Aerosoft Switzerland Professional

By Andrew Herd (4 March 2006)

icrosoft weren't kind to Switzerland. No doubt it wasn't their intent to make the place look as unexciting as it does in Flight Simulator, but somewhere along the way all the pizazz got filtered out, leaving the impression of a landscape that was designed at by a Health and Safety committee, rather than the implacable forces of plate tectonics, followed by millennia of erosion. The result is some bumps just north of Italy, just big enough to make you think 'That must be Switzerland' as you cruise past at FL330, but not impressive enough to make you decide, 'Let's investigate!'

If you install Aerosoft's Switzerland Pro, you will want to investigate - in fact, you may never leave again, once you have landed - because this photographic scenery (developed by Flylogic), installs a brand new detailed mesh, and then wraps it with some of the most attractive textures you are ever likely to see. Switzerland Professional joins the exclusive club of photosceneries which depict an entire country, the others being VFR Netherlands and the VFR Photographic Scenery England & Wales, which was recently republished on DVD - and you get nearly 16,000 square miles (41,000 km2) of aerial photographic scenery. The one downside of Switzerland Professional is the cost, which at $149.99 brings it the distinction of being one of the most expensive FS photoscenery addons available in terms of dollars per square mile, especially given that the identically-sized VFR Netherlands is available from the same publisher at only $39.99. However, Aerosoft's package is the only photoreal Swiss package available and the sheer level of detail it contains will be enough to justify it as an automatic purchase by anyone who has ambitions to fly around this jewel of a country. Look at those screenshots and if you listen hard, you will be able to hear the cowbells tinkling...

Switzerland Professional came in a large cardboard box, 9.5" x 7.5" x 1.5" (24 x 19 x 4 cm), which was big enough to make me wonder if Flylogic had seen one of PC Aviator's 'full kit' sceneries and decided to include a book full of plates and a couple of sectionals, but one shake was enough to dispel my hopes, because the contents rattled around. Inside, I found two CDs in paper cases, a 38 page multilingual manual and a registration card - no charts or plates.

I stuck the first CD in the drive and studied the manual while the installation got under way. Flylogic have provided textures based on 30,000 aerial shots taken back in 1995-6, which have been processed so that Flight Simulator's default terrain tiles are replaced with photographic substitutes, wrapped over a new 20 meter mesh. What this means is that you can fly over terrain that looks as near to reality as it is possible to get, allowing for the constraints of available processing power and the limits of Flight Simulator itself - and as you can see from the screenshots, the results are nothing short of spectacular. The endlessly repeating default textures are banished, replaced by a photoreal landscape that lets you fly as a real pilot would, navigating by looking out the window and recognising small towns and road junctions and lakes and all the features that make visual navigation possible. The higher you go, the better the scenery tends to look. If you fly much below 2500 feet above ground level, the textures begin to pixellate, but this being a feature of all photosceneries and one that doesn't cause as many problems as you might imagine, given that most low level flight is taken up by approach and departure, neither of which leave a great deal of time for sight-seeing.

In theory, any machine that can run FS2002 or FS2004 ought to be able to run this package, as phototextures don't take up any extra processing cycles compared to the default tiles, but complex mesh does impose quite a hit, especially if you are flying up close and personal, so the developer gives the minimum system configuration as at least a 2 Ghz processor with 512 Mb of RAM, a 128 Mb video card and 2 Gb of free hard disk space. With this in mind, Flylogic recommend a 3.0 Ghz PC or better, with a gig of RAM, a judgement with which I cannot disagree.

The package installs a single season - summer - but unlike some other photosceneries, if you fly in other seasons you aren't faced with featureless gray textures, or the need to run a config applet. The three other seasons all use the summer textures, the shots shown here being taken in Flight Simulator's winter, so readers who were looking forward to seeing a snow-clad landscape are going to be disappointed, although you will find plenty of the white stuff on the mountain tops. The chief hazard with using a single seasonal set of textures is that if you fly in FS winter, the summery Swiss textures stand out like a sore thumb as soon as you approach the country's borders.

If you take a close look at the large shots (click on the in-line graphics scattered through the review) you will also notice that there isn't any Autogen scenery, the developers having taken a decision to suppress it completely. Once again, this will suit some readers better than others, but in my own experience Autogen doesn't complement photosceneries that well and at worst it can look plain daft, with distracting conflicts such as houses sat across roads and trees growing out of factory roofs. Once you climb to a reasonable height, Autogen isn't that noticeable unless you have the detail settings turned all the way up and that takes the knife to frame rates - so on balance, I can do without it when I am flying over photographic textures, especially ones as good as these.

Unusually for a photoscenery product, you get four detailed additional airfields along with the scenery: Birrfield, Wangem-Lachen, Frick-Schupfart and Speck-Fehraltorf. This set is on sale separately from Flylogic for 49.90 Swiss Francs, which at the time of writing was about $38.00. Quite a few other Swiss airports are already available for Flight Simulator, either as freeware, or payware, and Flylogic sell a good range which can be ordered boxed or downloaded from their website and all are compatible with Switzerland Pro. All four additional fields have their own AI, some of which is unusual enough to be worth watching.

The water, and there is plenty of it, all seems to be landable and I had great fun playing around in various floatplanes during the time I had the package under review. Like Cloud 9's 'Fly the Lakes', with which the scenery has a certain amount of overlap, there are sailboats on some of the lakes, and in addition, you will find a neat animation of the annual airshow at Axalp, a detailed castle at Gruyeres and the Patrouille Suisse in training at Wangen-Lachen.

I will discuss the airports in more detail later, but since the guts of Switzerland Professional are the textures, we'll take at look at them now, but first, a few words about phototexture packages in general. The 'pros' of these addons is summed up by the screenshots: sumptious, instantly believable landscapes; VFR navigation becomes possible; and at times, especially if you are using TrackIR as I did with the Cub, it can be very easy to forget you are using a simulator.

The 'cons' are that phototextures extend Flight Simulator loading times, although not as much as you would expect with this particular product; that the textures break up if viewed from heights of less than 2500 - 3000 feet; that if you fly much faster than 150 - 200 knots, or make too many turns, the textures are liable to suffer prolonged attacks of blurring; and that, as already mentioned, you only get one season. Aerosoft Australia, the developer behind PC Aviator's MegaScenery range of US photosceneries, has developed a neat post-processing method for adding snow effects in winter and I live in hope that other developers will figure out how this is done, although the penalty of having a winter season is that it adds to the size of an already large installation. While I remember, there do not appear to be any night textures supplied with this package, so big metal simmers can forget doing spectacular red-eye shift approaches.

The package virtually begs you to fly fast and low down those narrow valleys and yet that is the one thing you absolutely cannot do - not because of any failing of the package, but because Flight Simulator can't load and place the textures fast enough and the view rapidly degenerates into a blurry mess. To be fair, this kind of flying often ends in tears using the default textures if you have a complex mesh installed and the texture mushing seems to be a side effect of the low priority awarded to the FS landscape engine. So I bumbled around the countryside in the Cub, marvelling at how wonderful everything looked, without suffering any texture blurring at all - I enjoyed much the same experience in the 172, but the Baron turned out not to be such a good choice, because in cruise it is just fast enough to defeat FS2004's texture handling in mountainous areas at the kind of altitudes at normal GA altitudes. Strangely enough, changing to the Flight1 PC12 brought me back into a world of crisp textures again, because the Pilatus is designed to fly high, yet has a slow enough descent and approach speed that the phototextures rarely got left behind - but I am sure that duking it out in the valleys in the PC12 would be to risk disaster.

There is no doubt that you could use Switzerland Professional as a backdrop for airline simming, but it kind of misses the point, given that modern airliners climb like scalded cats and by the time the crew have a moment to take a look outside the cockpit, the plane is usually so high that only major landmarks can be appreciated. Photosceneries are at their best for GA simming, either for pleasure flights, or for a gentle spot of VFR navigation, and this package is one of the best I have ever seen for this purpose, assuming that you can find a sectional to guide yourself around with - half the fun of simming in these circumstances being the satisfaction of working out exactly where you are - and flying with real weather takes on an entirely new meaning when your world is dominated by large unyielding piles of granite. ICAO charts for Switzerland aren't that hard to come by in Europe, but if you get stuck, Transair had the relevant 1:500,000 sectional last time I checked; readers in the US will probably be happier with the VFR+GPS Jeppesen sectional, which is stock code LS-1V on the Jepp website. So if you have tired of using the FS GPS, mastered the dark art of VOR navigation, and got the flight management computer T-shirt, this package provides a welcome to a new world, challenging enough even to make flights in the Cub kind of special, the best thing about it being that the quality of the textures is so high that they make getting lost a pleasure.

If you have looked at any of the large screenshots you will realise there is something different and quite unique about flying around this addon, which is that the deep valleys really show off the capabilities of Flight Simulator's light engine. It is hard to stress how atmospheric a flight from Sion can be with Switzerland Professional installed, especially when Flight Simulator's sun is low and the mountains cast dramatic shadows that enhance the relief and hide the many of the villages clinging to their lower slopes until the very last minute. The mesh detail is generally well matched to the textures, so that rivers run in their beds and roads don't head off on strange excursions up forty five degree slopes before looping back down to the valley floor again. Another plus point is that in common with most packages based on aerial, rather than satellite photography, the textures don't exhibit any particular color cast and look believable even when packages like Flight Environment (which substantially alters Flight Simulator's lighting) are installed.

The airfields supplied with the package are all relatively basic and while it is great to have them, it is debateable how much value they add. Wangen-Lachen has some low-polygon model animated sailboats and a Patrouille Suisse flypast; while Birrfield and Frick-Schupfart are home to a clutch of gliders, but pleasing though these little sceneries within a scenery are, none is exactly packed with detail, although they are way better than their default counterparts. The developers have also chosen to use airfield ground textures that blend in better with the default tiles than Switzerland Pro's photographic ones, which makes the four fields look as if they have been stuck in as an afterthought.

Verdict? In terms of quality, Switzerland Professional is up there with the best photographic sceneries around, but at $149.99, it isn't the sort of package anyone is likely to buy on a whim. On the other hand, I can't think of a scenery package which has given me so much enjoyment in a long while, so if you live in Switzerland, or have any ambitions to base your simming there for a while, it is well worth taking a look.