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de la Cruz and Alberto Canedo are the makers of a scenery that
covers a small part of Mexico, namely the northeastern tip of the
Yucatan peninsula. The main city in this area is called Cancun, one
of the youngest cities in the country. We're talking about one of
the main touristic attractions in Mexico. That's why Cancun owns a
modern airport, with only one runway but with all the facilities that
make it possible for larger aircraft to visit the city.In their own words the two Mexicans made photorealistic airports. Besides Cancun they included the Cozumel airport, next to a couple of small airstrips in the area. It all looks very detailed. Beautifully rendered main buildings, static aircraft and detailed taxiways. Cancun even includes position numbers and jetways. If you want to make it even more lively you can also download cun_bg1.zip, which adds dense dynamic scenery to the airports. The rest of the scenery is based on the default FS98 textures and thus a lot less photorealistic than the airfields, which I think is a little disappointing. However, the fact that the creators added roads, cities, improved coastlines with beaches and lagoons Brooke Shields would be very jealous of, soon makes you forget that you are in fact flying in a piece of default scenery.
The scenery consists of a few additional zip files that include the
required BGL and texture files. Just copy them to your own created
Cancun directory and activate the scenery. If you don't have the
Airport
and
VOD
textures already be sure to download them and put them in the main or
Cancun texture directory, otherwise the scenery doesn't look like it
should.
To run the scenery the creators specifically recommend a strong computer. Anything less than a Pentium 166 won't do the trick, especially if you put the scenery settings to very dense. The patch for FS98 is also highly recommended. The creators fully integrated their scenery with the FS98 default scenery, a feature I've never seen before with scenery addons. This means that if you want to go to one of the airports directly after installing and activating the Cancun scenery you will not find it in the section 'Scenery from 6.0 and before'. Instead you'll find the airports under 'Search places'. Just go to the Carribean section under global areas and there you'll discover the presence of Mexico.
Because they integrated the scenery with the default FS98 scenery it
is also possible to view airport statistics in the 'Airport
facility directory'. This is a very welcome, because the scenery
itself doesn't contain any documentation on the available airports.
The overall picture is very satisfactory. The Carribbean region is one of my favorites and thanks to this scenery it is possible to do some extra hopping in the area. I am convinced though that whoever downloads this scenery will do a lot more flying there than anywhere else in the Carribbean. In Cancun you get more detail, better airports, more static aircraft and for a couple of minutes extra download time very nice dynamic scenery. It's scenery like this that makes me wonder if Microsoft itself can't do better.
Bert Zengerink
Download Cancun
ajzengerink@castel.nl