Portugal 2000 For FS2000

By Andrew Herd (4 June 2001)

ed up with dull grey terminals and huge block-like hangars? Keep getting lost in KLAX? Tired of waiting for a take-off slot at London Heathrow? Well, come to Portugal, where the living is easy and the sun always shines. I kid you not, this has to be the most colorful package I have ever seen for Flight Simulator.

PTSIM's Portugal 2000 adds an extra 44 detailed airports to FS2000, complete with accurately placed runways, taxiways, ramps, stands and night-lighting effects. Custom textures and additional landscape features have been included near some locations to allow VFR flying and the package also adds detailed coastline with beaches, sea cliffs and Portugal's main ports.

Since Portugal has one of Europe's more scenic coastlines, there is no doubt that many flightsimmers will be considering this package and I spent several days flying around the scenery in order to review it. I was not disappointed - I can't think of any other scenery which has given me the urge to turn my cap back to front, drop to 500 feet and buzz the beaches below. Whether you are a general aviation enthusiast, or a big iron pilot, there is something in this package for everyone.

The first thing to say is that this is a very appealing add-on, and although it is not quite in the same league as Italy 2000 from the late lamented Lago (will someone please buy up the rights to that package?) or the Airport 2000 series from Wilco, it is definitely a contender. Every airport has custom buildings as the packaging promises, accompanied by fences, trees and all the minor details we have come to expect. At some airfields the scenery is relatively sparse, which reflects the fact that many of the airports in Portugal are compact affairs in real life, but to compensate for this you get some spectacular effects on which the developers have obviously lavished a great deal of care and attention, such as cliffs and harbors and endless little Easter Eggs.

Portugal 2000 comes on a single CD with a four language setup which requires entry of a password before installation can procede. I had no problems with this and the package installed perfectly, modifying scenery.cfg automatically and activating the scenery. The full installation is only 109 mb, which means that it should install on the smallest hard disk and there should be no problems with frame rates - I found that the scenery would run quite happily on a 300 MHz Pentium without serious problems.

Some dynamic scenery is provided, although this is largely confined to the main airports. The team have clearly gone to great pains to grade the level of detail according to the scenery density settings in FS2000, which will be popular with anyone who has an older PC.

I should point out that the scenery appears at the lowest level of detail if you have FSTraffic loaded and use the standard settings - so turn FSTraffic off if you have a faster machine. On the highest quality settings, Lisbon, Oporto and Faro all have detailed airport signs and markings, while the smaller airports are delightful exercises in miniature. Every airfield has custom tiles for the runways and surrounding taxiways and they all have European runway markings and night lighting effects. For VFR flying it is hard to beat.

There are a few glitches in the package, where textures haven't been placed quite as precisely as they should, notably at Lagos, but the only real complaint I have about this scenery is that the general quality of the textures sometimes leaves a bit to be desired. This is a matter of taste, I think, because the textures are hand edited using the 16 bit alpha bitmap format introduced with FS2000.

A glance at the screen shot right will show you exactly what I mean. The airfield concerned is Tires, which is close to Lisbon. The airport scenery is excellent, but the textures on the control tower aren't quite up to scratch. However, since enormous amounts of off-airport scenery, including bridges, villages and even sailboats and ships are provided, this is only a minor criticism and the airport custom tiles blend so seamlessly into the default scenery that one can hardly complain.

I really did like Portugal 2000. There definitely is something about the scenery which pleases the eye, and while it would benefit from a minor bit of tidying up, I can thoroughly recommend it. There are surprises around every corner - at the price it is a bargain.