World Environment Professional/Ultimate Night Environment Professional

f we are to place any credence at all in the demographics of Flight Simulator enthusiasts, then chances are fairly good that you recall black and white TV. I’m not talking about the cheesy five-inch jobs you can get at your corner drug store for about seven bucks. This was the day in which you watched The Mick belt home runs on the only set in the house, in all its glorious shades of gray.

At the time, monochrome was more than adequate. In fact, it was pretty darn exciting to watch, especially because well, that’s all there was.

Next, we were introduced to Technicolor, and things really started to get interesting. Suddenly, the ball fields came alive, and we could appreciate the change of seasons as we watched.

Have you seen a flat screen LCD picture in High Definition yet? Until I get my hands on one of those babies, I’m afraid I’ll always lament my low definition set.

Now that I’ve got you in the proper frame of mind, let’s talk Flight Simulation. In particular, the subject of what it is we see when peering through our digiglass windscreens. There have always been addons to enhance our views: mesh, scenery, whole vistas of areas enhanced for our pleasure. And they’ve been great. But, as a general rule, they were fairly local in their impact. Mesh, while certainly more global in scope, is still mostly local to continent. For the adventurous, continent hopping could prove somewhat disheartening had one not purchased and installed the mesh for wherever their hearts told them to go. Scenery even more so.

So, when someone offers a line of products purportedly global in scope, it is worth having a look-see.

The products I have been fortunate enough to look at are the Zinertek World Environment Professional and Ultimate Night Environment Professional.

To begin at the beginning (which I really hate to do, it’s so ... structured and cliché), I downloaded the programs and installed them. This was perhaps all of four or five mouse clicks to accomplish. Could not have been more easy.

Now, there are some products that will literally hit you in the head with a really big rock. Eye popping, drastic changes in your experience that leave you reaching for, as the Rolling Stones put it, “Mother’s Little Helper”. Then, there are those, which are subtler in nature, and merely tap you softly with a two by four. This is what I found when I fired up FS2004 after installing these products.

Ultimate Night Environment Professional employs more than one thousand new night textures, each one head and shoulders above default. The promise is a zero frame rate hit, and my friends, I cannot find fault with this claim. Here is a shot or two that I took while flying in the vicinity of New York City and Long Island, New York:

The urban areas are where this product really shines, no pun intended (unless you thought it was devilishly clever, in which case, pun intended). Everywhere you care to look you are treated with bright lights, vivid reds and an array of individual windows in buildings. This really puts zip into your nighttime city hopping adventures. The suburbs, while still an improvement over default, suffer only from the lack of lighting that one would expect in the middle of the boonies.

Now, we have World Environment Professional, the latest offering from Zinertek. Once again, we’re treated to global changes that will take you from Albuquerque to Zimbabwe and everywhere in between. What this package does is play with the lighting effects in flight sim.

For example, here’s KITH, in Ithaca, New York.

Here is the two by four I mentioned earlier. This shot may not jump out and bite you, but what really impressed me was how the brightening of the walls enhances the textures in the tower. The buildings in the background also benefit from a greater difference in light to dark.

Here, at sunset, the lighting on the fuselage is subtly altered with an evening glow of orange. By contrast, the underside of the wings remain in shadow.

Throughout, there are variations in brightness all along the fuselage, which change as the sun continues to set.

And, speaking of sunsets, Zinertek has managed to do some pretty wonderful things, too:

And, where would sunset be without sunrise? Again we see lighting appropriate to the angle of the sun’s rays.

Last but not least, here are some day textures that benefit from the subtle lighting effects courtesy of Zinertek:

I would have liked to provide you with some before and after shots for comparison, but here we have the one thing I would like to see from Zinertek. In my excitement to install these beauties, I neglected to create a backup of the texture files first, despite recommendations to do so (Note to self: read the installation instructions BEFORE installation). There are some products, which will create a backup of the files to be modified by default. This would be a welcome addition!

It must certainly be mentioned that the textures seen in this review are the summer set from BirdsEyeView I am one flightsimmer who will forever fly with these wonderful BEV textures! Alone these textures enhance our sim world in ways that must be seen to be truly appreciated. Adding to them the effects of World Environment Professional and Ultimate Night Environment Professional brings the "wow" factor to dizzying heights!

These are products which add a great deal to your simming experience. Think of them as going from color TV to High Definition TV. Before you saw it, you didn’t know what you were missing. Having seen it, you would rather not live without it, even if after a time you take all that beauty for granted!

Chip Barber
rfbarber@optonline.net

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