FlyTampa's San Francisco Scenery
By Salina Chan (6 December 2004)
ith the city of San
Francisco being one of my favorite places, and me always being on the
lookout for a good scenery, I came across the new Fly-Tampa package
and I told myself that I’ve got to have it. Ordering and
downloading was easy, all major credit cards are accepted and the
price seemed okay as well so the order was placed. The installer
itself is less than 19 MB and after installation it took up around 60
MB on the hard disk. So far, so good. As I noticed right after
starting up FS2004 was that SFO appeared still very default to me
– the installer does not change the scenery.cfg file so I had to
do that myself, which is by the way also mentioned in the
documentation, but more about that in a minute. After another few
moments I was finally at the new airport.
The Airport
My first impression was that the airport really feels real. I spent the first few minutes in slew mode racing across different parts of the tarmac to see all the things I was interested in before increasing my altitude to have a look at the whole thing.
The first minor glitch was noticed right after I decided to start up
again, this time not on the default runway but parked at a gate. I
selected one of the heavy gates at the International Terminal, A6 in
my case and a Project Open Sky 747-412. The plane is not parked quite
correctly there. The nose wheels are about a meter or two
ahead of the stop line. The same happened at a number of other gates
too, but it seems to be a problem associated with the POSKY planes
since the default 747s fit all the gates nicely. Since I would assume
that only a minority of pilots out there will be using the default
planes I thought I should mention it. Since I don’t use any
MelJets at the moment and the PMDG 747 is still to be published I
don’t know how they would fit, but let us move on.
The surroundings of the gates are covered with nice eye candy such as
baggage carts, catering trucks (LSG Sky Chefs and Gate Gourmet),
airport personnel and all the stuff you will find on the tarmac. All
the gates are numbered and on the dedicated gates, such as Terminal 1
or 3 you will find the airline logos on the jetways and on some of
the service vehicles. A really nice touch. Most of the gates
have automatic docking systems and the others have a little guy there
helping you to park the plane. Terminal 2 which is under renovation
in the real world is also closed for traffic in the add on,
increasing realism further.
I have mentioned the dedicated gates before, let me go into a little
more detail about them. The team from Fly-Tampa has done a good job
in assigning the gates like they are in real life, although given all
the AI traffic I have installed, I had to modify the gates
assignments a little because I needed more gate space for my home
carrier SIA and I did not like that some planes were parked on the
apron, but nevertheless, they did a good job in providing a decent
AFCAD file.
Getting lost at the airport won't happen easily. Not only are the gates correctly numbered but there are plenty of taxiway signs too so you don’t have to turn on progressive taxi to find your way to the runway. Additionally, the documentation provides you with an airport diagram which lists the taxiways as they are named in the real world.
Now it is time to “turn off the light” and see how the whole thing is going to look during the hours of darkness. The terminal and apron is illuminated by floodlights and the runways and taxiways are also clear to see at night.
Let’s see what else there is to say about the airport, yes, the
people mover is there running around the terminal (although more
frequent than in real life) and the landside of the terminal features
the maze of access roads, road signs and even a few cabs and cars in
front of the terminal.
The Environment
The airport fits nicely into the surrounding FS2004 default scenery
and the producers even thought of the users of the Megascenery
because they have enclosed textures to make the two compatible. Since
I don’t own the Bay Area Megascenery (yet) I cannot tell you how
good it will look but judging from the screen shot in the
documentation I’d say they did the same good job there.
The Documentation
A small Acrobat documentation comes with the package. Its eight pages (including cover) feature the airport diagram, a list of the airlines and concourses, frequencies and runway data, some tweaking info, web links and a FAQ as well as a brief overview of the real airport and a page on the Megascenery.
Problems
As I mentioned before, the gate alignments might be a little inconvenient to some but that isn’t too bad. Something which really looks odd is the grass texture around the taxiways and runways. It does not change with the weather so if you are planning to fly at KSFO during winter wonderland weather conditions, expect to
see some green grass around the airport. Also the docking
system is usually not visible from the cockpit view since the panel
is in the way – unless you zoom out that is. Another item I
mentioned before were the adjustments I had to make regarding certain
airlines in the AFCAD file but those are only an issue when you have
a lot of AI traffic. One thing more to the point might be the
textures of some of the terminals. From close up they look a little
unsharp.
Performance
Even with my not so much top of the line system (Intel Pentium IV, 2.4 GHz, 1GB RAM, GeForce 4 Ti4200 AGP8x 64 MB) and plenty of ProjectAI air traffic I am getting a decent frame rate.
Worth It?
For a price of $21.50 US San Francisco is a little cheaper than the airports from Simflyers (http://www.simflyers.net/) but in my opinion given its quality and realism absolutely worth it. If you are not sure about their quality, Fly-tampa offers a free demo for OMDB (Dubai International) where you can see the quality of their work for yourself.
Salina Chan
salinachan2000@yahoo.com
