This is a demo of Visual Flight UK and Ireland Terrain Mesh Scenery for FS2002,
the best terrain mesh
scenery currently available for England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, designed
and tested exclusively with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002.
If you enjoy this demo, you can obtain the full product from www.visualflight.co.uk
The demo area is the Highlands and Islands of Scotland from N57 W5 to N59 W8. This includes Skye, South Uist, Benbecula, North Uist, Harris, Lewis and the mainland coast from Ullapool to the Kyle of Lochalsh.
You can fly between Plockton (UK10), Benbecula (EGPL) and Stornoway (EGPO) and stay within the demo area. A flight plan is provided which takes a circular route from Plockton to Stornoway via Benbecula, then back via Ullapool.
The view forward out of the cockpit should now resemble that shown in the picture below:
Scenery installed correctly - click for larger view
There will be differences due to weather, date, time, season and graphics resolution/depth, but the outline of the hills should be the same. Please ensure that your visibility is set high enough. If in doubt, from the FS2002 menu, choose World, Weather..., Clear all weather, Yes, OK.
If the scenery is not correctly installed, the view will resemble that shown below:
Scenery not installed - click for larger view
If you have any problems, please repeat the installation instructions taking care with each of the steps. If this does not resolve the problem, please email support@visualflight.co.uk with details.
Plockton - Benbecula - Stornoway - Ullapool - RONAR - Plockton
This scenery requires Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 (Standard or Professional Edition). FS2002 delivers far better frame rates and general performance that FS2000 even on the same hardware configuration. You can check FS2002 system requirements by following the Amazon.co.uk links below.
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Flight Simulator 2002 Standard Edition |
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Flight Simulator 2002 Professional Edition |
If you require something more tangible than the online manuals supplied with FS2002, you may wish to consider purchasing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002: Official Strategies & Secrets from Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com.
If your PC can run FS2002 it should be able to handle the Visual Flight terrain mesh scenery. However, to derive most benefit from this package, a suggested minimum system configuration would include:
The advice is to get the best system you can afford, but try to balance these elements. Depending on your settings, increasing RAM reduces or eliminates pauses when panning views or turning. Increasing graphics RAM speeds up texture loading and eliminate the situation where textures appear to be missing from airplanes or scenery, or where there is a noticable delay in loading them. Increasing CPU speed increases frame rates and increases the degree or terrain mesh complexity that can realistically be handled.
This scenery has been tested on a system with a 1GHz processor, 512MB RAM, and an nVidia GeForce II MX200 64MB graphics card at 1024x768 32bit with all graphics options on their maximum settings. This gives acceptible frame rates, and reducing some of the less essential graphics settings leads to big frame rate improvements, so there is plenty of scope for finding a good balance of performance vs display quality.
Terrain mesh scenery contains the elevations of the terrain based on a regular grid. It does not alter existing features in the default Microsoft scenery such as coastlines and rivers. This can cause visual anomalies which can sometimes appear extreme. In particular, there is a problem with the elevations of many lakes which are set in the default scenery. In order to "blend" the scenery where there is a difference in elevation between a water body surface and the surrounding terrain, FS2002 creates cliffs or embankments around it. If the difference is not too great, this effect appears reasonable, and may if fact correctly model the real-world scenery, e.g. putting a dam at the end of a reservoir, or cliffs along a sea shore. However, the elevation accuracy of some of the lakes in FS2002 is questionable, and result in some very dubious looking landscape in the immmediate vicinity.
There is a discrepancy between the elevation of the sea and the lower reaches of rivers such as the Clyde and Severn, which results in features such as the notorious Erskine Bridge waterfall. This discrepancy is present in the default FS2002 scenery, and is not addressed by this Visual Flight release.
Not to be used for real-world navigation.
Towards the edges of the area covered by the demo scenery, the terrain mesh quality will deteriorate as it merges with the default terrain scenery. This is noticable not just in the landform of the islands and mountains in the distance, but also within the demo scenery area close to the margin. Because of this, although the airport at Barra is inside the demo area (just), the scenery quality at Barra is not of the same standard as that provided in the full product.
This is not an intentional feature to reduce the effectiveness of the demo. It is just a side-product of the fact that the demo area has to end somewhere. The full product does not suffer this limitation as the UK and Ireland are surrounded by sea and ocean.
All files are subject to copyright. Permission is granted to redistribute this demo scenery package provided that the demo scenery package is unmodified and includes the entire content of the zip file in its original form including this readme file. For any form of distribution for commercial gain above and beyond the cost of redistribution and maintenance of the facilities to enable distribution permission must be obtained from the author c/o Visual Flight. This demo scenery package is provided "as is", without any express or implied warranty. No representation or warranty of any kind is made concerning the merchantability of this demo scenery package or its fitness for any particular purpose. Neither the author nor Visual Flight nor any persons or organisations involved in providing the source data and producing the package will be liable for any claims, losses, or damages arising from or connected with its use.