When pilots fly cross-country they use a range of landmarks on the ground to help them find their way and pinpoint their position. The most distinctive of these are roads, rivers and coastlines, but in Flight Simulator 2004 these simply aren't reproduced accurately enough to allow them to be used for navigation.

All this is about to change thanks to Roads & Rivers of Europe, which updates the scenery of Europe with a set of accurately placed roads, rivers and coastlines that are positioned to within 15 metres of the real thing.

Roads & Rivers of Europe covers the following countries: Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Portugal and the United Kingdom

• Detailed and complex road intersections are modelled
• Main roads in cities are included
• The size of roads varies according to their real world classification
• Road bends and junctions accurately shown
• The course and size of major rivers are accurately depicted 

A few common questions

Q. Will Roads & Rivers of Europe work with add-on mesh terrain scenery such as FSTerrain and FSGlobal SE?
Yes. Provided the mesh terrain has been created using accurate real-world data, the roads and rivers should fit in perfectly. In fact they should fit in even better than with the default terrain, as the default mesh is much lower detail than that provided by add-on packages.

Q. Will Roads & Rivers of Europe work with custom airport sceneries such as British Airports or World Airports?
Yes. Provided the airports have been accurately placed and sized by the designer based on their real world location and layout, then they should blend in perfectly well with the roads and rivers. The exceptions to this would be airports placed where they do not currently exist in the real world. This could be historical airports or wartime airbases created to represent a particular time in the past. It is likely that the sites of these airports have been redeveloped in the intervening years.

Q. Will Roads & Rivers of Europe work with photographic terrain scenery such as the VFR Photographic Scenery packages available for England and some other parts of Europe?
No. The way Flight Simulator handles Photographic Scenery is different from the way it handles the normal ground terrain. With photographic terrain Flight Simulator prevents the display of the vector roads and rivers so that the 'real' roads and rivers on the photographic tiles can be seen. This is logical as properly designed photographic scenery should have all the real roads and rivers in the correct places. Displaying the 'drawn' roads and rivers over the top would greatly reduce the realism of the photographic scenery and also require extra effort to display. You can still install and use Roads & Rivers of Europe even if you have photographic scenery for some areas. Outside the photographic areas the new roads will display as normal. Inside the photographic areas the new roads will not be visible. If the photographic scenery is accurate then you should even see the Roads & Rivers of Europe roads matching up perfectly with the 'photographic' roads where the two areas meet.

Q. Does Roads & Rivers of Europe contain every single European city street from the real world?
Roads & Rivers of Europe contains all major and minor highways from autobahns and motorways right down to country lanes, but in cities it was decided to restrict the display to the major streets only. This is because of the way Flight Simulator generates the autogen buildings and trees. Where Flight Simulator finds a road it prevents the generation of any autogen objects either on the road or for a short distance on either side. Where streets are very close together, as in a city, this can result in no buildings or trees being displayed at all. On balance it was found that the most realistic visual appearance was achieved by displaying the larger city streets so you could still identify and navigate them while leaving the Flight Simulator autogen to create the buildings and trees where the smaller streets would be.

Q. What is the best altitude to see the roads from?
Roads & Rivers of Europe was designed primarily to allow true VFR (Visual Flight Rules) flying in Flight Simulator. In VFR flight you navigate by following landmarks such as roads, rivers and unique ground features. For this reason Roads & Rivers of Europe is optimised for the normal VFR altitude of 2000-4000 feet. Just like in real life you won`t be able to make out much more than the general coastline from 36,000 feet. At medium levels you will be able to see the larger roads and rivers but the full detail will only start to be seen (again just like real life) when you are down below 10,000 feet.

Q. Will Roads & Rivers work with FScene?
Yes. The default roads are still used by FScene and these will be disabled and replaced in the same way.

Q. Can I choose just to display just some of the roads - for example motorways only?
No. Roads are all interrelated and are designed to be displayed together for maximum realism. Many motorway junctions include minor roads joining and crossing and the visuals would be affected if only some roads were displaying. Experimentation has shown that there is no measurable performance gain when only displaying some of the roads so it was decided not to provide any option to switch road types on and off.

Q. Are there any known places where Roads & Rivers of Europe doesn't work?
There are some minor problems in a few places where inaccuracy in the default Flight Simulator scenery can result in particular features being misplaced relative to the real (and accurate) roads, rivers and coastlines. In a number of cases Roads & Rivers of Europe corrects these mismatches by careful modification of the default scenery, but this isn`t possible in every case. Europe covers a huge area and it would have taken years to check every part of it for discrepancies caused by inaccuracies in the default Flight Simulator scenery.

Some landmark buildings are incorrectly placed in the default Flight Simulator scenery. Roads & Rivers of Europe moves a number of buildings to their correct real-world location but there will still be some that might look slightly out of place.

Flight Simulator has some European rivers incorrectly displaying as 'minor' rivers when they should be 'major'. Where this occurs you may catch the occasional glimpse of the default minor river appearing alongside the new accurate river provided by Roads & Rivers of Europe.

Not all 3D bridges are accurately placed in Flight Simulator. In most cases you should see the new roads lining up correctly with the bridges where they cross a river but sometimes there might be a slight misalignment. Roads
& Rivers of Europe removes a number of default bridges where they are so far out of place that they would be entirely on land when the new roads and rivers are displaying. In these cases you will still see the road crossing the river. You will just not see the 3D bridge object.

Q. I've noticed that some roads appear to have breaks in them where they simply vanish. Why is this?
This is where the road goes into a tunnel. If you see the road in real life it will look like this.

Q. Will Roads & Rivers of Europe make any permanent changes to my Flight Simulator set-up that cannot be undone?
No. If you uninstall Roads & Rivers of Europe, Flight Simulator will be restored back to its previous state with all the default roads, rivers, bridges and coastlines reactivated.