Area Alpha - One Man's View

(This is not a "commercial review"; just some subjective feelings from a Beta Tester)

Originally I chose to volunteer to "fly beta" on this particular area, because the original Vancouver addon had a great little "read along" adventure about Chuck Merryweather. OK, his adventure poaches a bit of the neighbouring terrain, but I had flown that area quite a lot in FS9.

Was the FSX version going to live up to it?

Yes! Cubed! And then some!

But whoa there, don't take me at face value. Let's look a bit closer and deeper into FSX and it's new features first.

FSX can cope with a far greater tree density - Vancouver "outlands" just happen to be very "treed". Point one to FSX for a greater level of detail.

Next, the meshes. Again, FSX can handle a far greater LOD than FS9 did. You go flying low around the FSX version of the Vancouver hinterland, and you are going to be low - in some rather realistically unpleasantly steep-sided ravines in places. Point to FSX

You want crazy flying? In the "9" version I would set a strongish wind from the town and land a Beaver or later the DO27 on the helipad at the Grouse Mountain lodge. In the "X" version I have discovered the ski slope nearby. More fun even, than Courchevel in France. Point to Vancouver and X for "original landing sites"

Visuals. I am not a real world pilot, although I used to be one - gliders - and have collected a few chopper hands-on hours as perks of the job as well. FSX isn't there yet, but the visuals are so much improved, that old pilot habits are coming back. When I approach a new field (well, any field now) I find myself looking for the visual clues to landing. They aren't there yet, but the flight experience is going the right way. You find yourself looking a lot more respectfully at the scenery. Point to X again

Over the past few weeks of testing, I have clocked up over 100 hours day and 25 hours night on both a modern "fast CPU" PC and my "slower" one. Microsoft have "paid the ferryman" after the FSX launch disaster and fixed it with SP1. A lot of other wise folk have added tweaks to our knowledge base. You really do have to "work" with FSX to get your rig enjoyable - it was a lot easier in 9. Point to 9.

The Vancouver scenery is addictive! See above - so many hours collected and I still have not had enough of the scenery! The landscape is simply perfect for bush flight. There's "wild country" to land in - start up your Tundra-tyred Beaver and fly up a river - there's plenty of gravel banks to use as a landing site.

Someone (Erich) posted this video as a very surprised member on Simflight and asked "Whe re in the X world can we do this?"

In a couple of days, this guy is one guaranteed Vancouver customer! There's plenty of places to do that in the Vancouver scenery.

This is not the place to plug someone else's addon, but I am going to anyway. Hi Fi Sim have brought out Active Sky for FSX and X Graphics. Add the three programmes together, and you really get one hell of a bundle. The Vancouver hinterland is absolutely amazing when the weather closes in. Misted valleys, haze, city grot - it's all there. Simply amazing!

Praise over! What can I say against Vancouver Plus?

A fair bit actually. But nothing that can be directed against the Sandmann / Patch / FSAddon team. There are still some limitations within FSX that cause strange overlaps between the MS scenery and the FSAddon textures. Roads break off in places up in the woods. Sometimes scenery floats past in the sky (well, trees) - this is caused by having your settings really high. As you change views, the PC will forget to redraw some tree objects and you'll have floaters for a while, until the next scenery re-draw. Some object alignment is a wee bit off (there is still some object placement inaccuracy in the sim itself it appears) - but if you're a "normal" flyer, you aren't going to notice much.

One thing about this scenery addon... it's going to save you money for a while. How so? You aren't going to want to buy anything else for quite a while! (Even if you do go and get the Hi Fi sim stuff)

I'd like to comment more about this marvellous addon, but I don't have the time - I want to go fly some more!

This is a "must have" with all the bells and whistles!

Eta Beta Pi

...or "To Beta or not to Beta?"

I really have been remiss, haven't I? How long has it been since my last post? Months? Seems like it.

The trouble is, so many exciting things have been happening, so much is going on, FSX has finaly been tamed by SP1 and we are nearer to DX 10 Graphics. A couple of months ago, you could have chased me up the garden path and back again - Fly FSX in very high detail mode on my PC? Not on your Nellie!



Well first of all, the pundits have been coming up with all sorts of FSX tweaks - Fiber Frame Fractions, Max Autogen Trees or Buildings per Cell, Texture Bandwidth... FSX was improving already before SP1. Now SP1 is here and the difference is staggering! I can fly in X at 15 to 20 FPS no problems.

"Huh, I hear you say, "I get 50 in FS9 all sliders right..."



Well, FSX is a LOT heavier on our systems. 2500 Trees 1200 Buildings, most sliders way up towards the right... and 15 SMOOTH Frames / second. I can live with that. The scenery is so much improved now and the payware addins are really coming up trumps in ways we really didn't think about six months ago. And planes...

Don't get me started folks! The airplane market for FSX is amazing. Freeware, Payware... it's all there and more than there was this time last "iteration" - at least that is the feel I am getting. It's also been so busy in the scene, that I have even started pulling a few FS9 planes across, like my beloved Christen Eagle. Anyway, where have I been? Well, I can safely tell you about a couple of Betas closed - First of all, there was the Aerosoft Beaver and the Helgoland scenery.

The Beaver is really an update based on the FS9 paints. OK, there's far more paints for the Beaver X now, but it is still basically "poor" in the paint sense. Instead of fully implementing the FSX paint techniques to the full, Aerosoft have chosen to do a simple adaptation of the FS9 skins. No, don't get me wrong, the Beaver is a great value-for-money payware. It's just that I have been spoiled by some pretty damn good FSX painting recently.

The Helgoland Beta was an amazing experience. The trouble is, my most recent Beta invitation is Helgoland to the power of ten! If you thought Helgoland was good, you wait till you see the jaw dropper "xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" Sorry! I can't tell you. More to the point, there's another Beta I am on - "yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy" and that is even more stunning! Folks, you are in for a HOT summer.

And then there's Vancouver X - go visit the FSAddon site and have a peek at THOSE previews - and take a drool mop for your keyboard!

Then there was another little project I had started to get involved in. This little darlin' is amazing! A pity that it is not going anywhere. I did some paints six months ago, bu the dev team has not yet managed to pull the chestnuts out of the fire yet. But just think! This plane will have a level of detail hitherto unknown in the FS world. We're talking up to 800 and more pixels per foot resolution in places and rivet heads that can be modelled - and not just painted or bump mapped.



OK, let me see about som images to pad out this post...


There you go - business as usual. Don't forget to go explore my Photobucket... loads more there. Have fun!