Hi all, I don't post often, and I'm sure all FS9 users have heard of FS9 Evolution, but for those yet to give it a try, I've just installed it and I can say that it's well worth your while. I imagine it needs a fairly decent PC to run to its potential though, however, it does come in two versions, with a 'lite' autogen version too. I attach a screenshot taking off from Exeter in the UK (using the excellent UK2000 Exeter Extreme airport), and have to say that it's not too dissimilar than the ORBX scenery.
I haven't 'touched up' this screenshot in any way, it's taken direct. I also use REX and UTX Europe. So in summary, amazing work from the developer, and well worth getting for FS9 users. It's donationware, but in my view, is good enough quality to be payware. It amazes me how, from the humble beginnings of FS9, it can be turned into so much more thanks to the passion and talent of the FS community. Upgrades Performed during the Install Process are New all seasons natural world ground textures New plentiful and more realistic autogen trees European Type autogen road signs New roads and railways New Runway Textures including Markings Etc Pylons and lamp posts place at realistic distances Enhanced 3D buildings Enhanced water colours and waves New shore line’s textures More stable and crisper environmental rendering New enhanced sky colours Upgraded clouds Longer contrails AND MUCH MORE IN ALL OVER 6000 DEFAULT FILES WILL BE ENHANCED One you install The Natural World, you get 3x icons. Green Area, Arid Area & Restore.
The Natural World installs a Texture Swap program for Flight Simulator 2004 which can be easily accessed by the FS2004 Texture Swap folder placed on the Windows Start Menu, and desktop The Texture Swapping increases the amount of ground textures made available for Flight Simulator to render. The enhancements include separating and altering ground textures, for green deciduous and Arid Areas. Due to disc space and program size limitations in the default FS9, Microsoft have used some arid area textures BMP to double as Mooreland/Tundra type land class, which means that in some places like Northern Europe, New Zealand and Scotland, great brown areas supposedly representing dry grass, which to me looks unreal and in most cases is not actually dry grass in the real world. Some default Cities in dryer parts of the world look far too green with lush fields and woodland Cairo spring to mind this now looks as it should This has now been addressed by the use of The Natural Worlds Texture Swap Programmes.
Western Tileable Ground Textures
Remote desktop license server activation crack. There is also a MS Default swap option for those flying heavies at high altitude and taking off in one zone and landing in another, this option is limited to the files used by the texture swap program and is not a full MS restore Using the Texture Swap Correctly Easy in iconic green or really dry areas. The transition zones is where it become like mud, but still not complicated, its more down to local knowledge or what the eye perceived on a visit to a location or what you think it should be which Restore you load, and I am at pains to advise on it, except to say the use of seasons help, the Arid restore is designed to be used in summer time. By Default, The Natural World installs GREEN DECIDUOUS areas I have produced three quick user friendly restore icon in the Start Menu / All Programs / to re-install Arid/Green or Semi Arid textures into FS. Which cannot be used while FS is running You will need to pre-determine which area to have installed, then starting Flight Simulator or close FS to change areas as flight simulator retains texture sets in it pre-fetch folder. So, it is not a region switcher, but more of a season switcher, that will affect the greenery & aridness.
Flight Simulator: Scenery: Replacement Textures FS-Tree 2004 5-Dec-2005 Design: Oscar Lima Golf Version: 2.0 Description: Replacement trees. For FS2002, FS2004 (1,1 MB) 6854 downloads FS2002 Replacement textures 13-Dec-2001 Design: Lennart Arvidsson Version: 1.0 Description: Replacement textures for FS2002. Recommended for Europe, Alaska, Canada and New Zealand. For FS2002 (29,7 MB) 9815 downloads FS2004 Glacier, crevasses, perpetual snow replacement textures 9-Oct-2004 Design: Eric Guichard Version: 1.0 Description: Glacier, crevasses, perpetual snow replacement terrain textures. For FS2004 (1,3 MB) 7532 downloads Lennart's FS2004 Replacement Textures Part 4, Spring Textures 19-Dec-2004 Design: Lennart Arvidsson Version: 1.0 Description: New replacement ground textures for FS2004. Includes all seasons (each season has own download file!). Designed to cover Europe and certain parts of North America and New Zealand.
Package has 6 parts. For FS2004 (7,5 MB) 9141 downloads Lennart's FS2004 Replacement Textures Part 1, TextureSwitch Program 7-Jan-2005 Design: Lennart Arvidsson Version: 1.0 Description: New replacement ground textures for FS2004. Includes all seasons (each season has own download file!). Designed to cover Europe and certain parts of North America and New Zealand. Package has 6 parts. For FS2004 (355 kB) 10728 downloads (4 kB) (1,6 MB) Lennart's FS2004 Replacement Textures Part 3, Fall Textures 19-Dec-2004 Design: Lennart Arvidsson Version: 1.0 Description: New replacement ground textures for FS2004. Includes all seasons (each season has own download file!).
Designed to cover Europe and certain parts of North America and New Zealand. Package has 6 parts. For FS2004 (8,3 MB) 9643 downloads Lennart's FS2004 Replacement Textures Part 6, Hard Winter Textures 19-Dec-2004 Design: Lennart Arvidsson Version: 1.0 Description: New replacement ground textures for FS2004. Includes all seasons (each season has own download file!). Designed to cover Europe and certain parts of North America and New Zealand. Package has 6 parts. For FS2004 (10,7 MB) 9099 downloads Lennart's FS2004 Replacement Textures Part 2, Summer Textures 19-Dec-2004 Design: Lennart Arvidsson Version: 1.0 Description: New replacement ground textures for FS2004.
Includes all seasons (each season has own download file!). Designed to cover Europe and certain parts of North America and New Zealand. Package has 6 parts.
For FS2004 (35 MB) 10601 downloads Lennart's FS2004 Replacement Textures Part 5, Winter Textures 19-Dec-2004 Design: Lennart Arvidsson Version: 1.0 Description: New replacement ground textures for FS2004. Includes all seasons (each season has own download file!). Designed to cover Europe and certain parts of North America and New Zealand.
Package has 6 parts. For FS2004 (9,4 MB) 8314 downloads New roof texture 9-Feb-2013 Design: FISD / Tatu Kantomaa Version: 1.0 Description: New building roof texture for replacement to the default texture. Makes buildings look more like real Finnish buildings.
For FS2004 (155 kB) 2136 downloads Replacement Road Textures 6-Jul-2003 Design: Bernd Junge Version: 1.0 Description: Replacement of the default FS2002 roads and highway day textures. For FS2002 (366 kB) 4910 downloads Replacement trees 23-Feb-2002 Design: Mikko Maliniemi Version: 1.0 Description: Replacement trees to match Finnish landscape.
For FS2002 (339 kB) 4143 downloads Resized 32-bit cloud textures 11-Aug-2005 Design: Antti Pohjanpalo Version: 1.0 Description: Resized 32-bit (2D and 3D) default cloud textures. Smaller filesize for better FPS. For FS2004 (1,7 MB) 4906 downloads Resized DXT3 cloud textures 19-Aug-2005 Design: Antti Pohjanpalo Version: 1.0 Description: Resized DXT3 (2D and 3D) default cloud textures. Smaller filesize for better FPS. Use this texture set, if you are able to run FS with 'Render to texture' -option activated (on some add-on programs, this option will cause problems). You will get better FPS with this texture set than my 32-bit cloud set, and much better than with FS default set. For FS2004 (858 kB) 5278 downloads Tinytrees 26-Jun-2003 Design: Tommi Liukkonen Version: 0.1 Description: Replacement textures for autogen-trees.
For FS2002 (846 kB) 6134 downloads:::: Replacement Textures.
Disclaimer What you are about to read will in most parts sound like a tribute written by someone biased on the subject, but I guarantee that I have no affiliation with the developers, it just really is that good. Background The NL2000 V4 scenery is a freeware photo real scenery covering the whole of the Netherlands. The oldest version of the scenery currently found on the web is version 2.0, released back in 2003 for FS2000. A later version, v2.9 for FS2002 and FS2004, has previously been reviews by Mutley’s Hangars own Rob Scott. The current version, version 4, was released on May 28 th 2010, and is FSX exclusive.
For FS2004 users there is also a version 3 available for download and the latest update, version 3.9, includes the same photo scenery as version 4. The scenery is based on aerial photography dating back to 2005, so some parts of the scenery will be missing infrastructure development after that point in time. The photographs have a resolution of 1m/pixel, for some airports the resolution is 40 cm/pixel. In addition to the photo scenery the downloads also include 24 airports, a traffic module, an object library for objects used at provided airports, a 3d object library of placed 3D objects in the area and a module for presenting City and Town names in FSX.
If you chose to not download the 3D objects library there is also a module for excluding FSX scenery objects from the covered area to avoid wrongly placed landmarks. An installer needed to install all packages are also provided, this package also includes the manual for the scenery. At the moment of writing three of the provided airports are available in two versions. These are all old air force bases that are no longer in use, but both active and current versions of these airports are provided. For this review I have chosen to download all of the photo scenery regions, both the 3D objects library for airport objects and other placed objects, and all available airports. For the three airports with two versions I opted for using the current versions over the active versions to get an as real as possible flying environment.
The modules not used or up for review are the traffic module, the three active versions of former airbases and the module for presenting town and city names. Since I’m using the placed 3D object library I could also skip the FSX exclusion module.
At the time of writing a few of the larger airports in The Netherlands, that are available in NL2000 v3, are still in development for version 4. Most notably Schiphol (EHAM) is missing. In the release notes Gilze-Rijen (EHGR) and Woensdrecht (EHWO) are also mentioned as still being in development and will be released as soon as the developers feel they meet their expectations. Downloading and Installing The complete download is big, and by big I really mean big.
The total download was somewhere in the region of 35 Gb. The photo scenery is cut up into 12 regions ranging from 4,2 to 1,1 GB each. Even at this size I managed to get it all downloaded in a few hours! Unzipping and installing everything took another one and a half to two hours. There are plenty of options on how to download the different parts of the scenery.
All downloads are available via Torrents, and if you don’t have the software for torrent downloading there is also a light weight torrent client available for each of the parts. A word of warning though, once run the provided file will install the torrent client on your computer, and it will run on start up from there on. The only way I could find to remove it was to manually delete the key from the registry and deleting the files, hidden away in your user profile!
If, like me, you aren’t up to date on how to work with torrents, or this method of downloading isn’t possible due to restrictions from your ISP for example, there are other options available to you as well. All object libraries and airports can be downloaded from AVSIM or Flightsim.com via links on the download page. The photo scenery in itself is however not supplied via these sites due to file size restrictions. But fear not, the developers have made these parts available as FTP or Direct HTTP downloads with good download speeds in addition to the Torrents. All downloads are in a non standard format handled by the provided installer. So your first step, after downloading and un-zipping the files, is to get the provided installer up and running.
A fairly straight forward procedure without any problems as long as you follow the on screen instructions. The installer is a rather intelligent piece of software that extracts the files from the different downloads, sets up the scenery layers in FSX and copies the files to a folder of your choice. The installer also makes sure that the different layers are put in the correct order in the scenery database, so you can install the airports and other modules while waiting for the photo scenery files to download without running in to problems. Photoscenery and Placed Landmarks Once everything is installed just start up FSX at any airport in The Netherlands and you’re almost good to go.
But unless you have a really high-end computer you can expect a drop in frame rates, so some tweaking of your FSX settings will most likely be necessary. Some pointers on settings are provided in the manual, but as the developers points out it’s up to you to find settings that cater to your personal taste. Standing on the ground, and while flying at low altitudes, the ground looks a little pixilated, but once you get up to about 2.500 – 3.000 feet AGL things start to look really stunning. At these altitudes the only thing that looks a bit strange are the flat houses and structures in the underlying photos, especially so in areas that have some 3D objects placed. Once you get up to about 5.000 AGL this issue is less of a distraction since you are by then viewing the ground from an angle that gives the images a sense of depth even if they are flat. If you regularly fly airliners at higher altitudes the scenery still looks great, but a lot of the details are lost, and as Rob pointed out in his previous review you sadly won’t have much time to enjoy it before you’re out of the covered area. Speaking of flat, this is a word is closely connected with the Netherlands.
The land is flat (even with FS Global installed), with fields, some forests and cities scattered around the landscape. Sounds boring, doesn’t it? Well, with the 3D objects placed on the ground this really never was an issue. While buzzing around in the skies there’s almost always things that pops out at you. Even from a long way away.
Houses, trees power lines, wind mills, wind turbines, industrial buildings and boats are spread out in great numbers over the whole country. Most of them placed to cover real life counterparts found in the aerial photography.
I even found a few hot air balloons hanging around. Sure, hanging still in the air but that just makes it easier to come really close to them. And with the clarity and detail of the roads and canals on the ground some VFR flying is truly a joy. As an example of the level of detail it was no problem to locate the position of an airfield in Google earth when comparing that with the image from the top-down view in FSX, even when zoomed quite a bit. And as if this isn’t enough the developers have also gone over the aerial photos with a magnifying glass and added water classes to every body of water present, and with all the canals that run through the country there’s plenty of water present.
This means that every body of water will come to life for you, and not just lie there static with the sun reflecting from it at angles that doesn’t correspond to your flying environment. I actually think I saw a swimming pool with moving water while driving around the airports, but I’m not sure. And it was bricked in so I couldn’t try to drive my car into it to see if it would produce a splash or not. The only parts that look below par to me are the few remaining default FSX airports. These will still have your default, or other add-on, ground textures in the parts not covered by runways, taxiways or other objects, so they really stand out like a polar bear in a flock of penguins.
But this is an issue that will be hard to adjust for unless the airports get developed by NL2000. All this results in an experience that is simply breathtaking with tons of things to discover, and just as many stunning views.
However, we must now move on to the one slight downside to the scenery. Seasonal Variation As with most photo real sceneries there is no seasonal variation of the ground textures, but considering the download size of just one season it would be a herculean task to actually produce a photo real scenery of this size with seasonal variation. Even high end pay ware add-ons with photo real scenery usually only come with one season. There are a few exceptions, but they only cover smaller areas. However, since there are plenty of trees present on the ground you will have some sense of seasons since the trees do change colors. In spring and autumn this looks good enough to almost cover the fact that it’s still summer on the ground, but in the wintertime snow covered trees with green fields makes for a strange combination. Integration With Surrounding Scenery One thing that can be an issue with photo real scenery is roads and other parts that end in nothing or miss aligned with the surrounding scenery when they reach the edges of the scenery.
This is especially obvious if the surrounding scenery is default FSX. At the moment I have UTX Europe, Aerosoft Mega Airport Amsterdam Schiphol and FSScene X textures for the ground that borders on to this scenery package, so I have checked for alignment issues between them and the NL2000 scenery. The scenery follows the borders of the Netherlands as close as possible with regards to FSX limitations, and the change in ground textures makes it fairly obvious where the border is on screen. As expected there are fields running across the borders that will look like they are cut in half. For the most part this isn’t a big issue, but flying during wintertime will look very strange as the ground in the surrounding areas are part covered in snow. As for roads and canals the alignment with the placements according to UTX is in most cases flawless, with just minor misalignments visible in some areas.
The same is true when looking at the border around the Mega Airport Amsterdam scenery. The airport scenery pops out a bit due to differences in colors in the underlying photo, but alignments of roads and other objects that run through the border are close to perfect. Airports As stated earlier there are 24 airports to choose from on the download page, ranging from small local grass strips to large regional airports. Details from Wikipedia on the available airports are supplied below.
In the following text I will also comment on how good the airports corresponds to their real world counterparts. The comparisons are based on the fact provided on Wikipedia and imagery via Google earth. ICAO Name I Image Type and Info Runways EHAL Small GA & SAR airport 1 Grass + 1 helipad EHBD GA airport 1 Asphalt EHBK Regional Airport, primarily used as a Cargo Hub 1 Asphalt EHDP Non active Military Airbase 1 Asphalt/Concrete EHDR Small GA airport 1 Asphalt/Concrete EHEH Cargo and Military operations.
Serves Ryanair and Cityjet among other airlines 1 Tarmac EHGG Civilian airport with mainly Charter traffic 2 Asphalt EHHO Small GA airfield 1 Grass EHHV GA airport 3 Grass EHKD Civilian and naval airport 1 Concrete EHLE Largest GA airport in The Netherlands. Home to the Aviodrome aviation museum. 1 Asphalt & 1 Grass EHLW Military Airbase. German airbase during WWII 2 Asphalt EHMZ Local airstrip 1 Grass EHNP Small airport, closed in real life today 1 Grass EHOW Small GA airport 1 Grass (part concrete) EHRD 3 rd largest airport in The Netherlands 1 Asphalt EHSB Military airport, closed in 2008. 1 Asphalt EHSE Small GA airfield 1 Asphalt EHST Small, ultralight aviation only, airfield 1 Grass EHTE Small GA airfield 1Conc/Asphalt &1 Grass EHTW Civilian and military airport 1 Asphalt EHTX Small airport 2 Grass EHVB Old naval airbase closed in 2006 2 Concrete/Asphalt EHVK Active Military Airbase 2 Asphalt According to the records on Wikipedia this is almost a complete coverage of airports in the regions. Once the 3 airports still in development (Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, Gilze-Rijen Airbase and Woensdrecht Air Base) are finished there will only be 1 Military Airport and 3 Glider and Ultra-light fields missing from a complete selection.
That in itself is rather impressive. In addition to the large selection of airports there are also a total of 85 helipads included in one of the modules, not sure in which one but most likely the 3D objects module. Most of these are on off-shore platforms in the ocean, but at least 2 of them are located at hospitals. A word of warning regarding these helipads as take-off points is in order though. The ones on off-shore platforms are rather bug-ridden, and will most of the time result in a splash once you get into FSX. This is a known issue but from what I have read on the forums the developers has chosen not to try and find a fix for it. But if, unlike me, you can handle a helicopter they should make for some challenging landing spots over the ocean.
But how does the airports look I hear you wondering? Well, to start off with all airports with a few exceptions have ground textures based on the same aerial photos as the surrounding areas. This means that the airports will blend in perfectly with the ground scenery.
The two airports with ground textures that don’t blend in with the rest of the ground textures are still based on photographs, but there are some differences in the colours compared to the surrounding area. This is most likely due to the photographs being in a higher resolution, as mentioned before, thus providing more details on the ground. In general what you see in FSX at the provided airports will correspond almost perfectly with what you find using Google Earth. Five of the military airfields are unfortunately censored in Google Earth, so in these cases no comparison could be made regarding the placed buildings.
But given the accuracy of the other 19 airports I’m confident that these are up to scratch too. There are some minor differences present, with extra buildings at some airports, and missing buildings at other, but no major things. The only airport with substantial differences is Teuge Airport (EHTE) where the runway is extended to the east compared to Google Earth, and the road running past the eastern parts has been diverted along the runway since it would have passed straight through the runway after the extension. The extension of the runway was made in 2007, so the difference is due to outdated images on Google Earth. With UTX installed this unfortunately means that the road traffic for that area follows the road as it was before the extension, and subsequently runs straight over the runway! At larger airports you will find taxiway and ground markings that correspond well with what you can expect and lighting are present where it should be. The runway lighting are set to be on regardless of the time of day, but if you wish to have them turned off you can set your transponder to squawk 7000, and the tower will turn them off for you.
In some cases I did come across runways, taxiways and aprons that looked a bit strange, with some small parts having a different texture compared to the rest of the scenery. In all cases that I could check this was also present on Google Earth.
Also, at some airports I have found service roads that are only presented on the underlying photoscenery. While the placements of objects at the airfields are very good, the general quality of the 3D objects and their applied textures ranges from very nice to downright awful. Selections of both examples are provided below.
Most of the buildings on civilian airports have what I believe are photography based textures, whilst the structures at Military airports looks more handmade. It’s amongst the handmade textures I find most of the once that look really bad. The main issue I have with these are that many of them look completely flat when it’s obvious that the surface should have some sort of texture to it. This is most likely due to the fact that they have the same exact colour, without any variation, over the whole surface. This gives the object at hand a feeling of being more cartoonish than something trying to mimic a real object.
But in all honesty this is a problem that is present even in some high end pay ware airports too. Transparency mask affecting objects Good models Bad models - Cartoonish? Good textures In addition to the buildings there are plenty of other static objects present at the airfields, ranging from gliders and GA aircrafts to people of varying quality, some even animated. Among some of the more odd things I have found are a Mig 21 standing on a closed military airfield and a peeping tom looking through the window of a hangar. So there’s plenty of things to discover even without leaving the ground. Within these 24 airports I have only run in to one major bug that is large enough to warrant mentioning in a review. At Groningen Airport Eelde (EHGG) something along the runway edges on runway 5/23 will cause the plane to crash when you get to close to the edge of the runway.
Problems have also been reported with objects causing a crash if you take of along the centreline, but if you go slightly right or left of the centreline your fine, until you try to turn on to a taxiway or the crossing runway 1/19. But since there are two runways the airport can still be used. You can land on runway 01 and take off on runway 19, as long as you can do this without utilizing the small parts that lie south of the crossing with runway 5/23.
The issue at hand is known to the developers and seems to have something to do with the runway lights. The problem is being looked at and will be amended in a future patch. Other Scenery Add-ons used in this review UTX Europe REX 2 – OverDrive Mega Airport Amsterdam Schiphol FSScene X FSGlobal 2010 Traffic X AI traffic A selection of aircraft Verdict A stunning piece of scenery with few downsides provided you have the hardware to run it. If I was a professional scenery developer I would pay big bucks to get these guys on to my development team, if for no other reason than their devotion and attention to great details. But perhaps the stunning level of detail is something that would have to be cut back on if the scenery was being developed for paying customers in order to meet your release dates and development budgets.
The fact that the whole package is provided as Freeware makes it very hard to complain about small issues but the less than functional helipads is a minor drawback, along with some of the really ugly object textures and objects that I feel could have been cut before release to further raise the level of the finished product, especially considering the astonishing attention to details in other parts. The only major issue isn’t really connected to the scenery but the almost viral behaviour of the provided torrent-client is an issue for me. A warning regarding this on the download page would have been enough to avoid annoying me. However, since downloading is possible from other sources I won’t be deducting many points over this issue.
The only reason I used it was that the installer link to AVSIM was dead when I downloaded it, but that has been sorted now. All in all I award this truly great add-on a 9.5 out of 10 points Mikael Stockfors Review machine Spec: Intel Core i7 860 @ 2.8GGhz 4 Gb DDR III 1600 XFX ATI Radeon HD57701GB Windows 7 64bit Pro System Requirements. Flight Simulator X (Acceleration or FSX SP2 required). Windows XP / Vista / Windows7 with the latest Service Packs. Pentium 2 GHz (Duo2Core Intel or equivalent advised).
1 Gb RAM (2 Gb recommended). 256Mb graphic card (512 MB recommended).