Horizon VFR Netherlands for FS2002/FS2004

By Andrew Herd (7 September 2005)

So most wannabe VFR simmers go back to flying high and navigate using the GPS and VORs; a minority sport in the real world. At a guess, less than 50% of planes in Europe carry a GPS of any description, let alone a panel mounted Garmin like the Microsoft offering - the reason being that most pilots fly in areas with which they are intensely familiar and use landmarks like gravel pits and football stadiums to orientate themselves. Apart from seeing clouds from the wrong side, this is one of the great pleasures of VFR, which is no more and no less than sightseeing from the air, with a hundred dollar burger as your reward. Now I think of it, why do pilots eat burgers? I don't even like burgers, yet I always eat one when I land anywhere, it must be like Pavlov's dogs, or something.

But you can't see sights if there aren't any there to see, which is why flying the big iron is so popular in FS. Even then, when you finally make your descent from the upper flight levels, all Flight Simulator has to offer is a landscape you have seen a thousand times before, bland tiles repeating endlessly off into the distance, which means that one approach is much like any other. You can vary the look by buying new texture sets, like Ruud Faber's superb FScene series, but although these make the FS world look much more real, they don't solve the VFR nav problem.

The solution, of course, is to buy photoreal texture sceneries, which after a faltering start about five years back, when PCs weren't fast enough and hard disks weren't big enough, have finally made it into the big time. Phototexture sceneries replace the default landscape texture tiles with new ones based on aerial or satellite photos of the area in question, each tile being locked into the correct geographical place by a coordinate system built into Flight Simulator. The two leading suppliers of phototexture scenery at the time of writing are PC Aviator and Horizon - both have released US sceneries, but to date Horizon are the only one to have published European packages. VFR Netherlands will be particularly welcome because there is a very strong FS scene in Holland and I can only imagine the excitement this release must have caused there, but even if you don't live in the Netherlands, I seriously recommend you take a look, because flat though Holland might be, it has some fantastic scenery. I sailed there a lot in the seventies and eighties and have very fond memories of the place and its people, which makes me a little biased, but believe me, this package is so good that people are going to be talking about it for years to come.

Hardware specs for VFR Netherlands couldn't be simpler, because it will run on any machine that can run FS2002/FS2004, as long as it has enough hard disk space: a full installation will rob you of 1.8 Gb, although it is possible to partially install the scenery, thanks to the way the developers have packaged it. The phototextures come on a single DVD-ROM (not a CD, note) and an automatic installation routine triggers as soon as you shut the drive door; you will have to stay at the desk, because VFR Netherlands installs in at least six different stages and you are required to confirm each one, which is how you get to choose which sections you want to install on your hard disk. The process is a little unnerving, because after each section is installed all the dialogs disappear off the screen and it can be tough figuring out what, if anything, is happening, but if you wait thirty seconds, the whole process kicks into life again, this process repeating until all the parts have been transferred. What I cannot for the life of me figure out is why the developers didn't just provide a series of check boxes to let users preselect which areas they wanted to install, along with a 'put it all on the disk' option, which would save a lot of time and energy. According to the manual (in English and Dutch), the scenery is organised in horizontal slices, with area 1 covering the extreme south of the country and the other four stacked on top, ending with part 5, which covers the northern coastline; because Holland is a small country, the slices are relatively thin, so installing only one or two would limit you to direct east-west flights if you didn't want to run off the edge of the photoscenery.

The package also includes new terrain mesh; a land/water mask that fixes Microsoft's coastline; and replacement default objects - some of the default scenery is also inactivated as leaving it in would result in elevated areas and other oddities along the shores, this fix extending into contiguous parts of Germany and Belgium. At the end of the installation, the program asks for permission to alter some FS parameters, including the terrain_default_radius, which reduces the frequency at which texture blurring is likely to occur. Horizon's chosen figure of 7.5 virtually eliminates attacks of phototexture blurring but sets the range at which FS focusses the textures too close to the plane for practical VFR navigation - owners of fast PCs with plenty of RAM might consider leaving the default radius setting at the original figure.

If you aren't familiar with photoscenery packages, it is worth saying what you don't get, which is new airports and airfields (although the existing ones are much improved thanks to sitting in realistic-looking landscapes) and there is only one season. I realise that some simmers see this as a big limitation, but the photographs on which texture sceneries are based have to be taken in the summer months when cloud cover is at a minimum and the sun is high - if you think about it, doing the shoot in winter would ruin the effect because long shadows and clouds would obscure much of the detail, particularly in maritime climates like the Netherlands. Leaving aside the fact that northern European landscapes look much the same from the air in spring, summer, fall and most of winter, the other problem with having seasonal textures in a scenery like this one is that it would occupy 8 Gb of disk space were every season to be included and the package would quadruple in price. Out of interest, PC Aviator have a pretty good compromise in some of their sceneries, which include faux winter textures, made by post-processing the summer tiles so that they appear to have snow on them; on the whole, it works well and I guess it is an option Horizon might consider, although snowfalls are generally very light in the Netherlands if they occur at all. This is one option that would make a great enhancement to FS - imagine if you only got scenery tiles with snow on them if the METARS showed snow? I don't think such a thing is totally impossible. A final point I should make about VFR Netherlands is that there isn't any night lighting, so you would need to disable the scenery entirely if you suddenly developed an urge to do realistic night approaches.

Horizon describe the resolution of the scenery is as 'better than 5m/pixel' - in all probability this means 4.75 m/pixel, this being the best FS2004 can support. This FS limitation certainly keeps texture load times down by limiting the size of the texture bitmaps, but it is frustrating knowing that with the increasing availability of fast PCs with large hard disks we could be looking at far greater detail. As it is, the 4.75 mp limitation means that phototextures don't look good much below 2000 feet - you can forget being able to identify the boundary hedge and the road next to it on takeoff and the average house will be represented by a clutch of four or six pixels, which isn't quite good enough to figure out what your next-door-neighbour was doing in the pool that afternoon. On the other hand, all the water is landable, so depending on the size of his pool, you might conceivably get a floatplane down on it and the higher you go, the better the overall impression, until the awful moment when a join between the phototextures and the default scenery comes into view and you realise why you bought the phototextures in the first place. It would be great to think that one day, the entire FS world would be covered in photoreal tiles, but even allowing for the advent of zillion terabyte hard disks to store all the date, I can't quite see it happening. You and I can dream, huh?

Before I forget, I had better say a little more about phototexture blurring. This is a fact of life affecting all Flight Simulator photoreal texture sceneries, the blurring being caused by last minute shuffling of ground texture tiles into their final resting places, a process which is accompanied by refocussing; even the default scenery tiles do it, but their design makes the effect less noticeable. Attacks of blurring are more frequent if you fly faster than 200 knots, turn frequently, or set the visibility limit too high - in practice we don't see many days with greater than 20 nm vis in northern Europe, so I use that as my upper limit and it definitely helps. There are all kinds of home remedies for fixing blurring and I have tried them all (thanks guys for all the suggestions), but have come to the conclusion that what we need is a fix to the FS texture engine. Since VFR Netherlands is so good the entire team at Microsoft will probably buy it, maybe it will inspire them to work on a fix for the blurring problem? (-:

I reviewed the scenery by flying all the way around the Netherlands, starting at the Eindhoven military base in the south (EHEH), routing down the Western Scheldt towards the North Sea, turning north at Vlissingen (Flushing to us Brits) up the narrowing neck of land that separates the sea from the Ijsselmeer until I reached the island of Texel, before turning east for a while and then south to complete the journey home. Few countries apart from Finland can claim to have so much water within their borders, the difference being that the Dutch have coralled most of theirs up so it can't cause any trouble - most of the time. I am sure it is Spaarndam that has a statue to commemorate the famous boy who put his finger in the dike, but don't go looking for it, because Horizon have stuck to their guns and there isn't any AutoGen. As it happens this works, because the density of the housing and the tiny size of most of the fields means that AutoGen houses and trees would have looked out of place, and they would also have compromised some neat 3D effects, thanks to the angle of the light when some of the photos were taken.

Flying around convinced me that the developers have got the texture colors absolutely right and the textures look very good indeed and although I spotted a missing bridge, the package was damned near perfect. The shots two rows above show the Flight1's fabulous PC12 turning over the port of Vlissingen left (I once tied our sloop up to what turned out to be the Dutch customs and excise search boat there, not one of my better navigational decisions, since the crew were so pissed to find us moored alongside when they got up at three am that they made sure we never inconvenienced them again by subjecting us to a seriously thorough search); then Middleberg, where my parents have kept their boat the past five years; and finally Veere in the right hand shot, a real tourist magnet if there ever was one, with an enticing marina and church right next to it with bells that play all expletive deleted night. The bells are beautiful - it is just hard to appreciate them when you have sailed for fourteen hours into the teeth of a gale and deserve a good night's sleep (-:

The set of screenshots immediately above show the coast near Rotterdam, a view towards Schiphol from the east and finally the view north as the PC12 flies on up the coast. One of the most impressive things about this photoscenery is that it shows why Holland is such a interesting country - the view is always changing and even a few minutes flight can take you from a marshy wilderness, over a massive modern container port and then over intricately laid out old towns that haven't changed in three centuries. There is always plenty to see, not least the tulip fields near Amsterdam, some of which appeared to be in bloom when the photos were taken for the scenery; and there is always water, it doesn't matter where you go, there will be a dam, or a canal, or the scheldt, or the sea. No wonder the Dutch became such a competent nation of seafarers; they have no choice but to understand the elements, because the sea is always close at hand.

American simmers who haven't travelled to Europe will be delighted by the amazing variety in the scenery and also by how incredibly small the Netherlands is - even the PC12 can fly right around it in a few hours - the other beauty of owning this package being that it doesn't take long to recognise the landmarks surrounding the 25 airports it contains, after which you can throw your charts away and become a real seat of the pants aviator.

Okay, so the final set of shots show the PC12 approaching the Dutch naval base at Den Helder, with part of the Ijsselmeer showing upper right; in the center shot, I am overflying the island of Texel (not much to do there, I once got stormbound for a week in the harbor you can see to the left of the PC12's right wing - so I should know); and then the right hand shot shows me headed east along the chain of islands that inspired Erskine Childers to write the Riddle of the Sands. Looking at those windswept beaches I can understand exactly what it was that inspired him to set pen to paper; they are such mysterious places. From there, I only had to fly on another few minutes before turning south and heading back to Eindhoven. By my calculations, the whole trip should take less than two hours, even flying throttled back at 200 knots and you won't have seen more than a fraction of what is on offer - make no mistake, this is a pilot's package and if you enjoy VFR in Flight Simulator, there simply isn't a better place to have the experience. I have no idea why the idea of doing the Netherlands hasn't occurred to a developer before, but Horizon have made an inspired choice and I can't think of a more interesting scenery to fly. Sure, there aren't any mountains - there aren't many hills, come to think of it - but who needs mountains when you have all this to look at?

If you get VFR Netherlands, that isn't the end of it. There is a vibrant Dutch FS community whose members are deservedly well known for a freeware project called Netherlands 2000. The last release was 2.9, which came out way before Horizon's package was even a rumor and though Netherlands 2000 will require considerable modification to be compatible with VFR Netherlands, I would be prepared to hazard that the NL2000 team are thinking about it right now, because the opportunity is too good to miss. Unless memory serves me false, this is the first time it will be possible to simulate an entire country in Flight Simulator and if the NL2000 team don't rise to the challenge, I will be really surprised, because they have a reputation second to none.

VFR Netherlands might not have seasons and it might not have night lighting and it might not have any AutoGen, but it is a real jaw dropper. The choice of country couldn't be better, with hundreds of miles of distinctive coastline and no two towns alike, the Netherlands is an outstanding place to tour in Flight Simulator. The standard of the original photography and of the processing that followed is second to none and it has resulted in some incredible 3D effects in places; on top of that, the editing is virtually faultless and if the installation routine is a PITA, well, so be it. Had I known what was to come, I would have bourne all those dialogs with better grace. Very, very, very good indeed, Horizon.