Lago - Reggio Calabria, Turin and Bologna for FS2002
Venice for FS2002 and FS2004

By Andrew Herd (15 August 2003)

nce upon a time, in a simulation long ago, there was a thing called 'Italy 98' from a company called Lago. It says something about the state of Flight Simulator at the time that the big excitement about the package was that it included 300,000 km2 of detailed scenery, 140 monuments, 130 airports, and every navaid in the country. Installing it made a huge difference to FS98, which wasn't out to win any awards for realism where Europe was concerned. Lago's package was an ambitious effort to provide scenery for every airport in the country and if some of them were better than others it didn't detract from the fact that the box provided great value for money. In due course Italy 2000 came out, which concentrated on the airports and added AI traffic - and it too was hugely popular.

Lago went through a tough time for a while and things went very quiet on the release front before they were reborn in spectacular fashion and went gone on to indulge in a publishing schedule that is still unmatched for its scope; but the widely expected Italy 2002 never appeared. Instead, Lago changed tack and began to release a series of detailed individual Italian Gmax sceneries for FS2002. In this review, we'll give you an idea of what is on offer, bearing in mind that Lago have stated that they will provide upgrades for the packages to make them work with FS2004.

The sceneries are available as downloads from Lago's website - once you have got the files all you have to do is purchase a key which has to be entered during the install process. Calabria, Turin and Bologna are all priced at €14.99/$17.14, but the file sizes vary from a puny 13 Mb for Reggio Calabria to a bandwidth hugging 75 Mb for Turin. Each scenery has its own automatic installation routine and they are eminently suitable for beginners; as long as you can find the downloaded file and double click it, you will be able to set them up in FS2002.

The minimum spec for Calabria, Turin and Bologna is:

• Pentium II 500 -750 MHz
• 64 - 256 Mb RAM
• 30 - 150 Mb hard disk space
• Sound card
• Windows 98 or better
• Acrobat reader

Venice requires a 1.4 GHz Pentium and costs €24.99, though a reduced price initial offer may still be available when you read this.

The spread in figures reflects the different requirements of the various sceneries, with Reggio Calabria being the simplest. Lago don't recommend running either Bologna or Turin using less than 256 Mb of PC RAM and they suggest that a 3D video card with 32 Mb of RAM is needed to make the best of the products. Given that a 750 MHz PC is just about the bottom line for an average user running a default FS2002 setup without using any addon scenery, Lago's specs are perhaps a little optimistic. I don't doubt that you can run the packages on the systems they suggest, but without taking a scorched earth approach to the system tray, you will have to pull all the sliders to the left and I don't think you would get good frame rates if you loaded any weather or a plane with a complex panel. Turin, in particular, is an exceptionally detailed airport and given that there are more than 50,000 objects in it, I don't see it being a winner on the Pentium II 500 that Lago's pdf suggests can be used to run it. It does however, run consistently at between 15 and 18 fps on a 1.7 GHz Pentium, with all the sliders at the half-way point, broken cumulus at 6000 feet and 50% AI traffic, which is pretty good, considering - but those rates aren't maintained on low level flights over the city.

Minimum specifications are traditional, but developers would lose few sales and provide potential purchasers with valuable information if instead of a minimum they gave a specification for a machine which could consistently achieve a target frame rate of 18 frames per second with all the sliders at the mid-range settings. 18 fps is near the minimum that most users find acceptable and a setup which allows prolonged dips below 10 fps is definitely unworkable. Lago 's specs are quite likely to be acceptable if you have the skills to create a stripped down boot setup for your PC, but if you have any other programs running besides Flight Simulator, I think you would find the minimum specs a little borderline.

Looking at each package in detail, Reggio Calabria is a regional airport that looks across the Strait of Messina to Sicily and it has one of the more interesting approaches in Europe, partly because of local weather conditions (a good one to try in FS2004 when Lago gets the package customised for the new sim) and the orientation of the runways. The LOC DME approach to runway 33 is right up there with Funchal, given that when visibility is right down to the minimums you turn short final by following a curved lead in light system - only to discover that the runway is somewhat shorter than you might wish. Under normal circumstances 6000 feet of pavement wouldn't be too much of a problem, but it makes for quite a challenge when you are trying to roll a 737 level, tell the passengers that you hoped they had a good flight and land all at the same time - and I really had some fun with it. In common with the other sceneries, Calabria has semi-photographic textures and includes vast amounts of Autogen, as well as a full set of AI flights and aircraft to make them.

The scenery also includes an effects file that gives you an erupting volcano, which is something we don't see that often in England and there is a situation file to take you straight there if you want to see the action. Other situations place you at various positions on the approach, but I suggest you take a look at the plates in the manual first.

The Bologna package again features a single airport placed within phototextured surroundings and it shows the same attention to design that Calabria does. There are active airstairs, moving airport vehicles, a working docking system, and trees which wave in the breeze.

You get all the usual approach lighting, modelled in all its intricate detail, though if you are close enough to appreciate it, you are too low; reasonably high quality textures on the buildings and objects and full night lighting. One neat feature of this scenery is that if you make for the stand highlighted in the manual, it is possible to call out the support vehicles by selecting an appropriate frequency on Nav 2 - select it again and they will move back to let you depart. Nav 2 can also be used to turn on the pilot controlled lighting (remember that?) which is sophisticated enough to have two stages. The first illuminates the runway alone, the second brings up the taxiways too. There is a single approach plate for the ILS 12.

Turin is more sophisticated and includes two airports: Caselle (LIMF) and Aeritalia (LIMA). Once again, extensive photoreal textures are supplied, with seasonal behavior. You get no less than four helipads, numerous custom buildings in and around the airports, and all the usual stuff, including active airstairs, Nav 2 activated support vehicles and all. The Lingotto helipad is a unique feature, given that it is on the roof of a tallish building with working lifts. It isn't often that you see sceneries which make more than a nod towards helicopter fans, who are increasingly well served with choppers, but usually lack anywhere interesting to set them down, but this one is a real test and I hope Lago include this type of feature in future releases. Looking around the environs of the airport you will find a soccer stadium and on the night of June 24th you can enjoy the fireworks.

Whereas Caselle is a modern international airport, Aeritalia is the truncated remains of a much older field, sporting something that I often see in real life, but which is rarely shown in Flight Simulator - a disused runway. This is properly marked with warning Xs to prevent pilots landing on it and when I flew an approach I found out why; not only is part of the old surface built on, but there is a fence right across it about halfway down. Otherwise, beyond a few buildings, there isn't much to look at. The longer of the two runways is just over a thousand meters, so it is more suitable for GA and business twins than anything else.

I've included a screenshot here primarily to show how much Autogen Turin has, although it also shows the helipad on top of the Fiat factory - and yeah, since you ask, I did take out the glass dome when I tried to land. If it looks small from where you are, that platform is minute from five hundred feet up. The trouble with complex sceneries is that you need an extremely powerful machine to make them look good and a lot of users are going to see much less than this - but fortunately Lago have gone to a great deal of trouble to prioritise the distances at which objects appear. The downside of this is that you are more likely to experience scenery 'pop-ups', where stuff just grows right in front of you, but the benefit is that you won't spend all day waiting for the next frame to draw.

The star of the show is, without a shadow of a doubt, Venice - the city and its airport have featured in FS addons in the past, but never as convincingly as this. The first time I loaded the scenery it comprehensively blew me away and while it isn't absolutely perfect, it qualifies as the best scenery for Flight Simulator I have seen to date. Why? Well, for a start, this is the first time I can ever recall seeing every house in an entire city recreated in the game, and furthermore, it has been done extremely well. In the manual Lago make the point that more than half the development time was spent optimising the scenery for the fastest frame rates and they did a really good job in my opinion.

In fact, one of the really puzzling things about Venice is that it runs as quickly as it does, but when I took the R22 on a trip around the city, I couldn't resist blasting down the Grand Canal at low level so I could buzz the Ponte dei Scalzi. As the houses flashed by on either side - and you really do get to see every house - I suddenly realised that the developers had created the city in blocks and the impression of individual houses is created by clever application of textures to those blocks, cutting the number of poygons needed at a stroke. Not that this really matters, the whole effect is so good that it looks convincing from whichever angle you choose to approach.

Though the city is the main focus of the scenery, you get two airports, Tessera (LIPZ) and San Nicolo. San Nicolo is a GA strip away from the main runways at Tessera, which supports international flights and is equipped with an ILS. Though a nod has been made in the direction of San Nicolo, Tessara is where most of Lago's work has gone and it is well up to the standard of their other Italian sceneries. This is the first Lago addon I have seen which has been designed to install in FS2004 and while the FS2004 version doesn't include AFCAD files (for AI traffic) or Lago's active scenery, it is still extremely convincing. Personally, I can't wait until the gondolas start moving, so that I can chase 'em down the canals in the chopper (-:

I did have some problems with Venice, even after applying the 1.01 patch, the most major being that trying to load the airport sometimes crashed FS2004, the solution being to load a different airport first. Other bugs include the fact that the causeway to the city doesn't line up with the road on the landward end, a silly detail which would be easy to fix, and Lago's smart sound system let me hear airport noises at five thousand feet, but only if I throttled the engine right back.

Inevitably, some readers are going to ask the question, 'How is it that Lago are selling these airports at the same price as they once sold a whole country for?' - I am aware that there has been a lot of static recently about the cost of addons. But the truth is that these things take a great deal of time and money to develop; take the photographic textures, for instance; or the Fiat factory in the shot here, which must have thousands of polygons; or the AI traffic routings; or the active stairs; or Mount Etna. Thousands of man hours will have been involved in developing these sceneries - not to mention the cost of the development tools needed to produce them. These four airports are far more complex than their predecessors in Italy 2000 and I found all of them fun to use - particularly that approach to Reggio Calabria.

Andrew Herd
andrew@flightsim.com

Airports in this series can be dowloaded from Lago Online for between €14.99 and €24.99 each.