Product Review

Model Features

review text here

The major features listed include:

1 m detailed terrain model for the airport and city;
hand crafted airport ground textures;
airport building textures created from on-site photography of the actual buildings;
photo realistic area, including mountains;
helipad in the Narvik mountains;
10 m terrain mesh included;
uses most Orbx Flow technologies;
unique full seasonal variations;
unique static aircraft models;
custom animated windsock (p3d only);
custom trees and grass;
unique night lighting for the airport and city;
highly optimised for good performance;
designed to blend seamlessly with FTX Norway; and
can also be used with FTX Global BASE, with the included 10m mesh, but the recommendation is to use FTX Norway for a seamless blend to photo realistic scenery.

Level of Detail

The developer, Tore Stranden, has crammed so much detail into this airport and city scenery it makes it difficult to know where to begin. The detailing around this airport is superb. From coastline to garbage bins, Tore has left nothing to chance. The use of ambient occlusion and texturing brings this airport to life in a refreshing way. You get the feeling of actually being at the airport for real, instead of in your flight sim.

To achieve the most realistic environment as possible, Tore created the whole city area of Narvik as a 3D model. There are hundreds of custom designed buildings within the city limits and farther afield. This approach was to ensure good performance within the flight sim. By doing so though, it means that the area outside the airport cannot be landed on - aircraft simply fall through the scenery. Tore notes in the user manual that to overcome this he could have created a complex hardened platform, but such a platform would have caused an extreme performance impact. The 3D model therefore, contains the very complex terrain detail and literally hundreds of buildings. Considering the actual size of Narvik city, this must have been some undertaking. I am not sure if this approach has been used before on such a scale but it works very well, providing of course you do not wish to land on any part of the city - forget it, just use the airport.

There are, however, another two landing areas available, at least for helicopters, the helipad next to the TV/radio mast on Fagernesfjellet mountain, but beware of pylons in the vicinity near to the helipad, and there is a ship anchored at sea with a helipad marked on the deck.

The airport environment has been rendered superbly to provide a very realistic representation. The shoreline, with its stunning textures and photo realistic scenery, really make this airport stand out aesthetically, as is evident from my screenshots below.

Seasonal Variation

The seasonal changes are very real and believable and they blend seamlessly.

Quality of Objects

The contents of Narvik airport and surrounding area has some of the finest 3D models I have seen. The meticulous attention to detail reveals itself in this scenery, making great fun to fly around. Some of the objects included will take some finding, but I assure you, no matter how well hidden they are, they are nonetheless rendered to a high degree of accuracy. Both the textures and the clarity of the detail in this superbly crafted airport scenery are simply stunning. Just take a closer look at the rock wall to the north end of the apron and you will see exactly what I mean. The tyre marks and wear and tear markings on the runway and apron are also accurate representations.

Buildings and Bridges

The amount of time taken to complete this airport is unsurprising when you take in to consideration the detail in each and every building in the cityscape. There are some bridges included but one in particular deserves a special mention, the recently built Hålogaland Bridge which connects Narvik and Øyjord. Hålogaland Bridge is a suspension bridge construction which crosses the Rombaksfjorden in the municipality of Narvik in Nordland county. It will be part of the European Route E6 highway and it will shorten the driving distance from Narvik to Bjerkvik by 17 km and from Narvik to Bjørnfjell, via European Route E10 by 5 km. This bridge has been modelled extremely well and connects both sides perfectly.

Trees, Night Lighting, and Mountains.

Also included are literally thousands of custom trees, all of which are beautifully modelled. There are also, full seasonal changes within the tree library. There is the facility to change the density of trees cover in the ENNK control panel and they are not affected by the autogen slider in your sim. I chose to set mine on Ultra High Density, as I was not experiencing any major loss in frame rates. The night lighting has also been tackled in a sympathetic manner, with soft lighting and just the right amount of illumination, giving both an atmospheric appearance and a believable, natural look to the whole area. Although strictly speaking, the mountain area covered in this release is not the largest area, far from it, what it is though, is a perfectly formed rendering, coupled with subtle photo scenery textures. There are sufficient mountains included with Narvik airport to keep your helicopter flying skills honed and ready for some larger scale mountains.

Documentation

There is a 22 page user manual included in the download which explains all the user needs to know, from installation to using the control panel to configure your settings for ENNK. The ENNK Control Panel allows the user to configure the various components within the flight sim to allow you to configure the scenery according to your computer’s capabilities. It does what it says on the tin.

Performance

It states in the user manual that various components of the scenery, if enabled, could reduce frames rates dramatically, so a read of the manual is necessary to optimise performance on your PC. There were no performance issues for me and my system whilst I flew or walked around the Narvik scenery. I believe this is testament to how thorough Tore has been in rendering this add-on.

There is also an Airport Terrain Harden-Platform, which gives the option to draw more performance from the individual computers as described below. However, I did not notice any major difference in performance whichever setting I used.

Blue - Detailed Terrain Platform. If you wish to walk around with BOB, select this platform. This has the potential to cause bad performance during flight.

Green - Simple Terrain Platform. This platform is a combination of the other two options.

Red - Very Simple Terrain Platform. This platform provides the best performance during flight.

Value for Money

I can hear some members of the flight sim community sucking air through their teeth at the price. For just a few dollars more, I know it is possible to purchase much larger areas of scenery, but what we have to look at is this scenery is sublime, bijou even, and worthy of any scenery collection. The gorgeous photo realistic scenery, coupled with the artistry and eye for detail makes this, for me at least, a must buy, if not only to start my Norwegian airport collection with. The quality of Narvik is such that I will be flying in, out, and around this area for quite some time yet.

Conclusion

As this is the first airport that Tore Stranden has completed all I can say is, hurry up and get more done please. The attention to detail is quite breath taking. Tore has got a true eye for detail and it is awesomely evident in this product. This exquisitely crafted airport and surrounding area is, in my opinion, a must buy now add-on. I would confidently advise any flight simmers who are wanting something fresh and beautiful to fly around, to purchase FTX: EU ENNK Narvik Airport. It is not always about the money or the size of the area covered for me, it is about discovering new places to fly, enjoying my time there, and then encouraging designers to carry on doing what they do best. Tore Stranden might have taken some time to develop Narvik but he has crafted a small masterpiece here and the flight sim community need to be using it.

Review Computer Specifications

The specifications of the computer on which the review was conducted are as follows:

Asus P8Z77-V motherboard, Intel i7, 3.4GHz 'Sandybridge';
Asus Strix GeForce GTX970 OC 4GB;
16GB, DDR3, Corsair Vengeance, 1600MHz;
500GB, WD Velociraptor - FSX;
Windows 7, (64bit); and
Microsoft Flight Simulator FSX Acceleration.
Additional major add-ons include: Active Sky Next, Orbx FTX Global BASE, Orbx FTX Global VECTOR, Orbx FTX Global openLC series, Orbx FTX region series, Orbx FTX airport series, and Orbx FTX Trees HD.