Lago Honolulu

By Andrew Herd (31 October 2002)

ago have been building a reputation for high quality, small field sceneries recently, but you don't need that long a memory to remember their Amsterdam Schiphol 2000 product. Schiphol was - is - a great, sprawling shaggy dog of scenery, with runways everywhere and enough active scenery to make the average processor's eyes cross; I could just about run it on my machine as long as I did a fresh boot, killed all existing tasks, turned the lights out and used a polygon-free plane. But despite being a challenge to run, it was worth every cent and having seen what Lago have done with Honolulu, I would be interested to see a Schiphol makeover in Gmax.

Yep, the G-word again. Not only can Gmax be used to build planes, you can use it to build airports, and the good news is that because Gmax objects bypass the FS2002 internal display module and talk direct to DirectX, Gmax airports are faster than similar sceneries designed with traditional tools. Lago are selling Honolulu as the first commercial scenery designed entirely in Gmax, and whatever the truth of the claim, it is certainly the most impressive Gmax scenery I have seen to date.

But there is more to Honolulu than the use of a flashy new design tool. Apart from some neat programming tricks, the scenery is notable for having its own FS2002 compatible AI traffic and four non-flyable aircraft which run scheduled flights to and from the airport. The AI traffic is installed automatically, making this the first package I have seen that gives non-technical users the opportunity to see what real-world airline schedules look like at an FS airport. Previously, getting anything like this setup involved getting to grips with Lee Swordy's outstanding TrafficTools program (TTOOLS12.ZIP) editing cfg files and casting around for suitable candidates for AI planes; do-able, but not everyone's idea of how to have a good time.

Honolulu is a 12 Mb download from the Lago web site and installs with the publisher's custom routine, which it has to be said is a cut above most of their competitors' offerings. In addition to the airport, you get an 8 page pdf manual and a set of pdf approach charts.

Minimum spec is given as:

• Pentium III 750 MHz
• 128 Mb RAM
• 25 Mb of free available space on the hard disk
• Sound card
• Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 (Standard or Professional edition)
• Windows 97, Windows 98 (SE), Windows ME, Windows 2000 Workstation Windows XP
  
• Adobe Acrobat® Reader 5 to read and print the manual

This really is a minimum and fast though the scenery may be, it is also big, which means it will stress out lower specced PCs pretty quick. I ran it on a 1.7 Ghz PIV with 512 Mb of RAM and a 32 Mb GeForce 3 with the frame rate locked to 24. Even then, on approach I was getting frame rates nudging into single figures, though to be fair, there was never any significant loss of fluidity - but we got close. I had some problems getting all the textures to display using the Detonator 4 drivers, but solved this by running FS2002 in full screen mode; if you have similar problems I would recommend doing this, because it let me turn the AI traffic right up, and those planes are half the fun of using this version of Honolulu. I tried various planes with the airport and had no problems using POSKY 767s and CRJs, both of which impose significant demands on FS2002 in their own right.

The first thing to say about Honolulu is that it is impressive. Not only is there a lot of it, but it is stuffed full of detail, as the screen shots show, and there are all sorts of surprises, not least the fact that the cars in the parks are individually modelled, rather than being shown as colored blobs on a flat texture. For some reason, nothing annoys my sensibilities more than colored blobs in car parks, but until now, I accepted them on the basis that doing any more than that was to guarantee 0.25 fps. Purchase Honolulu and you can skim over acres of gleaming automobiles, providing the FAA don't get your registration, of course.

Taking a look around airside, the vast majority (it may be all, I didn't count 'em) of the gates are there, though none are animated and I didn't encounter any sight boards either. Lago's research tells them that users do not want such things, though my email tells me different - however, I have long held the view that there have to be some limits to FS, and I am open to persuasion on the subject of moving airstairs. Personally, taxiing has never been my thing, partly because I get lost so easily and partly because ground handling is the worst feature of FS.

On the credit side, there are baggage trains and comfort trucks and containers and who knows what else littered around the gates and the taxiways have a full complement of signs, so even I could find my way to the runways. One other thing that really did draw my attention was the way that all the lines have perfect joins, which is a feature of Umberto Colapicchioni sceneries, but of very few others. I am constantly amazed to find that in otherwise beautifully designed airports, taxi lines appear to have been slapped down wherever they first happened to hit, without any subsequent effort being made to line them up properly. A small point, maybe, but it is one of many characteristics of this scenery that differentiates it from the also-rans.

What else? Well, the palm trees wave in the breeze. Actually, they wave whether there is a breeze or not, but it is easy to convince yourself that while it might not be windy where you are, it is windy where the trees are. First time I saw it, I nearly adjusted the horizontal hold, but it is a neat effect once you realise what is going on. The AI traffic is very convincing, although you do have to wait a while for it to get going; if you like to load the plane on the threshold, open the taps and blast into the sky, you won't be seeing many other planes. But if you set up at a gate and then go and make a cup of coffee, by the time you sit down again, you will have to fight for a place in line. The result is that this is one of the few airports where using ATC is actually fun in FS2002 and I hope we see more releases with realistic AI tracks and planes, because the concept is good. Besides, if I see another Landmark 777, it will be far too soon.

The other thing I ought to mention is that you get mesh - very good mesh, which probably isn't that surprising, given the rate at which Lago are releasing mesh enhancements for FS. As far as I know, this is the first mesh they have released outside Europe, other than the mini-meshes included with their Georender products.

In the final analysis, Lago's Honolulu represents a good compromise between visual realism and fluid flight simulation. Although the scenery is complex, it isn't ridiculously so, and you will look in vain for such things as detailed control tower or terminal interiors. Such enhancements have appeared in sceneries and are impressive on first glance, but in the final analysis, the only thing they do is kill frames and most users will look at them once or not at all. Having settled on their philosophy, Lago has gone a step further than most developers would have dared and some of the more remote areas of the scenery have only the most basic structures and use generic textures. According to Mathijs Kok at Lago, the reason is that few of their beta testers ever went to these places and the goal of making the scenery usable on average PCs trumped the temptation to go mad and put in every single little detail. This means that Honolulu treads a different path to the small field sceneries which are fast becoming a Lago trademark - you won't find anyone having a barbecue on Waikiki beach, and Hickam AFB is restrained to the point where it is hardly more sophisticated than a default FS2002 airport. Although there are a couple of cases where I think Lago could have gone the extra mile and put in a little more pizazz; the hangars alongside 04R being a case in point, on the whole I think it works very well. Neat product.

Visit Lago at:
www.lagoonline.com