VFR England And Wales
By Simon Lloyd (25 September 2000)
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company VFR Scenery Ltd, which use to be part of the freeware scenery
creators “UK Design Team”, have made it well on to the
commercial market with their first scenery pack England and
Wales.
For a long time now I have wanted to find some scenery for the UK
that had more than a couple of brown buildings for international
terminals at London’s Heathrow. I downloaded many airports and
regions off of the net, including scenery from the “UK Design
Team”, but they all came up short. Now VFR Scenery has put all
their scenery together, filled in some missing links and ports and
came up with “England and Wales”, which covers over 200
airports in England, Wales, Isle of Man and the Scilly Isles.
Heathrow you may recognise from a freeware release a while back. Also Gatwick is from a freeware scenery release but why these packs were released for free I can’t believe as the detail is great and makes you just want to taxi around Heathrow all day.
The landscapes that can be seen right across the country are amazing; you can tell that more than just an aeronautical map has been used to create this scenery. Runways now look much more realistic on takeoff and approach, taxiing around the airports is now made more interesting and life like, with signs, taxiway center lines and flashing “runway ahead” lights. There are also thicker, more realistic precision approach lights and good runway lighting with the approach runway lights coming back further than the default FS98 lights.
At the major airports there are gates and signs to direct you to around, but even at smaller airports there are signs for the runways. Lots of airport buildings and objects are included so that there is a great feeling of realism. When flying across the country at altitudes of about 4000 feet the use of the program is at its best; even looking at some towns on this scenery is much better than anything Microsoft came up with.
Some say, and I agree, that the scenery found here is better than the FS2000 look. If you have FS2000 like I do then you will agree that this is better. I fly FS98 more because of this scenery.
Really, there is only one way to find out how great this scenery is, and that is by getting it. VFR scenery have released a free try out on their web site. Also on the web site is a free upgrade that will make the original scenery even better by ironing out the snags.
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Simon Lloyd
Visit VFR Scenery's web site.
Simoty@hotmail.com