Introduction
OpenVFR produces general scenery enhancement products that cover
large parts of Europe, and smaller parts of Africa, South and
North America. However, unlike the massive area products, such as
Ultimate Terrain, which cover (say) the whole of Europe for quite
a large price, OpenVFR splits their scenery into smaller
country-sized blocks, and further splits those blocks onto scenery
types -- terrain, mesh, and objects. This results in a larger
number of products to buy and download, but has the advantage that
each separate product is cheap, and you only need get the areas
you are particularly interested in.
This review covers one particular country in Africa: Tanzania, and
consists of three products: Mesh, Terrain and Objects.
Features
Terrain: Landclass and vector data. ‘Landclass’
is short for ‘land classification’. It defines how land is used,
e.g. forest, jungle, savannah, arable crops, urban, city,
industrial etc. It is important to note that landclass just covers
the classification data, it doesn’t include the textures that are
drawn to represent it (those are provided by FS). ‘Vector data’
essentially means all the drawn features that you see on the
ground overlaying the textures. These include roads, railways,
rivers, streams, lakes and coastlines. These data have been drawn
from OpenStreetMap.org, which is a public repository for
geographic mapping data.
Note: Roll mouse over to see the
default scenery
Mesh: Mesh is essentially the chicken wire that
all the textures and terrain are draped over. It defines the form
of the land - mountains and valleys, how high they are, how steep,
how jagged or pointy and so on. The defining feature for a mesh is
its resolution. This is a number that basically indicates how far
apart the sample points are. This mesh is 75m. You will sometimes
see mesh referred to as “DEM”. This is simply an acronym that
stands for Digital Elevation Mesh.
It is important to know that FSX will always use the highest
resolution mesh that is installed, regardless of quality. So if
you already have a mesh installed for Tanzania that is better than
75m, FS will always use that instead of this one, and so you might
need to reconsider the purchase of this mesh. (I don’t believe
there actually is a higher resolution mesh at this time, but one
day…)
Objects: These are things like lighthouses,
windfarms, communication masts, power stations etc, that will be
placed around the countryside. They are placed as individual
objects, rather than autogen, which means that they are controlled
by your Scenery Complexity slider, and not by the Autogen Density
slider. This also means there is a nice easy way to spot them --
turn your autogen right down, and they will remain visible.
Download and Install
For complete coverage of Tanzania, you need all three products. In
order to download them, you are given a link, which requires you
to log in to your store account. Once you have downloaded the
files, it is recommended that you unzip them to a temporary
location before proceeding further.
Once you’ve unzipped the files, you can simply copy the folder
tree into your main Flight Simulator folder. You will then need to
add entries for the scenery into your scenery library, but the
process is simple, and clearly described in the pdf manual.
Although this may seem a little cumbersome the first time you do
it, it will pay dividends if you buy and install moreOpenVFR
scenery, since it all installs into the same folders, and the
process then becomes simply unzip-copy-done.
Geography
Tanzania, or to give it its full title, the United Republic of
Tanzania, was formed in 1964 with the uniting of the states of
Tanganyika and Zanzibar. It is situated on the East coast of
Africa, with Kenya to the North and Mozambique to the South. It
also shares borders with Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, DRC, Zambia and
Malawi.
Striking features include the African Great Lakes - Nyasa,
Tanganyika and Victoria (which is generally considered the source
of the Nile), all of which are part of the Great Rift valley
system. Mt Kilimanjaro in the North East is the highest mountain
in Africa at 19,314ft. The Ngorongoro Crater is the world’s
largest intact volcanic caldera, and famous as a microcosm of
African wildlife. National Parks abound, and the most famous are
the Serengeti in the North and Selous in the South.
(Rolling image showing wet
season)
Climate ranges from tropical along the coast to temperate on the
high flat plateau of the interior. It is South of the equator, and
the seasons are Wet and Dry. the wet season is December to April.
Safari
Seeing as it’s Africa, and Africa is famous for its safaris, it
struck me that the best way of seeing the scenery would be to
mount a safari and fly around the country. And so I started in the
commercial centre of tanzania, Dar es Salaam, initially following
the coast and then heading into the interior.
You can follow the trip in the forums here:
http://forum.mutleyshangar.com/index.php/topic/6360-tanzania-safari/
and the flight plans are available in the Download Centre if you
wish to fly the trip yourself.
Overall Impressions
The most striking improvement comes from the mesh. Entire systems
of hills and valleys appear that simply do not exist in the
default scenery, and the whole landscape feels much crisper and
better defined. The Ngorongoro Crater, which is little more than a
suggestion in the default, is quite spectacular. It makes you want
to don your pith helmet, get down there and start hunting the TV
Wildlife documentary crews... [ahem!] The only downside is that
the default airports have not been adjusted for correct elevation
in the new mesh, and consequently you’ll find some that are
perched precariously on high mesas and others buried in trenches.
Developer tools to correct these issues have been available for
some time now, and it’s not a hard job to fix them.
Terrain also showed a good improvement, particularly with lakes,
rivers and coastlines, all of which showed significantly better
detail. There are some quite large lakes that simply do not exist
in the default scenery, and here they are all present and correct.
The terrain and mesh are well blended together, with the lakes and
rivers sitting flush to the ground. (some other mesh addons leave
the lakes and rivers on high cliffs, which looks really bad.) The
landclass showed improvements, particularly around the major
population centres, although further away from these the
improvement was noticeably less, presumably because accurate
survey data simply isn’t available for these areas. A striking
inaccuracy in the landclass is that it completely removes the snow
cap from the top of Mt Kilimanjaro.
There were a few places where the mesh and terrain didn’t quite
gel, the coast of Lake Nyasa being the most striking example.
Objects unfortunately were few and far between. So few in fact
that I find it hard to recommend spending the money, even at the
reduced price of €3.99. When you do come across them, they are
perfectly good masts, power stations, towers etc. but, frankly,
with the autogen cranked up to anything above sparse, unless you
know exactly where they are, I very much doubt you’ll even notice
them.
The OpenVFR products do not include replacement ground textures,
and as a result you still see the default FSX desert textures,
which seem to plague much of the world. However there is another
product which may help, in the form of GTX Africa, which is a
texture replacement addon. I have to stress that I haven’t tried
it, but it could well be an ideal companion to OpenVFR, in the
same way that it acts as a companion to Ultimate Terrain in Europe
and the U.S.
Review Extra
Download the flight plans for the Tanzania Adventure
here (Zip File)
Verdict
The terrain and mesh work very well together on the whole, the
only real niggles being the default airport elevations and the
missing snow from Mt Kilimanjaro.
And so the scores:
OpenVFR Mesh: 9.0
OpenVFR Terrain: 8.5
OpenVFR Objects 6.0
Overall Mutley's Hangar score: 8.0/10
Tim Arnot
Review machine Spec: Core i7-965 O/C to 3.8GHz |
6Gb Tri-Channel DDR3 Ram |GTX280 1GB into a TripleHead2Go @ 5040
x 1050 |
Windows 7
64bit
|