Gary Summons' London Heathrow

By Andrew Herd (22 February 2001)

ondon Heathrow is the busiest international airport in the world, with in excess of a thousand aircraft movements a day. Shoe-horning all these planes onto two runways has resulted in one of the most sophisticated air traffic control systems anywhere.

It isn't surprising that the airport has been popular with developers: the default FS2000 scenery has a "detailed" scenery and Wilco featured it in Airport 2000 Volume 2. A very good simulation comes with Barry Perfect's GB Airports, and now Gary Summons has added Heathrow to his ever-extending UK2000 Scenery.

Given the amount of attention that the airport has received over the years, it is quite clear that a new version has to offer something extra if it is going to sell and I think it is fair to say that Gary's scenery sets new standards for airport design. As far as I can tell, every significant building in the complex is there, and the custom textures mean that the scenery looks as close to the original as is possible in Flight Simulator. Given the sheer size of the airport, it could take weeks for the average simmer to see everything, so the package offers good value for money.

The price to pay for all this realism lies in the minimum specification: a P400 with a fast 3D card with the scenery complexity set at ‘dense’ and a P500 with scenery complexity set at ‘very dense’. And that is the absolute minimum you will get away with: a P700 and 32MB AGP graphics card is recommended and I can vouch for that. With all the sliders maxed out and running FSUIPC, my 733 delivers just enough frames to make the airport usable, though putting the Phoenix 747 on 9R took the frame rate down to about 5 fps, and that was with clear skies.

The scenery can be purchased on-line or delivered on CD by post, and newcomers will be delighted to hear that there is an install routine that takes all the heartache out of getting the airport up and running. The registration code is entered during the install process, which means that you can start flying the moment Flight Simulator 2000 boots. Except that, if you are anything like me, you probably won't start flying, you will want to take a wander around.

Some day I must sit down and design an open tourer for FS2000 so that I can drive around airports without having to use the slew command the whole time. A ground vehicle would be a huge improvement on doing the rounds in the default 737, given my penchant for sticking the wingtip through buildings and driving over lamp standards. If you don't do a tour of this scenery you will miss half the reason for buying it, because it includes every single stand and air gate, including the Concorde stand V14 at Terminal 4. In addition, it has British runway markings and realistic taxiway and stand markings. If you want to get an idea of just how different this new package is from the default scenery, take a look at the screen shots. In each of the "paired" shots, the default scenery is at the top.

The scenery comes with a good range of static aircraft, as well as a set of FSTrafffic tracks, which create a busy atmosphere, although the compromise Gary has made between frame rates and detail means that many stands are empty. This will be fixed in a special optional free upgrade which will include over 120 static planes, but Gary warns that this is unlikely to run on anything less than an 800 MHz Pentium.

Even if you have a lesser machine, the standard scenery has a great deal to offer. Many of the gates are "active", with functional azimuth bars on the docking boards as well as distance alerts. The animation is very good indeed, with the gantry moving out to dock with the aircraft within 30 seconds of the plane stopping. In the "Europier" terminal, passengers actually gather prior to the departure time, and the lounge empties two minutes before the departure board says the plane is due to leave. I can't recall ever seeing anything quite like this in a scenery before - fortunately Gary has set the departure counter to around ten minutes, or it would be a long wait to see your fares appear.

Leaving the terminals aside, the rest of the airport is extremely detailed. There are numerous aircraft guidance boards and detailed holding points with proper timed holds on the taxiways, and the holding lights have been programmed so they can change from green to red, which adds a new dimension to taxiing.

Gary has gone to town on the night lighting effects, which show off the transparent terminal glass to full advantage and highlight the attention he has paid to "internal" details in the terminals. There are numerous dynamic objects including a rotating radar, and perimeter fencing and trees are included.

Problems? Well, there is an inevitable hit on frame rates, but Gary makes no secret of this in the publicity on his web site and I guess only an incurable optimist would expect to buy a scenery this complex and hope to run it on a 300 MHz machine. However, the scenery does give better frame rates than the Airport 2000 Heathrow, which goes to show how much programming techniques have come on since the latter scenery was released. The static aircraft are not quite as good as I would like, with spindly undercarraiges and blurry textures when you get close to, but again, the more detailed statics are, the worse the performance hit, so this is an acceptable compromise. Hopefully the forthcoming 120 plane upgrade will address this problem - but what would be even better would be a dynamic aircraft set along the lines of the planes in Lago's Italy 2000 package, where all the aircraft can move and will depart if you watch an airfield for long enough. Quite what the impact this would have on a scenery as sophisticated as this version of Heathrow I have no idea, but if Gary ever gets around to doing it, this simmer would simply buy another machine to run it. A masterpiece.

London Heathrow is for FS2000 only. Price $15.00/£8.00 on-line; $18.00/£12.00 CD version.