Hi folks, EagleSkinner here with a spot of news about a whole flock of Geese – and you won’t have to wait until Christmas, nor will you have to put a penny in the old man’s hat. The people I take my hat off to have released an update to the OzX version of the FSX default Goose. What? You haven’t heard of the OzX Goose HD Redux pack which adds two new versions of the Grumman Goose to your FSX setup? The Goose, which has not one, but a whole flock of excellent high resolution graphics and bumpmaps textures to FSX for your flying enjoyment – for free! Where have you been this past year? Well whether you missed the first release of the Goose or not. Butch, Gizmo and the gang at www.aussiex.org have upgradeded their already excellent Goose HD Redux package and you can get this free addon at www.aussiex.org.
So what do you get for your money? (Well of course it will cost you… the amount of electricity you need to run your computer for the time it takes to download XXX MB of bits and bytes).
The AussieX team have taken the Microsoft default Goose and literally stripped it down and rebuilt it to such a high degree of accuracy and detail as possible.
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The Goose (and other HD Redux downloads from AussieX) are to FSX as FSX is to FS5 and if you thought that the FSX slogan “As real as it gets” meant that that was the limit, well you are in for a great surprise. Every square inch of interior and exterior texture has been re-worked from scratch and there is so much attention to detail that you could spend days just slewing around the virtual cockpit looking at all that eye-candy. Even the bumpmaps have been re-worked to a level of detail rarely encountered before in flight simulation. In fact the AussieX team’s artistic excellence is so good that even the big payware developers are starting to realise that high definition and high resolution textures are the only way to go. But the team went even further than “mere” eye-candy.
The flight dynamics of this Prima Donna of the FSX hangar were handed over to Pam Brooker (of Jade Island Flight Test Center) who rebuilt them to give two different sets of flight dynamics for the two differently powered Geese (or is that really Gooses?). You now have a standard G21A Goose with twin 450hp Pratt & Whitney R985 radials and also a high power version with twin 650hp Pratt & Whitney R985-SG radials.
But that was last year and merely the first iteration of the AussieX Goose Redux. This service pack takes the original redux pack and improves upon it with more paints and more attention to detail. Because despite their already excellent initial release, they weren’t fully happy with the Goose. Now the team has dotted some Is and crossed a few more Ts. But hey, don’t ask me to tell you about it. Having seen their work, I am going back to the classroom to improve my own painting.
All I can add here is for the reader to download and install this Goose expansion. It’s free, it works perfectly in FSX and it will take you to levels ov detail and realism that default FSX fails to achieve – and even quite a few high quality commercial addons, I might add.