in the package is an excellent idea, since flying around a VFR scenery without being able to do VFR nav is like watching TV with your eyes shut and the only alternative is to go out and buy the relevant sectional - which would cost nearly the same amount as Real Germany 2.

I mentioned the problem with blurred textures above - every 'photographic texture' package I have reviewed for Flight Simulator suffers from this because of the way the sim handles ground textures. This isn't a bug, just an annoying side effect of the way FS prioritises displaying things. Since the game is intended to simulate flight, it deals with scenery at the last moment and one side effect of this approach is noticeable in a default installation of FS2004 as a slight shuffling of ground textures into their final position as the plane approaches them. If you concentrate on the view ahead with the 2D panel switched out, you can appreciate how clever Microsoft have been with their design, because blurred default textures hardly ever occur, which is presumably due to their repetitive nature - they just keep on reloading from the cache.

Photo scenery textures are a different ball game, because each texture is unique and tied to a specific location; so it only gets loaded one time and the only time a texture can be retrieved from the cache is when the plane reverses its direction of travel and crosses near the texture again. For some arcane reason, newly loaded textures are extremely prone to blurring, which doesn't resolve until the texture 'locks down' into place - which, as we have seen, doesn't happen until the last moment. The end result is that photographic sceneries suffer from blurring a great deal and it gets worse the faster you go. It probably isn't an accident that these packages are usually demonstrated using the Cessna 172, which is one of the slowest planes FS has to offer apart from the Jenny. Blurring is noticeable even on the fastest machines and I can't see an end to it, unless Microsoft choose to rewrite the code involved - right now I can't think of a good commercial reason why they would do that.

The manual has a quite good section on how FS should be set up to run the scenery, which would be even better had the publishers remembered to translate it all into English and used search and replace to point all the references to Real Germany. Here, the crucial point is that setting visibility to 10 nautical miles does seem to minimise blurring, presumably by restricting the number of textures which load at any one time. Many US simmers will be a little bemused by this, but there are days when we long for visibility this good in Europe.

At €29.95 (around $32.00 depending on what the exchange rate is doing), Real Germany 2 is pitched at exactly the same price as the UK and Wales VFR photographic sceneries, but for German simmers, cost is probably less of an issue than the fact that the Real Germany series doesn't have any competition as far as photo textures go. However, as I said right at the start, there is a choice to be made between it and the Scenery Germany series, which takes a different approach to the same problem and isn't prone to blurring because it uses landclasses to arrange the default textures to represent woodland and towns. The disadvantage of this approach is that fine navigational detail is lost - in an area with many villages, shape and relation to other features is everything, with those other features often being subtle stuff like disused railways, small lakes and disused airfields. Photo scenery gives you a version of the landscape as pilots see it, the downside being that real pilots don't suffer from blurring unless they are flying under the influence.

Real Germany 2 is a well presented package, though the sloppy editing of the manual makes me wonder a little. If it falls down, it is at the fence all photo sceneries fail to jump, which is the issue of blurring - the process of VFR flight simulation isn't helped by being unable to make sense of what lies up ahead and if you cherish thoughts of screaming over a real landscape at low level in your F104, I suggest you think again, because this package will not provide the answer. On the other hand, if you do all your simming in one of the slower GA planes and can live without spring, fall and winter textures, Real Germany is definitely worth a look - it transforms the default landscape into something quite believable. I am sure it will be popular with German private pilots and flying clubs as well as with simmers.

Eurowings Professional for FS2002 and FS2004

Kris Heslop originally reviewed the FS2002 ATR42/72 version of this package over a year ago and I am including a short update here mainly to draw people's attention to the fact that the boxed version is out and updated to run under FS2004. Broadly, I agree with everything that Kris says, this being a good package that manages to cram an awful lot in for the price, though in view of the fact that so many planes are involved, some sacrifices have had to be made and in general the aircraft are not quite as good as those sold in single packages by other developers - but in some cases that margin is pretty slim.

Where Eurowings Professional differs from the ATR package Kris reviewed is that a BAe 146 and Airbus A319 have been added - the former with 10 liveries and the latter in 8 paints of the -100 version and 15 of the -200. Though you wouldn't guess it from reading the box, or the manual, there are also two versions of the A320, which share 16 liveries between them. You would think this would be a selling point, but references to the A320s are buried so deep in the manual you could easily fail to realise they were there.

Eurowings Professional costs €39.95 (around $43.00 depending on the exchange rate) and comes in a thick DVD style package, which contains a chunky 200 page manual, the CD and a registration card. Installing it is very simple and involves no more than selecting a language and entering the registration key found inside the box. Once complete, a new program group appears under the start menu, with links to various documents and utilities - not least among which is the Eurowings Flightplanner, which at least in theory allows you to select a flight and print off a plan, but in common with the lax approach to quality control which characterises this package, had all the menu items in German, though it worked well enough. One improvement which could be made to the applet would be for it to actually load the flight plan into FS2004 and stick the plane on the ramp with the FMC programmed, but I guess you can't have it all. There are also configuration utilities for the 146 and the ATR, which allow specific cockpit setups when FS fires up and there is a load editor which can handle all the planes.

Recommended hardware requirements are a 1.0 Ghz Pentium 3 with 256 Mb RAM, a 32 Mb graphics card and 300 Mb hard disk space, though as with all FS addons, the faster the system you have, the better. The planes not being particularly complex, frame rates are generally good.

This being an update on an already detailed review, I am only going to take a quick look at changes and the new planes. The most noticeable thing about the aircraft, which are otherwise well up to the standard of multi-plane addons, is that none of them have virtual cockpits - switching into this mode rewards you with a panoramic view of the clouds. The 2D panels range from very good in the case of the ATR and the 146, to acceptable in the A319, but though they are all reasonably sharp, there has been some sloppy editing in the forward view, with the result that stray black pixels are evident, some of them right in the eye line. While it is a common fault of panels to have uneven editing around the central pillar and along the top of the glareshield (take a look at recent Flight1 panels or DreamFleet planes to see what a perfect edit should look like), I can't recall seeing payware planes with black pixels in the window area since the FS98 days. If I was the publisher, I would encourage the developers to patch this, since in each case it could be sorted with about six mouse clicks. However, I am not damning the panels with faint praise, because in the context of the rest of this comprehensive package, they are perfectly OK. All have working overheads, pedestals, radio stacks and other additional sub-panels as necessary and it is clear that a great deal of work has gone into them and they are far better than any of the Microsoft jet panels.

There are a few annoyances relating to aircraft systems as a result of the upgrade. The Flight Management Computers (FMCs) are not completely FS2004 adapted and as a result they look for flight plans in the FS "Flights\myflts" folder, rather than "My Documents\Flight Simulator Files", which is the preferred FS2004 location. The workaround to import a flight plan is to copy it from "My Documents\Flight Simulator Files" to "FS2002\Flights\myflts" which is tedious, but effective.

In addition, the FMS belonging to the A320, BAe 146-300 and BAe 146-300QT show wrong values in some cases, the reason Aerosoft give being that for technical reasons it wasn't possible to adapt the code they used for all the planes - so you have to use the A319 FMS for A320, the BAe 146-200 and the BAe 146-300. For technical reasons, read 'we ran out of time and money', but again, if you look at what else is on offer, this is something most users should be able to live at the price. It wasn't that long ago that even single payware airliner addons were routinely released without simulation of more than their most basic systems and no-one even raised an eyebrow, though it would be good to see this fixed.

Before anyone writes in with a 3000 word technical appraisal of how the ITT is wrong on the A319 in CLB mode at 8000 feet in ISA, I will pre-empt them by stating that if they need complete accuracy, they should shift their butt, get an ATPL and hitch a ride in a real one, but the flight models are generally fine for this level of simulation and if you want a package that includes a dozen airliners at a better price I say good luck. Quite how Aerosoft managed to pack everything in and still make a profit I have no idea and if the flight management code and 2D panels were fixed up I would be giving this addon high marks. Abacus' Commuter Express package is a possible rival and if we can get hold of a review copy, we will take a look at it in the future, but right now, if you want a pack of short haul jets, this is the best game in town.

German Airports 1 for FS2002 and FS2004

Last but by no means least, we have German Airports 1, updated and released for FS2004. Regular readers will know that I don't consider a Flight Simulator installation to be complete without the entire GA series added and this version does nothing to change that view. The package comes in a box rather than a DVD style case, the reason being that it contains a thick folder of approach plates, which will keep the jet jocks happy. There is also a bilingual English/German manual and a registration card.

Minimum hardware spec given as a 1.6 Ghz Pentium with 256 Mb RAM, a 3D graphics card with 64 Mb RAM (preferably 128 Mb) and 80 Mb hard disk space. I had no problems installing the addon, which requires entry of a registration code found on the CD wrapper, so do not throw this away...

The airport list hasn't changed since the FS2002 upgrade added Innsbruck and Altenrhein; which those of you who are not dozing at the back will have realised are in Austria and Switzerland. The other airports are Franz-Josef Strauß in Munich, Nurnberg, Dresden, Bayreuth, Egelsbach (Europe's busiest GA-airport), Augsburg, Stuttgart, and Friedrichshafen - which is on the Bodensee and very nice too. In the brief tour I managed, all the airports seemed to have been considerably upgraded and improved to FS2004 standard, though a few bugs had inevitably crept in, not least the way planes loaded on the active runway at Bayreuth have a strong tendency to appear half way down the pavement and at a considerable angle to it. But what the heck, this set continues to be a reliable standard against which all other airport sceneries can be judged and anything that is better than the German Airports series should be an automatic buy, because there aren't many of 'em.

One thing that is apparent in this new version is that the difference in quality between the earlier numbered sets in the GA series and later numbered packages has finally been eroded and there is nothing here for the developers to be ashamed about. This addon gets an unreserved 'buy it' because you will search the shelves for a long while before seeing anything better.