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EGJA - Alderney Airport And IslandPublisher: Boundless SimulatinosReview Author: Andrew ParishSuggested Price: $24.99/images/fsc/wbicons/store-buy-now-button.pngAlderney...The island of Alderney is thenorthernmost and third largest of the Channel Islands, an archipelagoin the English Channel, off the French coast of Normandy. I knewbefore embarking on this review that the islands are steeped inhistory, but my obligatory 'pre-review research' turned up somesurprising information. Its unique location, between the French Normandy coast and the UKmainland, has shaped Alderney's history. A 4,000-year-old burialchamber and Bronze Age artifacts found on the island show that it wasoccupied by Neolithic man and its occupation by the Romans isevidenced through a small fort which was built in the late 300s, andthe recent discovery of a nearby Roman settlement. All the Channel Islands were annexed into the Duchy of Normandy in933 but in 1204, when mainland Normandy was incorporated into thekingdom of France, the islands remained loyal to the Englishmonarch. Whilst the islands are not part of the United Kingdom, theyare dependent territories of the English Crown, and the current UKmonarch - Queen Elizabeth II - is the present Duke of Normandy, atitle that can be traced back to the year 911 AD, and which was onceheld by William the Conqueror! /images/reviews/alderney/t/boundless-alderney-xp-02.jpgFigure 1 - Boundless Alderney - from above Henry VIII was responsible for construction of a fortification onAlderney towards the end of his reign in 1546, but it was unfinishedwhen work was stopped by Queen Mary in 1554 and the garrison wasconverted into a private residence. The island was heavily fortifiedby the British in the 1850s to deter attacks on the expansion to theisland's harbor from France; works which had been commissioned inresponse to an earlier extension of the harbor and new fortificationsat Cherbourg. In this short period, at least ten forts were built,including a new Fort Essex which replaced Henry VIII's originalfortification which was largely demolished. These new defensiveinstallations became redundant however when the French and Britishstarted to fight alongside each other in the Crimean War. In theSecond World War, German forces, arriving in 1940 on an island whichhad been deserted as the residents had been evacuated, also builttheir own fortifications and added to existing ones as part ofHitler's Atlantic Wall. This collection of fortifications makes the8 km2 of Alderney one of the most heavily fortified places in theworld. The capital of Alderney, St. Anne, is today home to around 80% ofthe island's 2,400 residents. The town can be traced back to the 15thcentury and today hosts several unique buildings, including theSt. Anne church, the clock tower and the museum, all of whichBoundless lists as featuring in the package. The airport on Alderney was built in 1935 and became the firstoperational airport in the Channel Islands the following year. Theterminal building didn't open until 1968 however, as the number ofroutes operating to and from the airport grew, peaking in the late80's. Passenger numbers have been in a steady decline for many yearsnow though, and the only airline with a scheduled service to Alderneyis the loss-making Aurigny (which is the French name for Alderney)which, at the time of writing, was operating nine flights a week to(and from) the nearby Guernsey using aircraft from its Dornier 228fleet. A second airline, Air Alderney, which owns a couple ofBrittan-Norman BN-2 Islanders, is reportedly planning to commenceoperations between Alderney and Guernsey, Jersey and Shoreham, but nofirm date appears to have been put on a start of those services. All of this points to a rich and varied environment, and I can'twait to find out how Boundless has managed to capture all of theseelements into its Alderney scenery package. InstallationThe 890 MB installation package provided to me contained twodirectories, one containing the scenery package, and the other anoptional custom mesh for the island. Treading a well-worn sceneryinstallation process, all that was required to install the scenery wasto copy the folders into X-Plane's 'Custom Scenery' folder, and theunpacked files are using around 1.9 GB of disk space. The default namesthat the folders have force X-Plane's default scenery orderingalgorithm to order them correctly for normal usage with no manualintervention. Boundless doesn't suggest a minimum spec that I can find for thescenery package. The system that was used to generate the images inthis review has an i7 processor, 32 GB RAM and an nVidia 2080 Supergraphics card. X-Plane was running comfortably with Vulkan enabled andno third-party add-ins enabled. A Custom MeshAs with other Boundless scenery packages, their Alderney packageincludes an optional custom mesh, the use of which is recommended byBoundless. I'll admit to being a fan of the idea of including a custom meshwith an airport or scenery package of this size, and I applaudBoundless for it. There's nothing quite as disappointing as lookingfor your favourite geographical feature at a given airport, or in thiscase small island, whether it be a characteristic hump in a runway ora particularly steep incline, only to find that they've been flattenedor smoothed to an unrecognisable nothing when you fire up yoursimulator. Unfortunately, a feature of the X-Plane scenery system means thatmesh modifications may have undesired side-effects. The mesh providedin this package covers not only Alderney, but all the Channel Islandsand this is where the idea breaks down. A cursory inspection of theother Channel Islands when the Boundless custom Alderney mesh is beingused suggests that the modifications have been made to the defaultX-Plane scenery. As such, if you've installed your own mesh in placeof the default for any of the other islands, then you're going to needto make a choice as to which you use. I've tried to capture thedifferences between different meshes in the three pictures below; themost obvious difference can be seen under the front left-hand cornerof the building in the centre of the images: /images/reviews/alderney/t/boundless-alderney-xp-01.jpgFigure 2 - Looking towards the airport from Val du Saou with the default X-Plane mesh /images/reviews/alderney/t/boundless-alderney-xp-07.jpgFigure 3 - Looking towards the airport from Val du Saou with AlPilot's HD4 mesh /images/reviews/alderney/t/boundless-alderney-xp-14.jpgFigure 4 - Looking towards the airport from Val du Saou with the Boundless custom mesh This isn't a problem that's unique to Alderney or to Boundless, butwhen vendors headline a custom mesh, it's important to understand thepossible wider implications. In the case of Alderney, a geographical convenience means that theFrench mainland isn't affected by this limitation. X-Plane scenery isspecified in files that cover whole degrees of latitude and longitude,and the Channel Islands fit nicely into the 'square' that sits withits bottom left corner at 49 degrees north and 3 degrees west with nopart of France encroaching into it. The upshot of this is that anymesh compromise is only going to affect the Channel Islands. A Look Around The AirportThe airport is only a small part of the overall scenery package andis not particularly large, especially when you consider that the areaof the whole island is less than half of the area of HeathrowAirport. Given that the airport is going to be the first place in thescenery package that most pilots with a shiny new install see, andthat part which they're likely to see in the most detail, it madesense to start my detailed look around the scenery package here. The configuration of the three runways is typical of the triangularlayout of a wartime airfield. Somewhat unusually though, all threerunways remain operational. The longest, 08/26, is only 877m long; theshortest, 03/21, is 497m. All runways are grass, although the centralpart of the longer runway is paved. The approach plates for EGJA onlyprovide information for aircraft in performance categories A and Bwhich means that its likely to be difficult to keep anything with alanding speed of greater than 120 from barrelling off the end of therunway during its landing roll. A careful choice of aircraft istherefore the order of the day if you're planning to fly out of orinto this airport. Despite the small size of the airport, a lot of attention has beenpaid by the developer to making it realistic. This not only extends tothe inclusion and appearance of the airport buildings, but to theadditional airport 'furniture' which makes it look like a workingairport. /images/reviews/alderney/t/boundless-alderney-xp-13.jpgFigure 5 - Alderney Airport Apron All the airport buildings are modelled on their real-worldcounterparts, and whilst this hasn't, with the possible exception ofthe spiral staircase of the control tower, been done to a significantdegree of detail in that the untextured 3D shapes are fairlyorthogonal in nature, they are solid replicas compared againstphotographs available online. The placing of some buildings is inplaces at odds with the orthophoto that is included as part of thescenery package and this is most evident in the placing of the controltower and spiral staircase which intersects the adjacent fire servicesbuilding. The textures that Boundless has used for the aprons, taxiways andrunways really do look good. The apron and taxiway surfaces show wearin places and have the same appearance as they do in satellite imageryof the airport. Grass surfaces away from aircraft manoeuvring areasare sprinkled with 3D tufts of grass, and they have taken pains toinclude most, if not all the apron and taxiway markings visible at thereal airport. In some places the markings that have been laid down onthe apron aren't aligned with each other - in other places, theyappear some way away from the marking visible in the textures includedas part of the package. In addition to the static objects on the airport, the developer hasincluded a couple of cars and a fuel truck which drive on predefinedroutes around the apron giving it an additional sense oflife. Unfortunately, two of these three vehicles pass at some point ontheir predefined routes through one or more items of static sceneryincluded in the package. From The AirGiven that the scenery package is for the whole of the island, itseems only right to look at the whole package before embarking on atour of its individual features, and Alderney is the sort of size thatmakes this possible. The whole island is covered with an orthophoto which, as can beseen in the screen shots below, adds a huge amount of realism thatisn't achievable with regular landclass. /images/reviews/alderney/t/boundless-alderney-xp-03.jpgFigure 6 - An aerial view from the north-east Several things jump out at me in these images, but my favorite isthe extremely detailed shoreline, with its smooth sandy beaches andangry rocky outcrops and cliffs appearing as they do in the real-worldand the sea almost seeming to exhibit depth with sand and rocksvisible underneath the surface. We'll all have seen the less thanconvincing coastlines in scenery that doesn't adopt this approach!Similarly, the patchwork of fields, roads and paths across the islandis indisputably accurate. /images/reviews/alderney/t/boundless-alderney-xp-06.jpgFigure 7 - An aerial view from the south-west In some places, particularly around the airfield, there are smallgaps where the orthophoto has been poorly stitched together whichallow the underlying land class textures to show through - elsewhere,the textures just don't align. Nothing that's particularly noticeablefrom the air, and difficult to spot unless you're looking hard, butlike a brush marks on a wall you've just painted, once you knowthey're there you can't help but notice them. /images/reviews/alderney/t/boundless-alderney-xp-04.jpgFigure 8 - Orthophoto gaps and alignment problems Beyond The Airport PerimeterThe airport is only a small part of the overall scenery package,and as we've already seen, there's a whole island to explore! Boundless advertises a long list of Alderney landmarks that areincluded in the package. I won't reproduce that list here, if you'reparticularly interested then the FlightSim.Com Store listing for itcontains the detail. What is evident from the list, in that there areno fewer than nine different castles and forts - ten if you count theOdeon (spoiler alert - it's not a cinema), is that the assertion madeat the start of the review in respect of the density of fortificationsacross the island is accurate. Many of these are visible in the screenshot below which was taken looking across the north-east corner of theisland. /images/reviews/alderney/t/boundless-alderney-xp-08.jpgFigure 9 - From back to front... Fort Albert, Chateau a L'Etoc, Fort Corbletts, The Odeon, Quesnard Lighthouse, Fort Quesnard and Fort Houmet Herbe I'll admit to being a trifle disappointed that I couldn't get theQuensard Lighthouse to do what lighthouses do despite changing thetime to the dead of night and winding the visibility down to somethingresembling a good old-fashioned peasouper. Then again, I probablyshouldn't be flying in those sorts of conditions anyhow. /images/reviews/alderney/t/boundless-alderney-xp-11.jpgFigure 10 - Church of St. Anne and its surroundings Looking a little more closely at the town of St Anne reveals thatsome of the more significant buildings have been modelled and thatthese are surrounded by a selection of typical houses and buildingsthat have been developed and individually placed. The result is aconvincing replica of the town. If you decide that the whole Alderneypackage isn't for you, Boundless has released many of the bespokeobjects included in the scenery as a freeware package which can bedownloaded from their web site. /images/reviews/alderney/t/boundless-alderney-xp-05.jpgFigure 11 - Alderney Museum and Clock Tower with St Anne Church and the harbour in the background /images/reviews/alderney/t/boundless-alderney-xp-10.jpgFigure 12 - Braye Beach Hotel in front of St Anne's School Interestingly Boundless has elected not to lay down roads acrossthe whole island, instead preferring to leave the underlyingorthophoto visible. For me, this is a good decision that preserves therealism that the package provides and avoids the rather off-puttingsituation where a perfectly good orthophoto is ruined by the defaultroads that the X-Plane simulator currently provides. /images/reviews/alderney/t/boundless-alderney-xp-12.jpgFigure 13 - St. Anne with the airfield behind For all its strengths, there are a couple of underlying issuesacross the whole scenery package which for me, again, expose a lack ofattention to detail. These are the misalignment of objects with theunderlying orthophoto and the elevation of objects above the ground,and both problems are acutely apparent in the harbor wall. /images/reviews/alderney/t/boundless-alderney-xp-09.jpgFigure 14 - View from Braye Harbour towards Fort Albert In the image above, it can be clearly seen that the harbor walldoesn't align with the photo underneath it (the textures on top of theharbor wall object and the ground to the right are identical). Also,from the positioning of the shadow underneath the wall closest to thecamera, it's possible to see that this end of the wall is hoveringabove the ground. In ConclusionThe decision by Boundless to model a whole island with its airportis an unusual one; in the case of an island the size of Alderney, it'sa manageable ambition. The package that they've developed delivers arecognisable rendition of the island and its features. There's always a question in my mind that needs answering at theend of a review, and that's whether I would recommend product I'vebeen reviewing to other simulator pilots? In the case of Alderney,that's a more difficult question to answer than usual. As always, if the airport or the island are meaningful to you, thenyou are most definitely going to benefit from and enjoy being able tofly into, out of and around a place that you know. For me though, taking into consideration all the lapses inattention to detail that I've discovered whilst looking closely at thewhole package, it's difficult to wholeheartedly endorse in its currentform. Taken individually, there's nothing I've seen that would stop merecommending it as a purchase, but as a collection the multiple smallflaws demonstrate a lack of attention to detail that distinguishes agood scenery package from a great one. That said, Boundless packages launched prior to this one have seenupdates released within months of their initial launch that addressthe sorts of issues that I've described, and I'm looking forward toseeing version 2 of Alderney. /images/reviews/alderney/title3.jpgAndrew Parish Purchase Boundless - Alderney EGJA For X-Plane See other Boundless Simulations scenery
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Boundless Simulations Alderney Airport And Island for X-Plane 11
Nels_Anderson posted an article in X-Plane
/images/notams/notams21/boun0104/boun0104.jpgBrought to X-Plane for the first time - this package includes boththe airport and entire island of Alderney in the Channel Islands! Wehave added all major landmarks, modelled to an incredibly highstandard. /images/notams/notams21/boun0104/alderney-2.jpgThese Landmarks Include:Essex Castle Fort Albert Fort Chateau a l'Etoc Fort Clonque Fort Corblets Fort Houmet Herbe Fort Ile de Raz Fort Quesnard Fort Tourgis The Odeon Braye Beach Hotel Church of St. Anne Mignot Memorial Hospital Museum and Clock Tower Quesnard Lighthouse St. Annes School /images/notams/notams21/boun0104/alderney-1.jpgAs well as these points of interest, there are thousands ofmanually placed trees, houses and miscellaneous objects - all custommade with HD textures. We have also included our own custom terrainmesh as an optional install within the package. We strongly recommendinstalling it too as it adds another layer of immersion to thescenery. /images/notams/notams21/boun0104/alderney-3.jpgMain Features Include:Accurate taxiway, runway & Apron networks HD, photorealistic PBR apron, taxiway & runway textures Thousands of HD custom Buildings Photorealistic sea & water Crisp HD, orthophoto base, carefully sharpened and recolored for best results Full night lighting in the airport and entire island 3D Grass at airport Custom streetlights / apron lighting Brand new HD Static GA aircraft Fully compatible with traffic Global & WT3 Boundless HD Trees / forests - color matched to the ortho below, includes many color variations / tree types Includes all landmarks 3D harbor, including shipping containers and crane High level of airport detail PBR textures used with airport buildings and many custom objects Full airport fencing accurately placed Custom terrain mesh, offering a realistic representation of the whole island Animated road traffic Animated airport vehicles All farms replicated with 3D buildings Many additional details, e.g. hay bales in fields, fences in fields etc... Excellent FPS Boats accurately placed in harbor and at sea /images/notams/notams21/boun0104/alderney-4.jpgPurchase Boundless Simulations Alderney Airport & Island for X-Plane 11 See other Boundless Simulations scenery
