So this is the beginning of the new Studio! I'm sure that many a member will learn new, creative techniques in every aspect of screenshooting and screenart.
But now, onto my first article for the new Studio V....
Most of the scenery packages available to the Sim community have good standards, but there are some which rise above the rest and prove themselves worthy of being what could be the ‘best of the best’. One of which, although an older package, is able to hold its own against many of the recent freeware packages - it could even prove to be better than many payware packages available.
This package is…..
Date reviewed – 23rd / 24th December ‘06
System Specs
- 64mb nVidia GeForce FX 5200 (for laptop)
- 768MB RAM
- Pentium IV 2.8GHz Processor
To review this scenery, I’ll be splitting it up into many different categories. I’ll be taking a look at the airport section of the package, the ground textures, autogen / scenery of the area and the overall impression. I’ll each give them a score out of 10 (therefore a total score out of 30).
The real airport itself is a small, mainly regional airport with some Air France flights linking it to larger airports; also Ryanair and Air Aurigny (a Channel Islands carrier) fly there regularly. It has a small, ‘vintage’ terminal and tower, and a collection of hangars on the western side of the airfield.
This package has modeled this perfectly. It has everything you could want in a scenery package – some updated buildings, a new AFCAD file for the parking, hangars, and all of this nestled away from the town of Dinard in a small wood. With some warm, sunny weather, it gives a fantastic atmosphere to the airport and feels perfect for a day of GA flying. But it also has everything a commercial airline pilot would want - detailed parking, a RWY large enough to accommodate the larger 737 models, and a terminal for them to pull up to. So the airport fills the needs of both GA and commercial simmers.
Overall, the airport scenery gains a fantastic 10 out of 10 from me, it certainly makes for fantastic screenshots but also provides a good facility to fly from / fly towards.
Ground Textures / Landscape
This package covers a large area of Brittany, and adds photoreal textures to the ground. Indeed, often photoreality doesn’t appeal to many Simmers, but these have a fine mixture of autogen, strategically placed (much like FSX instead of having it randomly placed like FS9) and textures showing both small villages, the town of Dinard, beaches and woods, which can all be seen in the screenshot below:
The coastline in the package is magnificent. It much more resembles FSX coastline, with detailed sections of beach and a few rocky outcrops in the bay. Dinard is right up against the coast, and it looks fantastic from above.
Overall, the ground textures / landscape get 9 out of 10 from me, as although they are fantastic from about 2000ft upwards, when on the ground at LFRD they can be quite blurry, but after all, aircraft don’t spend that long on the ground.
NOTE: For the package to work, you have to run an automatic installer which unzips the relevant files to C://Program Files/FS9/Addon Scenery. Then you have to load up FS9 and go into ‘Settings -> Scenery Library -> Add Area’ and select the two folders relating to the LFRD scenery – these being “LFRD2004” and “LFRD2004Landclass”. For the Ground Textures to work properly, you must install the folder “LFRD2004” above “LFRD2004Landclass” and the list, so “LFRD2004” has a priority of 1, and “LFRD2004Landclass” has a priority of 2 – see image below:
PART 2
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