VFR Photographic Scenery - East And South-East England For FS2002

By Andrew Herd (6 December 2002)

ome time ago I previewed a beta of a new scenery for FS2002 - a joint venture photographic scenery of England and Wales by GetMapping / Visual Flight. At the time I thought every British simmer was bound to be interested in it, purely and simply because from my perspective anything that enhanced the VFR aspect of FS2002 could only be a good thing. The current version of Flight Simulator is really good at straight and level flight and radio navigation, but it all falls apart the moment you look down. 'As real as it gets' should not involve seeing the same pattern of fields over and over again and the default textures don't even begin to give an impression of what the UK is like from the air. So logically, everyone should want better VFR scenery, right?

Wrong. There is a large community of simmers who do not want to see anything like the screen shot below. Read on, you may be one of them (-:

Why did I write that? Well, it goes to show how you can be blinded by your own prejudices, but it simply hadn't occurred to me that the jet jocks don't look out of the window until they reach the MDA and that there is a largish community of folk out there who like AutoGen, night textures and seasons so much that they would not swap them for anything. Following the posting of the preview, I was treated to a long and very instructive thread in the FS2002 forum which opened my eyes to the different things users value in Flight Simulator - so before you go any further, take a long hard look at the picture above.

You are looking at the M25/A3 junction at Wisley. At left is the old wartime airfield; just ahead of the chopper are the gardens of the Royal Horticultural Society; and beyond that is a golf course for people who cannot fly and want to make their lives seem longer. The lake below the left skid used to have windsurfers all over it in the eighties, but they are gone now, along with the Porsches they brought with them. Take a look at the motorway, the way the shadows from the trees fall across it; they don't move with the sun, but what a terrific effect. This is what flying VFR in England is like, believe me. It makes me want to go - just a shame we have fog today.

As it stands, the JustFlight package includes a single set of textures that total around 1.8 gigs; a night time set would double this and seasons would quadruple the result. Given that this package only covers the east and south-east of England, you could quadruple the total again for total country coverage, resulting in the whole installation would run out at 64 Gb or more. Fortunately for the developers and for PPLs, the lack of seasons doesn't matter so much as you might think.

England's maritime climate means that large parts of the countryside stay green nearly year round and that seasonal variations aren't as noticeable as you might think. This is one thing that Microsoft have got nearly right in their UK textures - the color stays much the same all year, because much of our land is grazed. Sure, in spring, we have winter wheat in the fields, in summer we have ripening crops (with very noticeable yellow fields of rape) and in fall they harvest, plough, seed and roll in the space of a few days. Thanks to the European Common Agricultural Policy, we also have 'set-aside', where farmers get paid to leave a percentage of their fields untilled. The net effect is that wherever and whenever you look, you mostly see green. Unless you are looking at Tonbridge Wells.

Seasons or no, the default textures offer a bland vision of Britain's infinitely varied landscape which loses half the fun of real flight - take a real flight and in the space of fifty miles you can pass from the prairies of East Anglia into the claustrophic jigsaw of the Fens, while another fifty sees you in the industrial heartland of the Midlands (which will appear in a later pack). There is always something new to see.

Flight in what we call VMC - visual meteorological conditions - is all about navigating using features on the ground. The UK and Europe in general, must be one of the toughest places in the world to do it, because there are so many ground features. Pilots look at the map, then look at the ground and try to find their waypoint (don't do it the other way around, it is the best way of getting lost known to man. I am an expert). What do we look for? Roads, like the M25 up there - you fly along with them on your left, because someone else is almost certainly doing the same thing coming the other way, and he is also at 2500 feet. You also look for lakes, football grounds, castles, railways, rivers and combinations of all of the above. Very rarely do you navigate using hills or masts, because you are trying to stay away from them. And surprisingly, one thing you can't do is to rely on a GPS, because reception is variable, batteries run down and the majority of pilots don't possess one.

The forum thread made me appreciate that the majority of FS2002 users don't fly the way a real pilot would; because they can't. I had never thought about this before, it being a concept I had accepted should be part of the FS deal right from the word go. All I can say is that flight simmers who have never tried VFR navigation have a real treat in store for them - taking off with an innacurate upper wind forecast and navigating to their destination armed with nothing more than a Mark I eyeball and a sectional. So, to demonstrate how the add-on makes this sort of experience possible, that is exactly what we are going to do.

We are going to take a flight from Shoreham to my parents-in-law's house at Guildford, using the 1:250000 scale ICAO chart of the UK - this is sheet 8, England South, if anyone wants to ring Transair they can get it mail order. Oh, and you are going to need a copy of the East and South-East England VFR Photographic Scenery from JustFlight. Be prepared; it will to cost you £29.99 (€49.99/$44.99), but then the ICAO sectional is £12.99 and only covers half the area that the scenery does. And by the way, you are gonna need a chopper - I suggest Jean-Marie Mermaz's (bell47sk.zip), which, amazing though it may seem, is free.

OK, so while we are loading the scenery, which takes time, since it comes on 3 CDs and it took me fifteen minutes to figure out how to get them out of the box, lets look at our route. I have chosen to go the long way around, chiefly because it gives us the chance to look at some interesting places. In reality, we would have to fly most of the way at less than 2500 feet on the Gatwick QNH, because the whole area is overlaid with London TMA Class A airspace. In the sim I flew higher at times to get a better view for the screen shots, on a Special VFR clearance direct from those nice people at Microsoft Approach. To make it more fun, we are going to fly by the seat of our pants - a method of navigation often known as 'IFR' or I Follow Roads. We can.

The recommended spec for the scenery is a 1.0 Ghz Pentium III, with a 32 Mb graphics card, Windows 98 or better, 128 Mb of RAM, DirectX 8.0a and 1.8 Gb hard disk space. This is no word of a lie - although the manual says that you can run the add-on using a 700 Mhz Pentium, the amount of pixel shifting that has to go on gives that sort of machine a run for its money, although interestingly enough, the impact on frame rates is minimal. The package comes complete with its own mesh, which can be installed as an option, but though this is better than the default, it is nothing worth shouting about. Lago's mesh is far better and fortunately it goes together with the VFR scenery extremely well.

Four pages of the manual are devoted to setting up your PC to run the package and they are essential reading. The first gotcha with the scenery is that it doesn't pay to set vis to more than 20 miles - 10 is better - and extended terrain textures should be set off. Three reasons are given for this: first, the greater the visibility, the further ahead FS2002 has to load the textures - sooner or later the process fails and you get blurring; second, the color of the textures is better with lower vis settings; and finally, if you enable extended terrain textures, you will wait all day for Flight Simulator to load. As it is, with the VFR Scenery package installed, load times are considerably extended, with a noticeable hiatus at 30-40% on the bar. I can hear a lot of folk snorting at the idea of setting 10 mile vis, but I go flying on many days when we have less than 15 kilometres. The requirement isn't totally unrealistic, although it will seem unusual to simmers who are used to flying with unlimited vis - but such a thing isn't that common in the UK. Take it from me, when vis hits fifty kilometres, everyone goes flying, just so they can talk about it to the grandchildren. For the last three weeks, it has rarely been above 8 km where I live and today it must be under 1500 metres.

For this flight I set the vis to 10 miles and to give the developers their due, it did make the textures look better. In the harsh light that comes with unlimited vis set in FS2002, the textures appear slightly garish and the fogging softens them. One thing you will have already noticed from the screen shot is that estuaries, rivers and harbors do not match the sea so well, even using the developer's enhanced inshore water textures. This is one of the parts of the package that could do with improvement; it shouldn't be so tough to fix using PhotoShop.

OK, so we lift off from Shoreham and looking back the first thing we see is that the airfield (screen shot two up, on the left) stands out like a sore thumb behind us there on the curve of the river. There is a way around this problem - turn the airfields off. Seriously, it works. Because of the way the textures were made, all the airfields are there as photographic images in the JustFlight package - even the ones which aren't normally present in FS2002. In fact, every last farm strip can be found, if you look hard enough; so if you buy this pack and a copy of Lockyear's you can fly to all the fields that Microsoft forgot. The problem with the photoscenery is that you don't get any 3D buildings, but all the default Microsoft fields and scenery are there, even if, as the VFR scenery reveals, it isn't always aligned quite as well as it might be. Incidentally, there might be a solution for the add-on airfield problem, as Gary Summons has hinted that he intends to design textures for his scenery that blend in with JustFlight's package. If someone of Gary's standing in the FS world believes it is worthwhile doing this, maybe other developers will follow his lead.

Another thing to note is that there isn't any generic AutoGen - the package completely suppresses FS2002's automatically generated trees and houses, although it works with specific AutoGen features like masts and stuff. There is a section on the developer's web site describing how to restore the FS2002 Heathrow scenery, for example, but be warned that add-on scenery objects like bridges and such sometimes appear in slightly different places to their images in the VFR scenery.

If you want my view, the lack of generic AutoGen is a good thing. I know this will horrify FS purists who have waited years to see houses and trees and suchlike, but take it from me, if you add generic AutoGen to these textures, it looks silly. Don't get me wrong, AutoGen looks fine at low levels, if you can excuse the default houses not looking anything like British ones, but it is too prominent from the air. If you want to know what trees look like from an aircraft, try the screenshot above. In this view, we have gone north via Tonbridge Wells to Sevenoaks and we are staring at the M25/M26 junction - I plan to hang a left, skirting around the Gatwick CTA. The field in the distance is Biggin Hill. If I deactivated the airfield in scenery.cfg, guess what? It would still be there in the JustFlight add-on, only no 3D buildings.

So, remembering to keep left of the motorway, we head west about fifteen miles, looking for Redhill. I'll leave out calling Biggin Hill as we transit their zone and all that stuff or this will be an even longer review than it looks set to be (-:

How will we know we have reached Caterham? In the default scenery, it would be anybody's guess and we would probably have to fix our position using the Redhill NDB, but someone forgot to put an ADF in the chopper, so be grateful we have the JustFlight package installed. We have to be sure of our position here, because we are right on the edge of Gatwick's airspace and the CAA will have my balls chromium plated if we stray into it. What we are looking for is the next major intersection; there should be a lake just east of a railway line... now lookee here. What do we see?

OK, I concede that the M25 is visible in FS2002 and if you had the FSLandclass UK pack installed you could get a fix by looking for a collection of buildings on a road just north of the Redhill NDB when Gatwick airport was abeam, but that is going the long way around. In real life, it isn't like that. For a start, Gatwick is much tougher to spot than you would think and Redhill is much easier to find than you would imagine - because it lies on a massive dual carriageway and it looks... er... like it does in the photograph. The aircraft I fly doesn't even have an ADF, because we are too mean to buy one, so we have to look out the window to find out where we are instead. It is fun, I assure you and it works. Thousands of PPLs have looked out the window every day since the dawn of powered flight. We just aren't so used to doing it in Flight Simulator.

From Redhill, we are going to follow the M25 another 15 miles or so to Wisley, where we will go left down the A3. Just look at the cars crawling along down there, bet they wish they were us up here, huh? For the benefit of non-UK readers, the M25 is the biggest parking lot in the world, a kind of 24 hour automobile graveyard, where people aspire to doing 15 miles per hour. The congestion is so bad, Chris Rea wrote a song about it, called 'The Road to Hell'. It was an enormous hit, but I guess it was bound to be, if everyone who had ever been stuck for four hours on that road bought a copy.

Wisley is our easiest waypoint, because not only is it the only junction for miles that lies in woodland, but it has an abandoned airfield to the south. I have lost count of how many times Barbara and I have arrived at that junction coming the other way by road on the M25, after a four hour journey south from Durham. When we reach it, I almost sigh with relief to be out of the traffic and able to get my foot down at last. From the junction it is only about 20 minutes to my parents-in-law's.

We go around the intersection and head south-west towards our destination. Now here I am going to talk about the other issue with JustFlight's package, which is blurring. When I first loaded the add-on, before I got the settings right, I had a great deal of difficulty with this and although the developer tells me that some users never suffer from it, I am pretty certain that everyone will see it sooner rather than later.

The problem is liable to strike when you change course, if you travel faster than your processor can shift tiles, or even, sometimes, when you are flying in a straight line with the visibility limit set too high. Switching view mode occasionally provokes an attack and panning fast around a VC can bring it on too. Sometimes, the textures seem to blur just for the hell of it. To begin with, I thought it was a bug that was specific to the package, but then I realised that the default textures do exactly the same thing, it is just less noticeable. What happens is that crisp textures in front of you are replaced by blurry ones and then the tiles shuffle as the display engine gets to them and suddenly they are back in focus again. This can happen right under your nose and very disturbing it can be.

There are various ways of preventing, or limiting, the problem, all of which are dealt with in the manual. When I first saw it happen, I was reminded of a similar problem on mountain flights in FS2002 and I did an orbit, but this just confused the display engine and made the blurring worse. It is tempting to fix it by enabling FS2002's extended terrain texture feature, but unless you have a terahertz PC with a 5 Ghz front side bus and RAID5, you will push loading times into the five minute range - no fun if you accidentally load your flight in the middle of the night (remember, no night textures) and have to set it up again. Besides, even if you have the power or patience to use this feature, it barely helps. FS2002 is only guaranteed to bring textures into sharp focus when they are in the pilot's face; within a few kilometres range and the effect can be very noticeable with custom textures. Fortunately there is a work around, reducing the visibility being one way to stop it being so obvious, another is to use an application included with the package called the 'Terrain Adjuster' which alters the range at which the sharpening occurs. The faster your machine, the further away you can set the range.

Another issue that you should be aware of before you get your credit card out is that the textures looks their best above 2000 feet, so you won't be able to use the package to barnstorm Saffron Walden's chimney pots. Go too much above 7500 feet and the detail merges together, go below 1500 feet and it becomes indistinct. Out of fairness to the developer, I have to point out that exactly the same applies to any other set of textures in Flight Simulator and very little VMC flight is conducted in the UK outside that band anyway. Large parts of the country are effectively a military low flying zone and the only thing that would routinely force most pilots much below 1500 feet (except in the circuit, obviously) is a low cloud base.

So, all that being said, here we are, at our destination. Right at the beginning, I chose a trip to Guildford because I know the area well - let's see what we can identify.

Almost directly below the chopper is a long wood; if you look closely, there is a rectangular cut-out on the near side of the trees below the tip of the left hand skid, where a yellow track passes through a green field. I have put an oval ring around this in the enlargement. The wood is called the Chantries, the field is said to grow magic mushrooms and the track is the Pilgrim's way, along which penitants used to pass for a thousand years on the way to Canterbury. It is sandy along that entire section and twenty years ago, Barbara and I used to take turns riding her mother's pony along it. Sadly the poor beast is dead now, but he did get to nearly 35, even if he was as cunning as all got out and would head for home at the slightest opportunity. We never found any mushrooms, in case you ask. Just behind the back of the right skid is Shalford, where I think I can just see the church where we got married, and the ring in at lower right in the large pic is her parents' house. If I went a little lower, you could actually make out their garage, but it is pushing the resolution of the textures a little. If you take a look at the last picture, I have gone down low and zoomed back the view, which has brought on a fit of blurring - but the green field below the right skid is where the pony used to graze. The dark patch in the narrow bit of the field below the front of the skid is a patch of bullrushes at the head of a pond that has slowly dried up over the years.

One contributor to the thread that was spawned by the preview wrote: 'For the money (and as noted, it is a LOT of money) I don't just want to see a painting of my house on the ground, I want to land a helicopter at its virtual front door, in the shade of its roof, day or night, all year round.' Well, I don't think we are ever going to quite get to that, but there is no doubt that this is one of the more expensive add-ons I have reviewed.

There are three more packs yet to be released, providing complete coverage of England and Wales. When they become available, buying the set would set you back £99.99 ($150 approx). A hundred pounds is a great deal of money, by FS2002 add-on standards, but considering the technology that went into taking the photos - for example, the camera cost more than than the plane it flew in - such things are relative.

If you want the most absolutely realistic VFR experience, you probably ought to buy the relevant ICAO 1:250,000 UK sectionals, at £12.99 each (the exchange rate is around $1.50 to the Pound). The complete set of six southern ones is £77.94, or you could economise and buy the 1:500,000 charts, in which case you would only need two, but that would still cost £25.98. Then again, if you have any PPL friends, you could ask them, or you could take a punt and ring up the local flying school, where you might get some expired charts for free.

'Is it really worth it?' I hear you ask.

I guess you are the only person that can answer that, but if you want my personal view as a pilot, I think the add-on is a must have, but its appeal will depend very much on your circumstances and the way you use FS2002. Here, for what it is worth, are some things to consider while you make your decision. If your simming is confined to driving 747s across the pond, then you will never see the ground until short final and buying the package doesn't make much sense. If low level military jets turn you on, then unless you have a really fast machine, the blurring will get you and in any case the textures don't look good under 1000 feet; and finally, if you are a fully paid up Microsoft-version-of-reality fan, then stay with the default, because you will definitely miss the seasons and generic AutoGen. But if you have any aspirations to seeing the UK as PPLs see it, then this is the only game in town. Despite the lengthened load times, the visibility restrictions and the blurring, I simply cannot wait to see the next three packs.

The developer - Visual Flight - has an excellent web site devoted to the VFR Photographic Scenery, which is worth checking out for news and information. This site has news, FAQs, forums and mailing list information, videos, screenshots, compatibility information and much more.

Learn More Here