Scandinavian Airports 1

By Andrew Herd (22 February 2003)

Scandinavian Airports is only available boxed and comes with an English/German manual and a set of Jeppesen charts - these are from the SimCharts series, according to the legend at the top of each page. The stated minimum hardware requirement is FS2002, a 600 MHz PIII or better, 128MB RAM, and Windows 98/2000/ME/XP. Very few recent packages offer any support for Windows 95 and if you are still using this version of the operating system and plan on buying more FS add-ons, it is time to upgrade.

The installation ran without any problems, no key code being necessary. Although the routine identifies the FS2002 folder automatically, there are some choices to be made, notably whether to install the mesh and the static aircraft. As the manual points out, if you use AI traffic, then there isn't much reason to use the statics, but if you have a marginal system and have AI traffic turned off to maximise your frame rate, then the statics definitely make the airports look busier. At the end of the installation, if you can't see any AI traffic, it may be necessary to run an update utility, which will restore it. The manual doesn't specify the location of the utility, but it can be found in the \util\AI traffic folder on the CD.

I installed the package with the mesh and immediately ran into problems with lowish frame rates. The mesh being the most obvious culprit, deleted it and reinstalled. This produced a certain amount of improvement and I didn't miss the mesh, because for all it does provide much more realistic contours around the airports which have it, it also introduces more than the usual amount of mesh 'funnies' including sloping lakes and unexplained mesas. This is particularly bad near Kiruna (ESNQ), which by chance was the first airport I happened to check out. Mesh simultaneously seems to bring out the worst and best in Flight Simulator - on the one hand you get a more realistic landscape, on the other, you have to cope with lakes that run up hills and airports in deep holes - though you don't get the latter with this mesh.

The whole problem would be greatly eased if 'water' features in Microsoft's default landscape were somehow programmed to revert to ground textures when they found themselves going up a hill; that way, we might have to put up with lakes and rivers that were the wrong shape, but at least they would be believable. What would be great would be to have a simple visual tool that let you pull the things around and bash them into any shape you liked - and if that tool also let you visually edit mesh, I am sure it would have a big sales potential. If it exists, someone, tell me and I will review it.

While I think of it, you might be interested to hear that as far as I know, Flight Simulator belongs to the Flat Earth Society. I would be interested to hear from anyone who has more information on this, but a flat earth is the best reason I can think of for why the elevations of long features are so often out at one end or the other. Loch Ness in Scotland is a particularly good example, if you have the Lago mesh.

Anyway. Scandinavian airports includes Gothenburg-Landvetter, Gothenburg-Saeve, Malmoe-Sturup, Joenkoeping and Kiruna airport (including parts of the city of Kiruna) in Sweden; Bornholm and Aarhus airports in Denmark; and Oslo-Gardermoen Airport in Norway. The fields are widely spread, geographically, from Bornholm on its island location south of Norway, to Kiruna, high up there in the Arctic Circle.

The scenery is super, but tends to be slow in places. Iin the screenshot of Gardermoen above, I was clocking around 7.5 fps using the POSKY CRJ and that was with AI turned off, visibility reduced to 15 miles and dynamic scenery on a low setting. Given that my test machine was a 1.7 Ghz PIV with 512 Mb RAM and a 128 Mb GeForce 4 Ti 200, running on Windows XP and using DirectX 9, the minimum spec given for the package seems a little optimistic. I would recommend a somewhat rather faster system, because I suspect even a 1.0 Ghz Pentium would struggle, if you use anything more sophisticated than the default aircraft.

Even the smaller airports in the package are very demanding on computer hardware and the more I looked into it, the more it seemed that the problem couldn't be completely accounted for by the mesh, or the generous number of animations - for example, the passenger in the gate above the CRJ's nose is running to catch the plane. The trouble seemed to be something to do with the way the scenery is coded and given that Aerosoft's German Airports 4 achieves nearly double the frames for comparable airports, I was fascinated to find out why. My hunch was that there had to be a lot of extra polygons in there somewhere that I just wasn't seeing. Swapping to the default American Pacific 737 brought the frames up to a just adequate 11 on the stands at Gardermoen and a very reasonable 17.5 on the threshold - so it was clear that the trouble lay somewhere in the terminals. Broadly, on my system, the package was usable as long as I stuck to the default planes, but marginal if I used any of the popular commercial add-ons, or taxied too far into the terminal areas.

It was when I began to look closely at the airports that I realised why they were so processor intensive. Click on the close-up of the entrance to Malmo here for a second and check it out. Now I have applied a little compression to the image to keep the size within limits, but the legends on the signs are clearly readable at 1280 x 1024 in FS2002, if you pan down close enough. I would have to rack my brains to recall another set of sceneries which has signs painted in that level of detail and kudos to the developers for the patience they needed to code all that stuff. If you could take a look at the automobile which is just out of shot to the left, you would see that it too, is surprisingly detailed. Taking another example at random, the towers that support the floodlights over the stands have every last step of the service ladders modelled; you can just see the tops of them in the shot above.

But there is a price to be paid for all this detail and the currency is frames. Scandinavian airports has been coded with such loving care that every field contains literally dozens of easter eggs, many of them in places you are highly unlikely to visit, unless you have a reviewer's roving eye, or like to simulate the drive into your airport as well as the flight out. This is great if you have a really fast PC, but not so good if your processor is the wrong side of the 1.0 Gigahertz mark. The pragmatic solution is to assign such surplus eye-candy to the 'extremely dense' setting, but FS Dream Factory (the developers) must be very attached to those signs, because they don't vanish until you pull the slider back to 'dense' and with them go the air stairs, the floodlights and a whole slew of other things, leaving the airport stripped bare - but with frame rates at a more acceptable 13 or 14 using the CRJ and over 20 with the default 737. If there are plans to update or patch the scenery, my vote would go towards a re-evaluation of the density settings versus display speed. At the very least, reassigning the signs so they were lost at the 'very dense' setting would help users with machines in the 1.0 Ghz range.

The textures vary from middling stuff to eye-catchingly detailed and I don't think I have ever seen a scenery quite like it in this respect. The developer clearly has an eye for primary colors, which leads to some interesting contrasts in the scenery. For example, the pavement is the blackest black I have seen in a while, looking everywhere as if it had been laid yesterday. The fact that such close attention has been paid to the design means that there aren't many faults to find, the taxilines all join up to one another and the gates are well detailed, although I didn't find any that were animated - but you do get working docking boards. A great deal of attention has been paid to the view at pilot's level, so unlike many sceneries of this type, you will almost always be looking at crisp textures when you apply the parking brakes.

Having got the bad news over and done with, the good news is that if you have a fast enough PC, or if you are prepared to sacrifice detail in exchange for speed, this is a very attractive package. The fields themselves are well chosen and raise the potential of some interesting flights - Bornholm to Kiruna, for one, given that there aren't that many FS airports situated in the Arctic.

The interesting thing about this add-on is that when you first load it, the overwhelming impression is of blandness, but the more you explore, the more there seems to be to discover and the level of detail at even the small airports, for example Bornholm, shown right, is overwhelming. Exactly how often do you see pedestrian crossings in FS2002 airports? Or detail like the glass-covered way in front of the terminal here? Or road markings outside the airport that you can actually read? This is enough to rescue the package from the also-ran pile - I just wish it was a bit faster.

Scandinavian Airports 1 is awesomely detailed, but the result is that it is a bit on the slow side. It is also quite expensive and that, at the end of the day, may prove its Achilles heel. But if you want to fly Scandinavia and you have a fast PC, it is worth considering.