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VFR Genration X Photo Scenery for FSX Christmas 2006 has been a bumper year for me in regards to FS related goodies. Along with the TRACK IR4 that I got I also received the full set of VFR Generation X Photo Scenery (Gen X). So once again Christmas morning I opened up the pressie with delight but had to wait until the day after Boxing Day when I returned home to Cardiff from my daughters before I could install it. The whole of England and Wales (sadly no Scotland yet) comes on 9 DVD’s yes count them 9, which in anyone’s terms is a massive amount of data, the full install coming in at a massive 60gb. To be frank if you have all three volumes you might as well install the lot, well if you have the HD space that is. At this point the best install option is to install all 60 gig onto its own separate and clean hard drive if you can. One has to consider that if you have say for example Windows XP, FSX and then GEN X all on one drive the seeker heads are really going to have to work hard in finding all the data and files it needs to run, this will slow things down. I originally installed Vol 1 onto the same drive as my OS and FSX laden drive and whilst it worked there where some considerable stutters and pauses. So off I dashed and found a suitable 180 gig ide drive and installed that. The install routine for GEN X is not the best in the world and do be prepared for along wait as it installs all of that data, it can take at least 40mins per volume and that is assuming all goes okay. I’m pretty sure that there are some problems as when it came to Vol 3, disk 3; my DVD drive just could not read the third disk. After much disk swapping and gnashing of teeth the drive finally read the disk, I don’t know how or why it suddenly read it but it did. Also whilst I remember not one of the install disks auto started I had to go to my computer and find the setup icon on the disk. This is strange as a friend of mine who also has the product had no problem at all and his disks where auto started. So once installed it’s the configuration and Horizon have provided us with a little booklet with a suggested setup for the Gen X scenery. I would actually go along with what they recommend as a first starting point and then build up your FSX config step by step, little by little. The recommendations are very good, when one thinks about it there is very little you need to turn on, as the photo scenery is so good and the definition is extremely sharp, 1.2m per pixel sharp in fact. If one flies over fields you can see sheep in them and cars on roads. Flying over my own house I was able to easily identify it and the large oak tree in our garden. Flying over the Taff Ely wind farm I could see the wind turbines and to my surprise I could even see power pylons and the cables going over the hills furthermore from one angle I could actually see the Wenvoe transmitter. Remember these are not 3d models that I’m mentioning these are photographic images images. My PC spec is not special although I have been told that my CPU is rather good considering it’s not duo core or an ATHLON. AMD Sempron 3000+ 2.2 ghz 1 gig ram nVidia 6600 le gfx card My setting are everything turned off except scenery which is at dense so I can see my airport buildings and I have the weather set to 10 miles in the user defined weather settings, this creates the haze that we see here most of the time in the UK clear cloudless days being a rarity. I am more than impressed with these settings and I achieve 24.8 fps locked at 25 fps in virtual cockpit mode with my Track ir4 on at the same time. The GEN X scenery is really designed to be used from spot view and when in spot view the overall impression is staggering, in the virtual cockpit view panning about from side to side can cause a little blurriness as my gfx and main cpu try to catch up, but that only happens if I do a lot of view switching. Even with that, the blurriness is no worse than VFR Photoscenery for 2004 at its best, and most of the time I can look out of the port window down onto some wonderful views. VFR flying is really quite a joy and to be able to pick out villages, woods, motorway junctions and familiar buildings whilst looking at your maps is truly marvellous. Finally I would just like to say as good as the product is I do have a couple of niggles, one being the installer, clearly there are some problems with it especially disk reading, someone not technically up to speed might become discouraged and give up, also the install routine is long which maybe a consequence of the massive amount of data being installed,  and finally it needs to be clearly stated that to enjoy the 1,2m per pixel scenery that you have to install 2.4 scenery at the same time, I spent a fruitless couple of minutes trying to deselect the 2.4 stuff before realising it had to be installed. Those few niggles aside this is another revolutionary step forward to flight simming nirvana and one product that I will happily recommend to you all. Wycliffe

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