Cloud9 Amsterdam Scenery For FS2004

By Andrew Herd (30 October 2005)

ne of my long-term beefs about FS addons is that creating simulations of airports is all very well, but that the products I see would be considerably improved if developers saw their responsibility as extending more than a spit beyond the boundary fence. In the real world, finding an airport and navigating around it relies on visual reference points - if these are lacking in a scenery, it reduces its value to a thin coating of eye candy around the runways that does little more than slow up frame rates. You take off, land, taxi around a little maybe, but for the rest of the time, the scenery might as well not be there, because unless you are very different to the average simmer, you like to fly. Most scenery developers do not seem to get this and persist in releasing airports that can only be located using the GPS, instead of enhancing the surrounding landscape so that it becomes possible to find the place by flying along the interstate/river with the odd shaped bend, or hanging a left at the lake to find themselves on long final. Okay, so I agree that fuel efficiency demands on airline flights do not permit this kind of approach anymore and that most of the big iron is vectored in IFR, but even if the wham-bam-thank you-ma'am arrival is your idea of flightsim heaven, you have to admit it is pretty boring flying a thousand virtual miles only to arrive somewhere that looks exactly the same as the place you just left right until short final. Then you land, taxi, shut-down and what? Do you slew around and take a look at all the place? Nope, you either take off again, or you shut down FS and go watch TV. I would contend that the reason why FS scenery sales are so anaemic is because most simmers see the buildings in the airports they use for such a short length of time that they have learned to be happy with the default set and that if scenery developers want to increase their sales, they need to think about the world beyond the fence.

Here is such a scenery and it doesn't surprise me all all that Cloud9 coded it, because as their idiosyncratic and rather wonderful Starfighter proves, they are a team that can think outside the box - and if you want to know what the award is up there, just click on the image and it will take you to an explanation.

Cloud9 have a totally different approach to other FS developers and it extends even to the way the product is marketed. Instead of needing a key or a file download link before you can see any more than a few screenshots, Cloud9 have fixed things so that anyone can download the Amsterdam scenery and install it on their PC - but if you don't pay for it, the addon vanishes after five minutes, just long enough to appreciate what you are missing. To make the scenery appear again, you have to shut down and restart Flight Simulator, which means that in theory, you wouldn't ever have to pay for the addon if all you ever do is load the plane at the threshold and make a really quick getaway, but then I doubt that many simmers would be sad enough people to do this (-: In practice, once seen, forever smitten and the neat thing about the trial idea is that the active period is long enough to work out whether your PC has the guts to run the scenery, so if you are doubtful about whether your system is powerful enough to do the addon justice, you can test the trial version before you shell out any of that hard earned cash.

Other developers have produced time limited demos before, but another Cloud9 innovation is that if you decide to purchase the scenery, you have to do so with FS running and an active Internet connection. The procedure isn't too complicated as all you have to do is start FS with a default aircraft, reduce it to window mode (ALT+Enter keys) select 'Amsterdam' from the 'Addon Manager' pull-down menu and click on 'Buy'. Hey, even I can manage that and it is a well known fact that I am not fit to be in charge of a credit card.

Amsterdam Schiphol is a natural choice for a Flight Simulator addon, because the place has grown to become one of the most important airports in Europe, although it ended up being built almost by accident. The Dutch military needed an airfield for the defence of Amsterdam early in the First World War, but their first choice was too muddy, so they ended up seeking an alternative. The search was complicated by the fact that the budget was exactly generous and because the War Minister hadn't completely got his head around the fact that aircraft couldn't be stored in barns like horses, but in 1916 a site was located close to Fortress Schiphol's parade ground. The new field still wasn't ideal, as its shape forced pilots to a lot of crosswind takeoffs at a time when planes weren't designed to do that kind of thing, but at least they didn't get bogged down all the time. After the war, the military did their best to prevent Schiphol being developed as a civil airport, but the City of Amsterdam and (believe it or not) the Minister of Waterways threw their combined weight behind the development. On May 17th, 1920, the first scheduled service was flown to London by a KLM using aircraft chartered from a British airline and the airport grew steadily, boosted by an influx of passengers coming to see the 1928 Olympics and a far-sighted decision by the City to pay for concrete surfaced runways in the early thirties, at a time when the vast majority of its competitors were still down to grass.

Then came the Second World War, the Nazi invasion and Schiphol became a Luftwaffe airbase. Even as the Allies were bombing the runways to oblivion, Prince Bernhard, then in exile in London, was planning its resurrection; Bernhard generously financing a team of architects to design a new, modern airport with the result that reconstruction started immediately after the war. In 1946 Schiphol was named the national airport, formally ending any threat to close it in order to build in a more central location and in 1949 further plans for expansion were approved. The new Schiphol was opened by Queen Juliana in 1967 and later decades saw it gain more terminal space, new piers and a modern cargo handling area. Last year, Schiphol handled an incredible 42.5 million passengers and 1.4 million tons of cargo - it is not only one of the world's biggest, but one of its most favorite airports. Unlike many of its European rivals, Schiphol has plenty of space for expansion and its role as an important transit node for flight connections looks set to grow thanks to its extensive route network. By 2010, it is planned to be handling 50 million passengers, 5 million high speed train passengers, 4 million tonnes of cargo and about 450,000 aircraft movements - not bad for a place that began as a replacement for a muddy field.

Cloud9's Amsterdam scenery is an 82 Mb download that installs not only a vastly upgraded Schiphol airport compared to the original FS2004 one, but a large area of surrounding photographic ground textures and a huge amount of new AutoGen in Amsterdam itself. When Amsterdam burst on my screen for the first time in glorious technicolor, the dog hid under the desk and covered her eyes with her paws, blinded by the majesty of it all. I can't recall being so impressed with an airport scenery since the last time I saw a Cloud9 product - their F-104 Starfighter.

A 50 page manual is included with the product, which after a brief run-down of the history of the airport, gives some hints about how to get the the best frame rates out of the scenery. This is followed by a section explaining how to work the gates, pilot-controlled taxiway lighting and improve the AI traffic flows. Most users will use the FS2004 AI planes, but the airport also runs very well with products like Ultimate Traffic or Traffic 2005 using the AI that Amsterdam installs with by default. However, the developers have included a set of no less than fourteen replacement AI bgls, some of which set up traffic flows according to wind direction, while the remainder work the traffic to produce realistic peaks and troughs. Having tried 'em, I can confirm that they are a big improvement on the default traffic bgls and achieve very realistic looking flows on multiple runways, something that is hard to achieve in Flight Simulator under normal circumstances. The penultimate part of the manual is devoted to airport charts, SIDs, STARs and - unusually, just wish more FS products did this - VFR traffic circuits. Finally, there is a list of 'situations' installed with the package, ranging from a Boeing 737 approaching the outer marker in IFR conditions, to a 777 ready for pushback on a sunny day.

Apart from a copy of Flight Simulator 2004, the system requirements are a 2.0 Ghz processor running Windows 98 or better, 512Mb of RAM, 200Mb of disk space, a 128Mb video card and DirectX 8.0 or higher. Needless to say, the faster the processor your system has, the better. I am sure a 2 gig CPU will run Amsterdam, but it wouldn't run much else with all the options maxed and you would need to conduct a scorched earth policy on your system tray to be sure of stutter-free flight - ambitious sceneries like this one always need a lot of horsepower to run properly. Cloud9 say that they have optimised Amsterdam to run as fast as possible and in confirmation of this I seldom saw single figure frame rates on my 3.0 Ghz Pentium, though they did happen from time to time. With everything turned up full and 39% AI traffic using one of Cloud9's traffic sets, approaches using the default 737 in the rainy conditions of Cloud9's Schiphol 06 approach situation hovered around 12 fps, but I got 14 - 20 fps taxiing around the airfield, a rate which was maintained even as I approached the gate. I tested several more complex aircraft and rarely saw the frame rate go below 10 fps, with the first dips below 15 occurring as I entered the VFR circuit area, but there was also a certain amount of stuttering, particularly when the plane's heading passed through the city. Given the immense scope of the scenery, the frame rates I got are excellent by comparison to other products of the same size, but be aware that there is a hit and that slower machines with restricted RAM will run into trouble sooner rather than later.

The manual makes numerous suggestions about how to improve this situation including deactivating the city scenery and doing this on my system brought rates on the 06 approach situation into the 18-25 region, dropping to 14-20 fps during the taxi to the stand. The 06 approach is done in heavy cloud, so I tried swapping to the fair weather theme which saw the rate go down to 16-20 and stay there almost until the wheels touched, which is impressive for a scenery of this type and suggests that on that particular approach, having the city enabled costs 5 frames per second. I would suggest using the trial version first if you are doubtful and if you have a copy of the package and are running a sub 3.0 Ghz system, if you can let me know what kind of frame rates you are getting I will post a selection as a guide .

The developer's claim that the airport is rendered with a level of detail 'never seen before' in Flight Simulator can be taken with a pinch of salt, but Amsterdam can certainly claim to be one of the most complicated sceneries ever released for FS2004. There are a vast number of objects, ranging from baggage trains to bollards and if you take a tour around, you will find everything from working clocks to cellphone network adverts. Cloud9 have even reproduced the plane spotter's pen, so if you have Traffic 2005, you can park Spotty there and hope he doesn't find his way back (-: And of course there is the city of Amsterdam, complete with its canal network, Oude Kirk, Van Gogh museum and red light district - I jest not. One gotcha I discovered when I browsed the manual was that you have to have the default Amsterdam FS scenery on your hard disk for the Schiphol addon to work properly, so you will need to fix this if you didn't do a full FS2004 install way back when. Another thing every user will notice is that the scenery takes several seconds to appear when you first load a plane at Schiphol; this being a side-effect of the way Cloud9 initialise the various modules involved.

Moving on, the runways, aprons and taxiways are beautifully textured with just about every marking, sign and light that can be found on the real airport, with some taxi lighting controllable by tuning 111.00 on Nav1. You would be surprised how many airport sceneries I see where the taxiway textures don't line up, never mind the lines, but Cloud9 have paid serious attention to detail and I didn't come across any problems. The textures on the buildings and ramps are first class, with most of the adverts readable when you get close to and much fine detailing of components. Equally, the phototextures surrounding the airport are of good quality, the good news being that these merge nicely into the VFR Netherlands photoscenery, although some sections of road and waterway are missing near the threshold of 18R - if you do use the two packages together make sure that you install Amsterdam 'on top' of VFR Netherlands and that you go into FS9's scenery library and deactivate the 'Cloud9 Amsterdam terrain' and the 'Amsterdam aerial photo' layers, or you will end up loading terrain and tiles for this area twice, which will slow Flight Simulator down unnecessarily. Unfortunately, the package isn't compatible with the old Netherlands 2000 scenery, which has to be uninstalled in a specific way before Amsterdam can be installed if conflicts are to be avoided - full instructions on how to do this are included in the manual. At night, the whole place lights up and it is easily the most attractive FS airport I have had the privilege to fly over - check out the screenshot in the center of the row just below.

When you taxi onto the stand, you are in for a treat, because there are two types of visual docking system and both are extremely well simulated. Depending on which type of system your chosen gate features, you will get guidance for any 7 series Boeing, any Airbus, most of the MD8x/9x series, the Dash 7 & 8 and the BAE 146 - but bear in mind that some aircraft developers put the pilot's eyepoint in the wrong place and I haven't come across an FS docking system that can cope with that yet. I tried various aircraft out and had no problems with either the default 737 or a couple of POSKY planes, although the usual problems occurred with slight malpositioning of planes at some of the gates if they were loaded through the FS 'go to airport' menu rather than by taxiing in.

There are two types of gate. The first has a single arm and will dock with the MD80 family, the A320 and the 737; the second has twin arms and is designed for the bigger Boeings, the MD11, A340 and A380. Both operate automatically, as long as the aircraft is correctly positioned and you have the parking brake applied; to detach the gate, all you have to do is release the brake and wait a few seconds. Ground handling equipment also appears at some stands after you have shut down the engines, a neat feature which we first saw in Gary Summons' UK 2000 sceneries. If you have dynamic scenery set to 'extremely dense' you will also see other vehicles moving around the airport on the internal roads and across the aprons - as well as a fire training area that does its stuff at ten minutes past every hour - I recommend turning this option on, because it really brings the place to life.

I am going to confess right now that I do not like doing reviews of airport sceneries. The reason is that they very rarely have the 'real feel' of the best FS addon planes and the grainy textures and slab-sided buildings bring me down to earth with a bump by reminding me that I am using a simulator after all. Some of the smaller GA sceneries - in particular the GeoRender/FSAddon stuff - are pretty convincing, but I have seen very few large airports that make the grade without deep sixing the frame rates. There are exceptions to this and Gary Summons' UK2000/British Airports, the German Airports series and SimFlyers had few rivals until Cloud9 came along, but having seen Amsterdam, I am a convert. This was going to be a short review, but I kept coming back to the scenery while I was testing Traffic 2005 and discovering something new; Schiphol being such a large airport that I discovered it was possible to land there many times without ever really getting to know the place. The endless variety the package has to offer is partly the result of the real Schiphol having twelve runways: 36R, 36C, 36L, 18L, 18C, 18R, 27, 09, 24, 06, 22 and 04 - and I shudder to think how many miles of taxiways there are. Gound fuel burn is a serious consideration, especially if you land in the boonies of 36L which is so far from the control tower that they speak a different language and getting lost is a serious possibility.

Verdict? Amsterdam kind of snuck up on me and it is a long time since I have been so impressed by a large airport scenery. Very large FS airports usually amount to little more than eye candy supported by software engines designed to efficiently eat processor cycles and for that reason alone, few survive long on my hard disk, there being no point flying approaches into a scenery that reduces frame rates to single figures. This addon stands out from the crowd in all kinds of ways: first of all because it includes a large chunk of surrounding photoscenery and a city; second because it is compatible with one of the best photosceneries ever released for Flight Simulator; third, because the developers have managed to convincingly simulate one of the world's most interesting airports in all its moods; fourth, because of the enormous effort they have clearly gone to providing realistic AI traffic files; and finally, because the package runs at a usable speed. Yeah, if you turn the AI and weather options up to the max, load a complex plane and fly the approach through broken cloud, everything slows down, but much less than you would expect for a scenery of this size and degree of complexity. So, if you have a 3.0 Ghz Pentium with a couple of gigs of RAM, you really are in for a treat - if not, just download the trial version and see if your system can run it, because if it can, you are looking at a classic.