dcc
P-38 nut
I treated myself to a few payware offerings for the holidays and thought I’d share a few brief reviews for anyone interested
Carenado Mooney M20J
As most of you know, I spend most of my time on one particular type of plane
but I’ve always had a liking for the Mooney M20, having flown in a real one a few times when I was young. I think the default M20 Bravo is ok as defaults go, but I decided to get the Carenado M20J during their big holiday sale, the price was too good to pass up considering all the positive reviews of Carenado models get.
Impressions -- Visually, this model is stunning and a real treat -- it meets and exceeds my expectations. I’m quite impressed at the degree of detail that is practically everywhere I look, and the fact that frame-rate performance does not seem to suffer. It has wonderful eye candy inside and out, and seems to use all the visual features of FS2004 and then some. The VC instrument panel back-lighting is quite convincing during a dusk/dawn or night landing. The flight model feels realistic, but I’m not a pilot. I don’t fly too many GA planes so I don’t have a lot to compare to, but it is relatively easy to take off, climb, land etc. and overall pretty easy to fly, but a bit more of a handful than a C172, which I suppose it would be IRL. I find it hard to do rolls in though
The ground handling seems almost a little too responsive, at least compared to my expectations. Maybe it’s just due to how I have my system set up. Carenado used mostly stock sounds except for the engine sounds, which are good and believable, but I found myself modifying the stock sound set a bit to more my liking. The one area that is lacking is model documentation. There's plenty of real-world plane documentation, but practically nothing on the model side of things. I’ve had to discover how to do some things by poking around, or reading posts online.
MegaScenery Oahu
My youngest daughter currently lives on Oahu so I wanted to be able to explore the island from the air to get to know it better. This add-on has photo-real textures and a more detailed mesh. The additional detail in the mountains is exceptional and the photo-real textures look pretty good from about 3000-ft on up. I can fly over my daughter’s university and even pick out her dorm. I notice no performance hit with this installed. I was kind of surprised, considering the issues I have with the next one.
Attached images show me in my new Mooney flying into PHNL.
MegaScenery Pacific Northwest
I am originally from Seattle and regularly fly the virtual skies in Western Washington. This photo-realistic texture add-on covers the Western half of Washington state and a little bit of north western Oregon. It also installs a more detailed mesh.
I had high hopes for this one, but it suffers from three major issues on my system: 1) the “blurries,” 2) glaring terrain anomalies and 3) the dreaded airport elevation anomalies.
The first problem (blurries) is probably system-dependent, my modest system just isn’t capable of loading the textures fast enough (plus I believe there are some texture-loading issues inherent in FS2004). If I fly slow plane, say between 100 – 150 kias, the textures load ok about half the time. Go any faster than that and its blurries to the horizon no matter what, unless I hit pause and go grab a drink. Once the textures load, it looks great and I recognize all the details of my home town, so at least it'll be good for screenshots. I only wish they would load faster.
The second problem is with the mesh. There are huge, nearly 30-40 meter high discontinuities in certain places. One in particular -- Lake Sammamish is personally annoying since I grew up in this area and can attest that the lake does not have a 30 meter water cliff on its western shore
There are others too, near Seattle and other high-traffic areas. Either the developers lacked the tools to fix the geometry or they just never flew around to check the mesh.
Then there are the airports. The developers said they made corrections for many airports, but I’m afraid I don’t see much evidence of that. SeaTac sits on a large mesa which certainly does not exist in real life. This is just one of many, many airport-related anomalies.
Finally, while this isn’t technically a bug, it is something that’s rather odd: The developers created a full set of snow textures for the entire area (western Washington, all elevations, etc.) Anyone who’s ever lived in Seattle knows that while the Cascades and Olympics get a lot of snow, it is very, very rare to have snow blanket the lower elevations to the extent shown in these winter textures. It looks pretty, but it would be more realistic if the winter textures only had snow above say 4000 feet.
Fortunately, I got this at a huge discount. It is a mixture of enjoyment and frustration. Anyone else have this add-on? I'd be curious if others have these issues or if I've just messed something up with my installation.
Happy New Year!
- dcc
Carenado Mooney M20J
As most of you know, I spend most of my time on one particular type of plane
but I’ve always had a liking for the Mooney M20, having flown in a real one a few times when I was young. I think the default M20 Bravo is ok as defaults go, but I decided to get the Carenado M20J during their big holiday sale, the price was too good to pass up considering all the positive reviews of Carenado models get.Impressions -- Visually, this model is stunning and a real treat -- it meets and exceeds my expectations. I’m quite impressed at the degree of detail that is practically everywhere I look, and the fact that frame-rate performance does not seem to suffer. It has wonderful eye candy inside and out, and seems to use all the visual features of FS2004 and then some. The VC instrument panel back-lighting is quite convincing during a dusk/dawn or night landing. The flight model feels realistic, but I’m not a pilot. I don’t fly too many GA planes so I don’t have a lot to compare to, but it is relatively easy to take off, climb, land etc. and overall pretty easy to fly, but a bit more of a handful than a C172, which I suppose it would be IRL. I find it hard to do rolls in though
The ground handling seems almost a little too responsive, at least compared to my expectations. Maybe it’s just due to how I have my system set up. Carenado used mostly stock sounds except for the engine sounds, which are good and believable, but I found myself modifying the stock sound set a bit to more my liking. The one area that is lacking is model documentation. There's plenty of real-world plane documentation, but practically nothing on the model side of things. I’ve had to discover how to do some things by poking around, or reading posts online. MegaScenery Oahu
My youngest daughter currently lives on Oahu so I wanted to be able to explore the island from the air to get to know it better. This add-on has photo-real textures and a more detailed mesh. The additional detail in the mountains is exceptional and the photo-real textures look pretty good from about 3000-ft on up. I can fly over my daughter’s university and even pick out her dorm.
I notice no performance hit with this installed. I was kind of surprised, considering the issues I have with the next one.Attached images show me in my new Mooney flying into PHNL.
MegaScenery Pacific Northwest
I am originally from Seattle and regularly fly the virtual skies in Western Washington. This photo-realistic texture add-on covers the Western half of Washington state and a little bit of north western Oregon. It also installs a more detailed mesh.
I had high hopes for this one, but it suffers from three major issues on my system: 1) the “blurries,” 2) glaring terrain anomalies and 3) the dreaded airport elevation anomalies.
The first problem (blurries) is probably system-dependent, my modest system just isn’t capable of loading the textures fast enough (plus I believe there are some texture-loading issues inherent in FS2004). If I fly slow plane, say between 100 – 150 kias, the textures load ok about half the time. Go any faster than that and its blurries to the horizon no matter what, unless I hit pause and go grab a drink. Once the textures load, it looks great and I recognize all the details of my home town, so at least it'll be good for screenshots. I only wish they would load faster.
The second problem is with the mesh. There are huge, nearly 30-40 meter high discontinuities in certain places. One in particular -- Lake Sammamish is personally annoying since I grew up in this area and can attest that the lake does not have a 30 meter water cliff on its western shore
There are others too, near Seattle and other high-traffic areas. Either the developers lacked the tools to fix the geometry or they just never flew around to check the mesh. Then there are the airports. The developers said they made corrections for many airports, but I’m afraid I don’t see much evidence of that. SeaTac sits on a large mesa which certainly does not exist in real life. This is just one of many, many airport-related anomalies.
Finally, while this isn’t technically a bug, it is something that’s rather odd: The developers created a full set of snow textures for the entire area (western Washington, all elevations, etc.) Anyone who’s ever lived in Seattle knows that while the Cascades and Olympics get a lot of snow, it is very, very rare to have snow blanket the lower elevations to the extent shown in these winter textures. It looks pretty, but it would be more realistic if the winter textures only had snow above say 4000 feet.
Fortunately, I got this at a huge discount. It is a mixture of enjoyment and frustration. Anyone else have this add-on? I'd be curious if others have these issues or if I've just messed something up with my installation.
Happy New Year!
- dcc
I'm re-discovering FS2004 after being away for some time. 