Lago's Italy 2000

By Andrew Herd (17 January 2001)

ago should be well known to FlightSim.Com readers and they produced a string of excellent products for FS98, including an Italian scenery which included 300,000 km2 of detailed scenery, 140 monuments, 130 airports, and every navaid in the country. Something about it must have caught my imagination, because it was one of the first commercial sceneries I bought for flight simulator, and I was sad to lose it when I updated to FS2000 - but now it is back, and it is a worthwhile upgrade.

The minimum system requirements for Italy 2000 are a Pentium II 350, 32 Mb of RAM, 60 Mb of hard disk space, FS2000 standard or pro, and the latest FS2000 patch (this is included on the Italy 2000 CD if you don't have it). I did run the package on a 300 MHz Pentium, but it required a deal of patience because the scenery is so complex, and I agree with Lago's recommended system, which is a Pentium III 450 with 64 Mb of RAM and at least a 16 Mb 3D video card. The manual devotes a good deal of space to improving FS2000 performance with this scenery installed and I would recommend reading this very soon after installation.

The first thing to say about Italy 2000 is that it is not just an upgrade of the older version; it is a complete rewrite. Italy 98 included huge tracts of countryside, but Lago have taken the decision to leave this out in the new version and the scenery is confined to the airports, the surrounding areas in some cases, and the navaids. On the whole I think this was the right decision - while some favorites have disappeared, the airports show much greater detail and in any case, custom landscapes conflict with the add-on mesh sceneries that have become so widely available. A count tells me that we are missing some airports in the new version: apparently Lago has left out fields which are either closed permanently or only open for a few months of the year.

One of the strongest features of Italy 2000 is its built-in active scenery and if you watch another aircraft at an airport for long enough, sooner or later it will start to move. Given Lago's experience in this area (as publisher of FSTraffic), this probably isn't surprising, but if you have never used a product like this, you are in for a surprise, because all the airports bustle with life. As far as I can tell, the active scenery uses the correct preferential runways, and you will see aircraft flying departure and approach procedures and even light planes doing circuits and bumps. This extends into upper airspace and the airspace above some of the major airports is sometimes full of planes, which can be distracting if you are used to flying in empty skies.

It takes some time for the active scenery to get up to speed, and if, like me, you like to make quick departures, there may not be enough time for planes to start arriving, as incoming flights have to fly the full arrival procedures from the IAF, which can take ten minutes or more at the larger airports. Planes which are on the ground start to move much faster and thanks to the inbuilt intelligence of the software they won't run each other, or you, down. However, if you dawdle on the taxiways at busier aiports like Milano, traffic which is following can pile up and you will discover a queue of jets patiently waiting behind you - so be prepared to get a move on!

The best way to get to see the airports is to go to the FS2000 flights menu and choose a startup situation. Lago have included one for every airport in the pack and given the fact that many of the fields are named after almost anything but the city they serve, this is the best way I can think of to get to know the package. Taking a quick tour like this shows off the variety of scenery in the package and reveals that the amount of 'stock' buildings has been kept to a reasonable minimum. Many of the airfields are in exceptionally scenic locations and several of the smaller, higher fields have challenging approaches, so there is plenty to keep you occupied. The situations include their own weather settings, some of which are relatively challenging and they all use default FS2000 aircraft, though you are free to change planes of course. The fact that all the situations start you looking at the aircraft in spot plane view made me think how good it would be to see localised versions of FS2000 aircraft in with a package like this, as it would add hugely to the fun to fly around in an Italian registered 182, but I guess we should be content with what we have.

Now for the problems, such as they are. The first thing you should do when you install Italy 2000 is log on to the Lago web site and download the patch, which fixes a few start-up situation problems. Next, whatever you do, do not try and fly this scenery with the FS2000 season set to winter, as it causes absolute chaos - to be fair, Lago cautions against doing this in the manual, and it is true that southern Italy rarely sees any snow. Lago also issues a caution about running Italy 2000 with third party mesh scenery but the experiments I carried out showed that it ran fairly comfortably with Eddie Denney's RealScene FS mesh (see screen shot left), so I suspect that it will also run with other meshes too, although you can expect the odd glitch. One of the problems with doing this review was that every time I identified a bug, Mathijs Kok at Lago fixed it, so I don't really have anything to report! Support is available from the Lago support newsgroup.

Overall, I liked Italy 2000 very much. The scenery has its heart in the right place, it feels Italian and it is great fun. Go fly it.