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This package represents a good deal and the scenery is amazing. I selected Horizon's offering after comparing the demos of Just Flight's and Horizons Snowdonia region. The 5m mesh really makes a difference and there was none of the 'terracing' that Just Flights scenery had (which is caused by elevation changes that are more frequent than the mesh and represents itself as striping on hills).
I bought this with VFR London X and airfields vol 1. Airfields Vol 2 is available from Horizon, but for some reason not from fspilotshop.com yet.
First the good points:
- In non-urban areas I can get over 100fps with this package, even in mountainous regions.
- The detail is fantastic and being able to fly over places you know is great.
- You can fly low and still see the detail, from 1000ft up it looks great.
- As a package you get great scenery coverage.
Then the bad:
- DVD3 in each package was scratched and my desktop had trouble reading most of the disks, however my laptop loved them so I ended up installing to a USB hard disk and copying to my desktop then manually editing my scenery.cfg file. Not something that is particularly suitable for those with only a single computer or are not comfortable messing with the internals of the program. Incidentally, my desktop reads other DVD's fine.
- Although the FPS is good, the terrain load times can be slow in urban areas such as London, I found that using the recommended settings helped, but these are quite basic and focus entirely on good scenery at the expense of anything else in the FS world. Upgrading to 4gb RAM from 2gb helped, but the load is still noticeable. This doesn't seem to be a problem in rural areas though.
- Each volume comprises 4 DVD's and 28GB of scenery. Unfortunately since the scenery is compressed it takes about 4hrs per volume to install. I can't help think this would have been quicker if it had been 5 DVD's and uncompressed.
So to summarise, installation was a nightmare and the end product requires a good disk/memory system to load the textures properly, but the end result is definitely worth the pain and brings an unparalled realism to the simulation.
Rating:  [4 of 5 Stars!] |
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