| VFR Real Scenery - Birmingham, Coventry & Wolverhampton |
| Monday, 03 September 2007 | |
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With a population of over 1 million, Birmingham is one of the fastest growing cities in the UK and is situated about 100 miles north west of London. The city is home to Birmingham City and Aston Villa football clubs and is also the home of the county’s cricket team Warwickshire, as well as being the National Indoor Arena which stages many international events such as athletics meetings and WWE wrestling events. There are also many other sporting events which take place in the city such as basketball, boxing, hockey and stock car racing.
This scenery package from Just Flight provides ultra realistic scenery for each of these 3 cities along with scenery for Dudley, Kidderminster, Tamworth, Nuneaton and Stourbirdge all for the unbelievably cheap price of £9.95/€14.50/$19.99. The scenery is made up using the same 25cm aerial photographic data of England and Wales which makes up all Just Flight’s VFR Real Scenery product range. It also includes 9.6m digital terrain data to improve the accuracy of the FSX relief so that you really are seeing what real pilots see from the air. Custom night lighting effects have been applied individually to each part of the scenery to give the most realistic effect possible. For those of you who already own part of this product range and know how good it is, this package also comes as part of the VFR Real Scenery Volume 2 (Central & Southern England) package, also available from Just Flight. I think that the move to release individual areas (such as the Isle of Wight VFR) at these low prices is a master-stroke by Just Flight; it gives simmers the opportunity to either buy just the area of interest to them (perhaps their own town), and it gives simmers the chance to sample the scenery at a low price to make their mind up if they would like the product covering a larger area. The one downside to this package is that it only comes as a download, and a whopping 840mb one, but when you consider the amount of data which is transferred into FSX you can see why. If you want a boxed version you will need to buy VFR RS Volume 2. After the download is complete installation is very easy, all you need to do is verify that your copy is genuine and the product installs itself.
After reviewing the Isle of Wight scenery, I was very impressed with how good the countryside looked across the island, but how would the urban sprawl of the West Midlands compare? My major moan about this scenery is that there are very few 3d buildings, so when you are flying very low you just have a 2d landscape (Just Flight have included a few 3D buildings in this package such as the football grounds). But when you are in the air looking down on the scenery it is fantastic. I cannot stress how real everything looks; you are able to fly true VFR using nothing more than a road atlas, no need for the GPS. The FSX traffic moves along the roads, but when they come to an intersection they just drive straight over it rather than under the bridge, not that I was put off by this. There were a few things I noticed whilst flying that I didn’t expect to find: because the scenery is photo scenery, there are occasions where things can look slightly odd. For example, when flying over airports the FSX runway ended, but then the photo scenery runway ended a little afterwards. Also some of the buildings around the airports had their photo scenery counterpart next to them. This is only a small problem and probably something that Just Flight were unable to change. But on the plus side the photo scenery add’s some new scenery to the airports when looking down from above, such as static aircraft parked beyond the FSX tarmac. The thing which I found most odd though was that Wolverhampton Airport (EGBO) was not covered by the scenery. The airport is literally half a mile outside the boundary of the scenery. It is probably included in the VFR RS Vol 2 package, but I would have thought that the development team would have extended the area covered just enough to cover the airport of one of the cities which forms the title of the product.
Speaking of the scenery boundaries, the difference between the photo scenery urban sprawl and the FSX default texture is huge, larger than any other add I’ve used. You won’t need to think ‘am I outside the scenery area’ because you will know the instant you pass the border. Thankfully the area covered is very large (2,400km2) so you will be able to have hours of fun exploring the cities, each and every landmark is included. I don’t know if this was pure coincidence or not, but after installing this package my frame rates in this area actually improved upon the frame rates I was getting with the default FSX scenery. As you are flying around the area you will pass over Edgbaston Cricket Ground, athletic, the motorways and the complicated looking Spaghetti Junction, you will almost believe that you are there for real. The default airports blend superbly into the scenery and the surrounding areas look great from the skies. Flying down the glide slope into Birmingham is so much more enjoyable than the default scenery because it’s as if you are flying it for real.
After flying around during the day, take time out to sample the night textures included with the package. The countryside is very dark, with only the odd light coming from a street light on a country road, and difficult to navigate around without the use of the GPS. Fly over the cities though and they are alive with the twinkling of street lamps, and once again you can fly by following the roads. The whole atmosphere of the area changes when night descends, but the change is a good one! It becomes even more fun to fly into these airports at night. When you are flying with this add-on, whether it is day or night, your flight will soon turn into a screenshot frenzy, and I feel that is a massive thumbs up for this package, the fact that you want to take more and more pictures of the area to share amongst the forums.
As you can probably guess, this package gets a thumbs up from me, but it is not the complete package. If Wolverhampton Airport had been included in the scenery area, and there were a few more 3D buildings at ground level, then it would be. If you live in the Birmingham area though then this add-on is one of those that you must seriously consider buying, and the price is a bargain, it’s just a shame it is only available by download. It gives me great pleasure to say that Just Flight have yet again produced a fantastic FS add-on |
