Madrid Barajas 2004 by Sim-Wings

By John Young (6 April 2004)

have long been a satisfied user of sceneries from Sim-Wings, having regularly flown in their offerings for the Balearic Islands, Canary Islands, Malaga, Barcelona, Alicante, Valencia, Pamplona and Santander. All have given me happy flights heading out of the UK for the virtual sun. I was even more delighted with the company's penultimate offering of Gibraltar, not because it is a British airport but because it is so well done and has some fascinating features. From the screenshots, the very latest offering of Madrid Barajas promised to be just as exciting, even when you discover that about 60% of the ground layout is a building site. You can see the extent of the development from the overhead shot below.

Like Martin Brunken's (Fly Miami) excellent scenery of Miami International airport, a key feature of Madrid Barajas is the rendition of the building work being carried out on the new terminal extension there. It's brilliantly done in Martin's case and he has also promised an update to the scenery when the real-world expansion is complete - at least for this particular phase of it. The building work at Madrid however, is much much larger but is also very well done thanks to some very good photo-realistic ground textures and the design skills of the author, Manfred Spatz. You can see the extent and quality of the texturing of the excavations below with the two new runways in the foreground and the present terminal way back in the distance.

The ground textures are in fact 32 256 x 256 pixel tiles, each derived from a segment of a high-resolution aerial photograph of the site. Multiply this by 5 for a complete set of seasonal textures and night lighting and you can begin to understand the reason for the 27 MByte download. I am sure the product reflects the state of the airport expansion at the time the scenery was designed, but I am equally sure that some users will want updates to keep pace with the operational improvements as they come on stream. More about that later.

What The Package Offers

The package offers just what you would expect from an established developer that knows how to produce customer-satisfying products. To quote from the Sim-Wings web site about the new Madrid Barajas:

The 5th largest airport in Europe and the most important one in Spain is now ready for you to enjoy! Included are the actual Terminals 1-3, surrounding buildings and full Cargo area. Also included are the current building projects at Barajas, that is Terminal 4, its satellites and the new Runway. The scenery was made after the original plans, photographs and is built upon a photorealistic ground texture. Some important buildings of the city of Madrid are also included. The included PDF manual comes in 4 languages, English, French, Spanish and German.

All Terminals and buildings in the highest possible detail textures.
Iberia's maintenance base 'La Munoza'
New Terminal construction site
over 200 taxi and runway signs
Original reflector and taxiway lighting
All parking positions with full signage
40 docking systems and many marshals
Wig Wag and traffic lights at runway crossings
Night textures and night lighting
Photorealistic ground textures including village of Barajas
Specific textures for all 4 seasons
Dynamic Scenery
Static scenery with aircraft, vehicles, personal and gangways (easily removable for use with MyTraffic and other add-on programs)
Autogen and Landclass scenery
Roads around Madrid area
AI Traffic
High Buildings of Madrid can be seen from the distance.

This is an impressive package and is well up to the usual Sim-Wings standard. An AFCAD2.bgl file is also included for AI traffic to park and follow in FS2004, though the one I tested was short of a few gate positions and was not coded for representative airlines. I found an alternative file (AF2_LEMD.ZIP) by Jose Angel Suarez that is coded and provides more parking. Note that this author has omitted a "hold short" node before the entry to runway 18R that causes the traffic to halt and back up on the runway with nothing getting airborne. If you have AFCAD2 installed, it's a simple matter to change the "normal" node there to a "hold short" one and free up the traffic. In fact, as Manfred told me, the runway is not actually used for departures in that direction at all which is understandable given the proximity of the current terminal to the far end. If you want to use Jose's file instead of the one supplied, you might want to open the AFCAD2 file and close the runway likewise instead of changing the offending node.

Obtaining And Installing The Package

I downloaded the Madrid package from the Simmarket.com web site after a credit card payment of €19.90 (about Ł14 or $24). The scenery is also available there on CD-ROM for an extra €15.00. It can also be downloaded from Sim-Wings's partner, Aerosoft, who provide boxed versions of Sim-Wings products to retail stores, at their web site. It's a fraction cheaper there at €19.36. The unzipped file contains two .exe files, one for FS2002 and the other for FS2004. As with all the other sceneries purchased from Sim-Wings, the automatic installer worked fine for me with the FS2004 scenery being placed in the FS9\Addon\Scenery folder. Note that a second folder is also installed that contains a new Landclass file (the file that determines which underlying ground textures and autogen scenery is drawn) for the area. Uninstalling worked fine for me too.

A useful manual is provided that also contains a history of the airport, but you will need to hunt around your hard drive to find it. It is actually installed in Program files\Aerosoft\Madrid-Barajas 2004 and can also be accessed from the Start menu. No charts are provided but a reference is given to the ais.AENA.es web site, where a number can easily be found in .pdf format.

The Scenery Highlights

The screen shot below is of the current terminal area (FS2004) with a good helping of AI aircraft positioned with the Jose Angel Suarez AFCAD2 file and an assortment of predominantly Project AI Iberia aircraft and flight plans.

The textures on the 3-D structures are often photo-realistic and there are some very interesting details as you roam around the airport and get off the beaten track. A friend of mine, who has been to the airport, tells me that the existing terminal area is modelled on an Art Deco theme and that appears quite evident from the Sim-Wings interpretation. He also related to me a personal experience of enduring one of the longest taxi-ing rides he has ever experienced. I know what he means, having had enough time to make lunch while waiting for aircraft to taxi out to runway 18R when I was evaluating the AI traffic performance. And that was with the simulator running at 4 X speed!

Scenery gates are plentiful but I did find that with the detailed AFCAD2 file installed, ATC "Ground" used around 20 instructions to direct me to one of them. Listening to the patter once was amusing enough, but having to read it all back again was just a little tedious. Thank goodness for progressive taxi!

Some nice touches in the scenery include physical approach lights, 3-D taxi lights, apron marshallers and of course an abundance of ground equipment. Night lighting is as good with subtle ground transitions and an overall calm and relaxing feeling. It was very good to see that the irritating bug seen in some sceneries of not drawing yellow and red lines at night correctly has been overcome in this case.

I am not sure after looking at two map view screen shots that I took of the area, that the new Landclass file makes a great deal of difference to the surrounding area. I was however pleased to see the additional high-rise buildings added to the Madrid skyline. You can see an example of the architecture below.

Minimum PC Specification And Frame Rate Performance

The minimum PC specification supplied by Sim-Wings is as follows:

Pentium 1.8 GHz
3D Graphic board with min. 64MB Ram
256 MB Ram
100 MB hard disk space

The review you are reading is the second version, having supplied the first to Manfred out of courtesy and to enable him to comment on my thoughts. I am glad I did this, which is not always the case, because he has been magnificent in taking on board some of the very few down sides to the scenery that I could find. Not surprisingly, a scenery of this complexity will create frame-rate performance problems for some users of less powerful PCs than the one I have. Manfred took this on board and has spent some time experimenting and changing his texture package. The result delivered an extra 3 frames per second when I tested the second time. This is what I call customer-focused service. The new textures are incorporated into the primary download from here on.

Measuring frame rate performance in a consistent and meaningful way is always difficult, but here are my results for a 2.8 GHz processor, 512 Mbytes RAM and 128 Mbyte Nvidia TI 4800 graphics card with latest Nvidia driver. In both sets of results, my anti-virus software was left running in the background, as was my drive reversion software. The results were obtained with no AI traffic or the static aircraft installed and no clouds. Screen resolution was however set to maximum in all tests. For my mount, I choose the default Boeing 737 with standard panel and the frame rate target was set to "unlimited":

	APPROACH	TAXI (Pointing at densest scenery)
Default Settings	21-23 fps	14-16 fps
Maximum Slider Settings	13-14 fps	7-9 fps

The results give quite a bit of scope to add AI traffic into the contest and even a few clouds, not that you would probably want too many in this sunny part of the world.

Faults

Apart from one tiny error with one building that Manfred is kicking himself for because he tinkered with the structure scale after the Beta testing, there are no faults or performance problems that I could find. That particular little problem has of course been corrected.

A Dilemma

To return to the abundance of sand. I never like to install a scenery and go straight there. I would much rather set it up and fly to it and experience the surprise of a new destination. Surprise was the operative word as ATC directed me to runway 18L and I passed over the building site with its very long runway also heading in the same direction to the one I was inbound to. I thought I was over a Martian landscape before wondering whether I was getting a bleed through of another scenery, perhaps the default, before I touched down safely. After I landed I began to explore and all became clear.

It's not a problem once you know about the extent of the expansion and it is very well done of course. My initial concern was one of "shelf life". You can see from the next screen shot that the new terminal buildings - there is another one on the other side of the runway - look advanced in their construction, although there are no jetways, aprons or connecting taxiways at present. Manfred tells me that the new terminals will be operational later this year, although few airlines apparently want to use them because of difficulty of access for the public.

I should have anticipated the answer to my next question about Manfred's intentions for updating the scenery in line with the new facilities coming on stream. What is different about Manfred's Madrid Barajas compared to most others, is the use of a high-resolution ground photograph to make the textures. This source photograph is expensive and can only be used if sales are likely to recover the cost. Buying a second version in order to update the scenery some time later will obviously depend on revenue from previous sales and the market for the updated version that, understandably, cannot be supplied for free. Apart from the cost issue, the practical problem still remains of the availability of an updated photograph. If the commercial company that provided the first one is not planning a second pass over the airport area, then of course, there is no new source for the textures.

That does not preclude Manfred from doing some re-work of the structures and perhaps the concrete in the interim, but he has indicated to me that in all probability, he will wait until FS2006 before contemplating a second version that incorporates the new facilities.

Conclusion

Leave aside the potential issue of the building work and shelf life of the scenery and the user should be very pleased with this offering. It is certainly up to the usual Sim-Wings standard with some excellent features. The ground texturing is very well done and to have seasonal textures derived from a single photograph is really quite novel.

My hat's off to Manfred and the team at Sim-Wings and I am grateful for the information and response that he has given me.

This is an impressive scenery of this important airport that, hopefully, will be updated in line with real-world developments.

John Young
john.young@btinternet.com

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