Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3957 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Flight 1
• Released on: 2008-05-02
• ESRB Rating: Rating Pending
• Platform: Windows XP

Manufacturer's Description
Using commercial data licensed from TeleAtlas Europe, in combination with Scenery Solutions own digital processing, Ultimate Terrain Europe is the biggest and best Ultimate Terrain release yet. Ultimate Terrain Europe contains nearly every road in Europe region, along with enhanced railroads, new oceanic coastlines, accurate landclass enhancements, lakes, rivers, plus an exciting new night lighting environment unlike anything else ever released. Using special design logic, many features have been enhanced to bring you an expansion that almost makes Flight Simulator jump out at you with realism.

Customer Reviews

Terrain in Spain looks better from the plane
Like the default Flight Simulator X scenery, but wish it could be just a bit more accurate? Ultimate Terrain X - Europe may be what you're looking for. It's not perfect and it won't revolutionise your FSX experience but it will probably get rid of those scenery issues that may have bugged you for a while.

The area around my home airport - Glasgow - has a few custom objects in the default FSX scenery, but I had been slightly annoyed that the nearby hills looked like they had towns on them (they're actually sparsely populated) and that the towns to the south-west of the airport could not be distinguished, since the generated scenery was too consistent across the whole area rather than having sections of fields between.

UTX does a good job in cleaning up this data. No longer are there lots of houses alongside the motorways and now I can make out the Ayrshire towns which do not run into each other any more. There are more roads, and traffic on those roads; the coastlines and loch/lake shores are improved; bridges are now in place where there were previously none (albeit not exact models of the real things) and the large junctions with roundabouts and flyovers look infinitely better. Before, it would take a bit of squinting and staring to work out exactly where you were in relation to nearby towns. Now, it is much more obvious, assuming you are familiar with the area in real-life.

However, it's not perfect. At the real Glasgow Airport, there is a road which runs very close to the perimeter fence (towards Erskine). In UTX, this road actually cuts into the airport next to the general aviation parking. Also, some roads which are very minor in real-life have busy traffic. These are very small gripes though, since so many of the gripes we have with the default FSX autogen are more-or-less gone.

I didn't notice any degradation of performance and installation was a breeze. This review is based on an area I know well, so I'm making the assumption that areas you know in Europe will be affected in a similar manner. Given the vast area which UTX - Europe will improve, I definitely have no problems recommending this to anyone looking for some scenery enhancements.

Western Europe only
To call this "Europe" is misleading; it only covers about 30% of Europe. Another 2,000+ miles of Europe to the east is ommitted. No "former Warsaw pact" countrys, no European Russia but what there is, is a massive improvement on the default FSX scenery. Objects and airports remain the same but rivers, coasts and roads are a massive advance in detail and accuracy.
There is plenty of scope for tweaking settings to improve performance since UTX has its own performace tuning utility. Most users ought to be able to see a sizable improvement in scenery believability.
Many of the textures and effects are very impressive, but you will probably need to spend some time experimenting with settings to get good frame-rates.
Get this if you like flying low and want wider coverage than photo scenery, but don't mind not being able to find your house.
Note: you'll need quite a bit of HD space to install on; but HDs are cheap these days.
I'd rate this with more stars if it really did cover Europe.

Ultimate Terraine X for use with Flight Sim X
My first impressions were not good at all. When I went to run Flight Sim my SLI graphics system just crawled. I very quickly found that many of the settings that I had painstakingly set up had been re-configured. After putting things back to where they were originally; I found a lot more general detail including roads and town shapes that were a lot more accurate than before. Trees and roads were much more realistic and more representative of the real situation. Overall I was happy with the product - but it was not life changing experience.