How about a bird's-eye view of your home? Visual Flight's VFR Photographic Scenery add-on for Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2002 allows you to do just that.
Flight simulation has come a long way from the early days of blocky graphics and jerky scenery. In early versions of Microsoft's Flight Simulator (FS) the scenery offered few navigational clues, so instrument flying was essential. As a result of my experience with FS, my flight instructor warned me I was relying too much on instruments. Instead, flying on visual flight rules (VFR), which is what every pilot's first licence entitles them to do, means looking out of the window, using visual clues to decide where you are and whether the wings are level. It's also important to look out the window since that is, after all, where both the scenery and the hard objects with which you might collide exist.
This package adds realism by draping a layer of photographic images on top of the scenery mesh, so all visual features are included. As a result, not only does the world look much more realistic, it also eliminates the randomly generated fixed ground objects, which can be irritating if you know the area.
The photos originate from the Millennium Map, a complete UK map by Getmapping, a company whose planes flew over the country in 1999 taking photos from around 5,500 feet AGL (above ground level). Getmapping's offshoot Visual Flight says it plans to keep updating the images every five years.
As long as you're flying in the east to south-east of England, the area covered by the package I tested, you can look down on familiar towns and villages. According to Visual Flight, other packages are available now for the same price to cover the rest of England and Wales, with Scotland and Northern Ireland to come soon.
What this means is that you can now navigate by known roads and railways. For instance, my first flight was out of Lydd then westwards over my home town of Lewes and down to Shoreham airport, a route I've flown before. Though it can be interesting to use the GPS, for most of the flight I was able to follow roads and railways without difficulty.
Conurbations look good from the air, although as the manual confirms, you get best results when viewing from 2,000 feet or more, especially in built-up areas where there are more features. Much closer and the images get fuzzy and lose detail - flying at around the height from which the photos were taken offers the best results, and from 10,000 feet the realism is superb.
Slow aircraft are better. I flew the Cessna 172 and its average 90-100mph flight speed allows for a comfortable meander around familiar landmarks, while flying a Boeing 737 meant the system couldn't keep up. That's because FS tries to predict which scenery blocks will be required next and the 737's 300-400mph speed just doesn't allow the system enough time to pull the large amounts of data required off the disk. The result is unconvincing blocks of fuzzy grey in mid to far distance. Sometimes, even when flying slowly it took a while for nearby scenery to snap into focus, although a faster hard disk may help resolve this. Reducing weather-related visibility to between five to 20 miles helps and, given UK weather, it's also much more realistic.
Installation took around half an hour on my 640MB RAM-equipped, 900MHz Athlon-based PC, and the three-CD package swallowed almost 2GB of hard disk space. It installs directly in the FS folder and is seen by FS as an add-on. It works with either FS 2002 or FS 2002 Professional.
Visual Flight recommends a minimum specification of a 700MHz CPU with 64MB RAM and a 3D-accelerated graphics card with at least 16MB memory. On the test PC, using a fairly high resolution (for FS) of 1280 by 1024, I achieved around 20 frames per second. Much lower than that and the images start to look jerky, so the heftier the machinery, the better the results.
The manual's directions are clear, explaining how to alter settings such as terrain texture size and MIP mapping. It also explains why it's best not to set FS to winter since the photos were taken during the warmer months so there's no snow in the photos.
Overall, this add-on for FS improves realism, adds enjoyment and allows true VFR flying. It lets you stooge around landcapes you know and those you don't, just to get a new perspective. For the low £29.99 price, it's highly recommended.
· £29.99 from www.visualflight.co.uk
