Flight1 Ultimate Terrain USA for FS2004

By Andrew Herd (20 August 2005)

very now and then, the forward march of technology and Flight Simulator's relatively open interface inspires a developer to produce a product that makes me slap my foreheard and think 'Dang! Why didn't anyone come up with that idea before!', one of those ideas being USA Roads, another Flight Environment. I don't think it is any coincidence that both these products have been packaged and marketed by Flight1, because the company has built up such a good reputation for selling quality products - neither has it been afraid to take the odd gamble in its time. In the case of the two packages mentioned above, installing the addon completely transforms the look of the simulator, but the best news is that the two are supported by dedicated developers who haven't done the natural thing and sat back on their laurels after release, but instead have pitched themselves into a further, even more demanding creative cycle. In the case of USA Roads, this has led to Ultimate Terrain and boy, is it a peach.

I looked at USA Roads about six months ago and thought it was a tremendously impressive product and one of the largest downloads I had seen to date at 321 Mb. The addon does exactly what the name suggests and it turns the FS2004 road system in the US from a pathetic joke into a good enough simulation of reality that it makes VFR nav a distinct possibility; but the problem is that the rivers, lakes and railroads still conform to the Microsoft standard. Nothing spoils my virtual day more than seeing a river haring up a mountainside - would it make fishing some kind of a challenge if they flowed uphill in real life.

No, I take that back. Now I get to think about it, it wouldn't be any more difficult than fishing water going the way gravity intended it to, but it would surely be hellish interesting.

Ultimate Terrain USA has evolved from and replaces USA Roads - what it does is to fix all the rivers, streams and railroads, quite a few of the lakes and then make sure that everything behaves itself like nature intended. Highlights of the package include the addition of every available road from Navteq (the digital map makers) data; enhancement of the railroads; correction of lake and shorelines; the addition of completely new and much more realistic night lighting; movement of rivers and streams to where they belong, adding many more in the process; improving the landclass in the larger connurbations; and add in new scenery tiles for parks, golf courses and cemetaries. Whether the latter will prove to be an attraction to simmers remains to be seen, but it is good to know that navigation by golf course is possible now. What you do not get is mesh, although the package does flatten some mesh polygons to allow repositioned lakes to sit in their correct places.

While I remember, I know a guy who once did a forced landing on a golf course. It wasn't easy and he was in a sweat when he got out the plane, only to have a party of golfers play right on past him and the plane as if they didn't exist. Pete said he wouldn't have minded, except it was a twin and he had left ruts a mile long down the fairway, but he figured they must have decided someone had spiked their drinks in the clubhouse and his Seneca couldn't possibly exist - their faces were a study. You get to meet all sorts of folk, I guess.

The package is a 1.2 Gb download. No, that is not a typo, it is all of 1200 Mb and therefore gets the title of the largest FS addon package I have ever reviewed, for what that is worth. Clearly, this is not a good purchase if you have a 56k modem and even Flight1 admit that some users might prefer to wait for the boxed version to hit the shelves - but if you have two megabit broadband it should only take a few hours to get it and thanks to the publisher's downloader tool. Online purchase is just about practical for ordinary broadband users as long as you are patient and don't have bandwidth limitations. The review was done with the 119 Mb 1.1 patch and the 10 Mb 1.2 patch applied. The plane in the shots is the DreamFleet Beech Baron 58, which is in beta at the time of writing and promises to be an absolute classic - more on this package as soon as we get our hands on some final code.

Once you have this great chunk of code on your disk, installation of the downloaded version is very straight forward. Flight1 affictionados will be old hands at the key validation system, which requires an active Internet connection and only takes a few seconds to complete. After that, Ultimate Terrain installs like the thoroughbred it is, creating a new program group under the Flight1 banner, which contains links to the manual, the setup and configuration tool and a texture configuration tool. In theory, the app can be installed on just about any machine that can run FS2004, but Flight1 suggest a minimum of a 1.6 Ghz Pentium with 2 Gb of hard disk space and a 128 Mb video card. It is hard to work out what performance hit there is, but logic tells me that all those new lakes, roads, rivers and railroads have to take up a deal of processor time - for what it is worth, I did the review on a 3.0 Ghz Pentium and Ultimate Terrain ran fine. One potential gotcha is that if you like this product so much that you go out and buy Ultimate Terrain: Canada and Alaska, you will need to uninstall UT USA before you put the other product on your disk and then reinstall it again afterwards. The reason is that the Canada/Alaska installation routine isn't smart enough to install 'on top of' the USA package, although the two products work just fine together if you do things the approved way around.

The next step after reading the 46 page manual is to run the UT configuration applet. This gives access to a vast range of options and, in concert with the texture configuration tool, allows you to set up the package virtually any way you want. It is worth spending a little time on the applet, because UT installations aren't set in stone and once the package is on your hard disk, you can change it as much as you like. There are six options for setting up the roads: enhanced roads (except for residential), which only puts the major roads into FS2004; add residential roads, which gives you the whole enchilada; add bridge roads, which turns on roads that cross water, but leads to a potential conflict with FS bridges, as these roads are 'flat' on the water surface; add tunnel roads, which puts roads over the tops of mountains rather than having them begin and end where the tunnel mouths should be; and flatten major roads, which cuts away the terrain some in order to allow larger roads to pursue flatter gradients. The last feature definitely makes major roads look more realistic, but there is an associated performance hit. The sixth option is to uncheck all the boxes, which leaves you thirty five bucks poorer and staring at the default road set.

I can hear people screaming, 'What about the bridge conflict!' Ahhhhhhh glasshopper, Allen Kriesman, who heads up Scenery Solutions, who did the development, is a terrifically clever man and he has thought of that. Middle right of the config applet is a set of options that let you do stuff like turn all the FS2004 bridge objects off and remove misplaced FS2004 landmarks and buildings. If you opt to keep the bridges and turn bridge roads off in UT, you run the risk of coming across bridges marooned in the middle of rivers which have changed their course as a result of their more accurate placement by the package. Having never been that much of a fan of Flight Simulator's bridges, which are few and far between, I turned bridge roads on and bridges off when I installed UT USA and was more than happy with the result. It would be great if the package automatically generated generic bridges where the roads cross water, but unless a bridge is a real monster, they don't stand out that much from the air if you are above a thousand feet, so flat roads across the water will do for me. Checking the 'misplaced' options more or less ensures that you won't get objects in the middle of lakes or in the sea and it is worth doing because UT USA changes some areas of coastline a fair bit.

That brings me to the water options, which allow you to enhance lakes, coasts and rivers; enhance streams; turn off all the streams; and adjust the 'stream offset'. Dealing with the last item first, all the stream offset does is tell the streams how far they ought to be below the surrounding ground level. The default is set an amazing ten meters, which I reduced to a more realistic 5. I am toying with the idea of reducing it to 2 meters. Enhancing lakes, coasts and rivers does just that and ensures that you don't end up with roads crossing repositioned water, while enhancing streams near enough quadruples the number of little creeks in FS and makes the landscape really come alive in some places. The penalty of enhancing the streams is that there is a performance hit and users of marginal systems may want to turn this option off, but the advantage of enabling the 'lakes, coasts and rivers' option is that it brings dramatic changes to FS2004. Ultimate Terrain redraws the entire coast of the US - accurately - and adds a slew of extra lakes and even ponds.

The other options deal with railroads, landclassing and night lighting. As far as the rail is concerned, you can either have enhanced railroads, the default railroads, or no railroads - I went with the enhanced ones. Checking the landclass options is pretty much compulsory because doing so brings you many more small cities and towns than Microsoft saw fit to include and it also fixes some problems which inevitably occur if you have 'enhanced lakes, coasts and rivers' checked. One thing I discovered during the review is that if a third party product changes a coastline, there is a good chance that a landclass value will not be defined for that particular area - and when this happens, FS2004 cannot display land, so squares of water appear instead. Needless to say, UT USA provides some "fill-in" landclass values for these areas, since it transforms the coastlines and adds many new islands, but this leads to a new danger, which is that some of the default coastal airfields may end up partially in the sea.

The first time I saw USA Roads, it occurred to me that a smart programmer might be able to force the landclass to change where the road density is greater than a certain amount, thereby forcing towns to appear by proxy, but it seemed a little far fetched at the time. To show that great minds think alike, Scenery Solutions have come up with a method which causes city landclass to be generated depending on road and commercial business density data, the end result being that town and city landclass appears as if by magic, more or less everywhere it should, although it doesn't work all of the time. Adding detailed land areas brings you the golf courses, parks and cemetaries.

One problem with the config applet is that the changes are executed the moment you check or uncheck a box, which means they have to be done one at a time, which would be more than a little tedious on a slower system; it would be great to see the app upgraded to let set all the changes up, then hit 'do it' and go away and have an espresso, assuming that is possible (I mean, make the changes all at once, not have an espresso. If you are a real simmer (tm) I assume you can make your own espresso). The second, of a minor nature, is that it doesn't obey Windoze law and you can only exit by clicking the exit button - the red 'x' box does nothing.

For readers who are scratching their heads at landclassing, it is a neat idea which allows Flight Simulator to choose which landscape tiles go where. So if a particular ground location in the FS world has a tag saying 'agricultural', you get farm tiles; and if it says 'small town' you get a low density housing tile and the appropriate AutoGen. Clever developers like Ruud Faber at FSScene have taken advantage of this to release much more realistic replacement texture sets and these work just fine with UT USA installed, so simmers who have invested in Ruud's excellent product line needn't worry, not only is their investment safe, it will look even better with UT USA installed.

The final configuration option relates to the night lighting, which is controlled using the texture configuration app. Ultimate Terrain transforms the way FS2004 looks at night, chiefly because there are so many more roads, and it offers five options for street light color and traffic density, together with three choices of pavement texture (that's road surface colour for Europeans). You can also choose to have the lights and road traffic fade away as roads become more distant from urban areas, select a set of specially painted urban terrain night textures and there is an awful decision to be made between two types of daylight pavement texture. Headaches, heartaches, man, these addons can cause real stress, thank you for sharing (-:

Can I use UT USA with my favorite mesh addon? The answer is a qualified yes, because with the exception of adjusting mesh elevation around the lakes, UT has been designed to sit on top of whatever mesh it finds, though the safest set to use is probably the one made by FSGenesis - I last reviewed this as an FS2002 product, but have had good reports of it since and the addon has been consistently upgraded and supported over the years. Your mileage with other types of scenery addons may vary - UT has a very lively support forum fuelled by questions from users some of whom are having troubles which appear to be caused by conflicts with previously installed third party scenery packages. A few unlucky people have had FS crashes to desktop, but as usual, I did the installation of the review product on a reasonably virgin FS installation and didn't have any problems, beyond spotting the occasional scenery 'funny'. I tried installing UT USA under MegaScenery New York and - once I had the order of the addons right way around in the FS scenery library - it worked fine. No, it worked better than that, because the new roads that UT USA adds in line up almost perfectly with those in the PC Aviator package and the effect was uncanny; all that was needed was some kind of fix for the 'join' between the MegaScenery textures and the FS default tiles and you would not have known that you weren't looking at two addons from the same supplier.

Whether you can use UT USA with other third party addons is going to be a matter of trial and error. Having read the forums, the safest way of arranging things is to install UT first, then go to the FS Scenery library and send it all the way down the ranking until it sits just above the default scenery. That way any addons you have will sit 'on top' of UT's roads and rivers and you should minimise the possibility of lake mesh conflicts. I tried a few of the more popular payware addons and didn't experience any problems at all, but there are so many different packages out there I can do no more than generalize. And before anyone emails me and asks if their favorite freeware/payware scenery works with UT USA, the answer is, I don't know (-:

Do I like UT USA? Yeah, actually, I do, a lot. I run it with the residential roads option turned off, because the dense grid that results makes cityscapes look odd to my eyes (for a screenshot of why I think this way, take a look at the USA Roads review). If I have any criticisms at all, they mostly relate to the appearance of larger bodies of water. Ulitmate Terrain does not present these as well as the default water and the way the rivers end up with knife-edge transitions between land and water looks far less natural than Microsoft's take on reality. According to Scenery Solutions, this was a conscious decision by the team, driven by the fact that the only way of dealing with the tens of thousands of water features in the scenery was to use an automated method for drawing shores, but once this was implemented, a problem became apparent. If shorelines were automatically applied to all water features, some of the smaller rivers and lakes ended up looking terrible, because the shores touched or overlapped in places. You might ask 'why not make the shores thinner?' but that opens a new can of worms, in that FS2004 has a 'shoreline bug' which means that if shorelines are made too thin, the water doesn't always align perfectly with it and can extend beyond onto the land and there is a similar issue with the wave effect. In the end, the vote was that all lakes over a certain area and all of the coast would have shorelines, but none of the rivers.

The shoreline condundrum isn't helped by the fact that you get to see a lot more river, which makes the effect that much more obvious, but Peter Wilding has a long term plan to introduce shores for the larger rivers, which will go some way to fixing the problem. Unfortunately, if you don't check 'enhance lakes, coasts and rivers' the enhanced roads are likely to wander all over the default rivers, many of which aren't in quite the right place; this is a particular problem if you have the residential road option enabled, as there are that many more roads to cause conflicts. To be fair, the lack of shorelines has affected every other package I have seen which adds more than a few acres of lake and river to FS2004, but it would be great to see a fix for this in FS2006.

My other beef is a minor one which I have already commented on above - there are areas where street pattern shouts out there should be a town, yet the tiles show forest or prairie. This isn't actually a fault with the package, so much as a feature to which your eye is inevitably drawn and I am not sure if there is a solution, beyond introducing coast-to-coast landclassing (impractical), or some kind of clever programming tweak (who knows?). Finally, it is possible to start the configuration applet and attempt to save changes with FS2004 running, which is a no-no; I think this should be prevented.

Verdict? I made many flights with the package installed: the first, shown in the top triple shot, being from Palm Beach International (KPBI) heading south in DreamFleet's fabulous model 58 Baron; the second across the bayous of Louisiana; and the third upriver from Hartford CT. In every case, having UT USA installed made the flight a much more enjoyable and realistic experience than it would have been had I had to suffer the default road and river set. Thanks to the more accurate placement of water in UT, flights in the mountains are a real pleasure, because the rivers and lakes follow believable courses most of the time. You can follow roads using a sectional and all of a sudden it becomes possible to use waterways to fix your position, so the addon takes Flight Simulator a step closer to the holy grail of VFR navigation. The one rough edge on the package is the shorelines - were these fixed up, UT USA would get an Armchair Aviator Award, but as it is, I can wholeheartedly recommend Scenery Solutions superb addon as the base to build all other US scenery on, because there is absolutely nothing out there to touch it.