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Gary Summons has been developing the UK2000 scenery for so long now that the first copy I received came on a roll of punched tape. In those days, Flight Simulator didn't actually have visuals, instead you had to enter in what you wanted to do on cards, which were packed up and sent to the data processing department; then after a long wait, you got back another roll of punched tape, which you ran on a mainframe terminal and sent back to department again, only to get a letter three weeks later saying you had crashed inside the hangar and should never have tried to take off in the first place, because the airfield was socked in and you wouldn't have been able to see anything worth a damn even if you had remembered to open the doors before you tried to taxi out. If someone had told us wireframe animation was only twenty years down the line, we would never have believed them.
Okay, I lied about the punched tape - but Gary did begin the development of the UK2000 scenery nine years ago, back in May 1999 and we reviewed the first couple of parts shortly after they were released in January 2001. The scenery was designed for FS2000 and it has been successively upgraded to work with every succeeding version of Flight Simulator, collecting rave reviews along the way. The last time we looked at it was back in February 2006, by which time Gary was coding for FS2004, had reached southern Yorkshire and Lancashire and the scenery had been made compatible with Horizon's VFR Photographic Scenery. Horizon make a natural partner, given that they are a UK-based developer and the VFR photographic scenery is a flagship product of theirs - Horizon have stuck with it nearly as long as Gary has with UK2000, the first time we reviewed the photographic scenery being back in 2002. So although this review is mainly about UK2000 Volume 1, I am going to include a look at the way it integrates with the VFR Photographic Scenery, because the two of them are (literally) made for each other and my recommendation is that if you buy one, you buy the other.
VFR Airfields Vol. 1 is available as a boxed CD-ROM for FSX and covers the southern portions of England and Wales, the upper limit being a line drawn horizontally just north of Oxford - which means that Luton airport isn't included. The minimum system spec is given as Windows XP SP2 or Vista, a 1.8 Ghz processor, a gig of RAM, a 128 Mb video card, DirectX 9.0c, 568 megs of hard disk space and an Internet connection, although the latter is only needed for the optional registration. The requirements for VFR Photographic Scenery GenX V 2.0 Vol 1 are the same, except you need ten gigs on your hard disk for a partial install and 28 gigs for the whole enchilada. Yep, twenty eight gigs, no fooling.
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VFR Airfields is easy to install, given that all you have to do is put the CD in the drive and then follow the prompts, which are self-explanatory. If you check all the options, you will end up upgrading 78 airports, each of which will have its own static aircraft and animated road traffic - there is also a unique 'explorer' flight, which starts at Badminton and, depending on the day and time, lets you fly in AI aircraft company to another enhanced airfield, which is quite a clever idea. Installing the package creates a new program group, with links to the UK2000 and Horizon's web sites, a configuration tool and an 86 page manual. In theory there is also a link to the National Air Traffic Control Services (NATS) web site, although this was broken on my installation; the correct link is here and once you have created a login, you can retrieve the approach plates for every airfield in the UK.
The configuration tool lets you 'tell' UK2000 Vol 1 that you are a VFR Photo GenX user and install/uninstall GA AI flight plans, explorer AI, static aircraft, road traffic, and a 'base image' for each included airfield - and do the reverse, again on a field by field basis. This gives you a great deal of flexibility not only to customise the scenery, but to cater for any other favorite addon airfields you happen to own, such as Gary's 'Xtreme' airports, which are even more detailed than the ones in UK2000 Vol 1, which at the time of writing meant Bristol and Gatwick. If your appetite is whetted, you can read about the Xtreme series here. Most users won't have much reason to use the config tool, because the automatic installation routine does everything that is needed, but if you subsequently install the VFR Photographic Scenery, the animated road traffic option will come in very handy, because the default FSX roads are in slightly different places to the ones in the Horizon addon and it will prevent a nasty outbreak of AI off-roading. The 'base image' option will also be welcome to some, because it takes out the ground texture graphic at the airfields you choose, allowing you to install another airfield without having to worry about whether the runways will line up or not.
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Installing Horizon's VFR Photographic Scenery Volume 1 takes a little longer than Gary's addon, mainly because the product comes on four DVDs and I would estimate it took an hour or so before I quite swapping disks. If you aren't familiar with this package, I would suggest reading the review of version 1 of the FSX product, as that will give you the low-down and let me concentrate on the changes made in version 2.0. The enhancements include night scenery, interactive water body updates and a new terrain mesh; if you are a version 1 user, don't panic, because you can get the water updates and night lighting as free upgrades. Horizon state on their web site that they will also provide 60 cm per pixel downloadable updates for up to 30 towns and cities in England and Wales in the future.
I did the review on a 2.66 Ghz Core2Duo with 4 Gb of RAM, a 768 Mb GeForce 8800GTX video card, Window Vista SP1 and FSX SP2 and frame rates were comparable to the default installation when flying over non-airfield areas, which is what you would expect. Taxiing at the smaller airfields imposed a variable performance hit, ranging from nil to around 25%, depending on whether the plane was on the threshold or close in to the buildings - given the increased level of detail, this is reasonable. The larger airports like Gatwick and particularly Heathrow, chopped out proportionally more frames, but without any of the sub-ten fps moments that will be familiar to FSX users parked at the gates of super-detailed addon airports. VFR Airfields Volume 1 is a kind of mid-way compromise between the bland scenery of the default airports and reality - the product considerably enhances the smaller airfields, but the larger airports don't get as thorough a work-over as Gary gives them in his Xtreme series. Before anyone complains about this, there are advantages in not running highly detailed large airports in FSX, unless you happen to have an over-clocked, liquid-cooled speed machine, and at the price, seventy eight fields on one disk represents fantastic value for money.
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The manual gives advice on how to set FSX up to run VFR Airfields to best effect and then lists each field, with an 'aerial' photo illustration, a brief history, details of the runways and frequencies and that is it. You don't get anything fancy, even at the majors, apart from AI vehicles and flocks of birds, which are prevalent enough at many of the fields to be slightly distracting, although the animations are well done. As you can see from the screenshots, with VFR Photographic Scenery Version 2.0 installed, the airfields look as if they belong and the many terrain oddities which the default FSX mesh produced in the UK are history, at least as far as I can tell, given that I didn't visit every single one of the fields. The VFR Photographic textures are a bit dark, no, don't adjust the gamma on your monitor, and aren't quite as good as the ones in PC Aviator's FSX MegaSceneries, but they only suffer slightly by comparison and are absolutely fine once you get used to them.
The airfields are coded to exactly the same standard as Gary's previous series, which means that all the major buildings are present and correct, together with a certain amount of other airport detail, including fences and hedges, and although the latter are 2D bill-board style offerings, they are neatly done, don't cost too many frames and blend into their surroundings as if they belong there. I have to admit that I have seen better static planes in my time and the best advice is to stay away from them, because they are perfectly acceptable unless you close right in - again, this saves frames, so I am neutral on the subject, but take a look at the screenshot above right to see what I mean.
One great service Gary performs is to retire FSX Gatwick's second runway from service, leaving us with only one, which is correct. Not only FSX, but just about every AI package I have ever tested has both runways at EGKK operating in parallel, whereas in reality only one of them is in use, the other having been decomissioned a long time ago!
The textures are all good and I particularly like the mown grass effect on some of the runways. Gary is well-known for the thorough job he does on taxiways and signs, so if you are familiar with any of the airfields here, you ought to be able to navigate your way around them just as if you were doing it for real. If you install VFR Airfields together with Horizon's VFR Photographic Scenery, you not only get a completely realistic landscape to fly over, you can land at very real-looking airfields - as a combination, they make a great team.
Andrew Herd
andy@flightsim.com
Learn More Here (VFR Airfields Volume 1)
Learn More Here (Horizon VFR Photographic Scenery)
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