Flight One Software’s Flight Environment
Reviewed by Ludo Lambrechts
When spending their hard earned money on payware people are looking for high value products. Many scenery add-ons cover only a small section of the world, or only a single airport. Flight One Software on the other hand has come out with an add-on that fills that void. Their latest title “Flight Environment” will transform the look and feel of your whole world. Flight Environment is a commercial product that has high quality, easy to use textures. These textures will enhance your clouds, your skies, and your water to extremes never imagined. With these textures everything looks and feels realistic. In this review I will go over the benefits and quality of FE as well as the ease of use.
The first thing I will go over is the texture installation program. This utility is very easy to use, and provides amazing results. Through this utility you have the ability to choose the textures you want to install. For every texture you have the ability to scroll through a wide variety of different textures which come with high-quality, and easy to see preview images. Through this feature you can choose exactly the setup which you desire in your flight simulator. If you’re not much for choosing and just want to take what comes at you, just have a go with the randomizer. It will automatically choose the textures, and will give you one out of 170,000 possibilities.
The installation of the textures sounds like a fun process; it’s like choosing out your favourite screenshots. But, people will be wondering how the quality of these textures are. Since it’s a payware product, and from a company such as Flight1, I expected nothing else than pure quality. As you can guess I had very high standards, and these textures exceeded my expectations. The quality and the realism of my skies were unbelievable. I looked outside my window and I couldn’t see much difference between my simulator and reality. I tried various other combinations and the realism and quality was stunning. Everything looked photorealistic, and Flight Environment did not fail to deliver top quality.
In the past we have seen many nice quality water textures released. Most of them looked very realistic with the sun’s reflection on the water, and other cool effects. But with every texture released the big issue was with float planes. As you came closer to the water it lost its look of realism and quickly became “ugly”. Flight Environment although has come through and fixed this ongoing issue. You get nice reflections while flying over the water, and are able to get a realistic feel while on the water as well.
The other major issue which clouds everyone’s buying decisions is the frame rate factor. Why would someone buy something they can’t use? This isn’t a problem with Flight Environment though. Like other sky and cloud textures they are said to improve performance. I have not noticed any hits on my performance as I am running a monster gaming machine, but there is an option to improve the performance. For the bigger and faster video cards you have the option of running high resolution clouds or switching to a lower resolution alternative.
Flight Environment in short changes textures. It does not change the weather engine, or how Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004 handles its weather themes. Therefore third party add-ons such as Active Sky will work with no problems whatsoever. The reason for this is that no change will be recognized by Flight Simulator as all file names have remained the same. This is not an issue which owners of these utilities should be worried about when purchasing this amazing product.
This add-on in its base form can be compared to FS Sky World. I previously used FS Sky World and I was very satisfied with the results I got………..until I saw Flight1’s work. Flight Environment features many more various different textures which are of higher quality than FSW. The installation utility is much easier to use, and FSW did not include water textures. I was very impressed with the difference in quality that I saw between Flight Environment and FS Sky World.
I would recommend Flight Environment by Flight1 to anyone. This program changes your whole flight simulator. You will experience an ease of use, and a feeling of realism when using these textures. It is not an expensive add-on at only $22.95 USD, and it is worth every penny of your hard-earned pay check. Congratulations to the team from Flight One Software and Peter Wilding for this great add-on. I award Flight Environment with a 10 out of 10.
Ludo Lambrechts
Administrator of Canadian Pilots©
Flight1's Flight Environment, My Review
[GK-customfield]FSX[customfield-GK] 
..........................the tough go dancing! 
Just got it a couple of days ago 
