Santander 2001
By Tim Pinkawa (29 June 2001)
antander 2001 is one
of Sim-Wings' latest scenery releases for Flight Simulator 2000.
Santander is a city in northern Spain. The city of Santander has a
small airport, also called Santander. Very few people know where or
what Santander is, so Sim-Wings decided to make scenery of it.
Santander is near lots of mountains, so approaches are very
interesting to fly!One important thing before you read this review. The reason all the pics are taken with the Bell 206 is that since the airport is so small, there would be no point in flying a jet.
Installation
The installer is an extracting .exe. Unfortunately, all the .exe does is just drop the files in the FS2000 folder. You still have to manually install the scenery. With a commercial product, they usually install themselves.
The Airport
Santander 2001 consists of airport scenery and a mesh of the surrounding area. At first look, I was very impressed with both. The airport itself has a lot of detail. The control tower is very detailed and looks quite realistic. It also has a very nicely done strobe light on it. The terminal, while small, had a lot of detail too. The textures on the terminal were nice looking, although they got a little blurry when you got up close. Behind the terminal is a parking lot. On a lot of the scenery I've seen, the cars are just blurry little rectangles with little detail. I was expecting the same from this package, but boy, was I surprised! The parking lot textures are crisp and you can see all the details on the cars! I really liked that in this package.
The tarmac has excellent looking concrete textures and looks very good. Around the terminal there is some static scenery including an Iberia MD-88 and some prop aircraft. A cool thing with the Iberia MD-88 is that it has night lighting. The tail lights up and so does the cabin. In a lot of scenery I've seen, the night lights don't work at all on static aircraft. There is also a hangar nearby.
One of the coolest things I saw was moving ground vehicles! They follow the road and don't clip through any objects. When I was flying the Bell 206 over it, it was very cool seeing it drive around on the roads at the airport and onto the tarmac.
The airport only has one runway. If you are on runway 11 and look right, you see the terminal. On the left are highly detailed buildings.
Santander is very close to the beach on the northern part of Spain, so there is a lot of water. In the water is an OK looking, texture-less boat. With all the detail put into the package, the boat was somewhat disappointing. Santander is surrounded by a lot of trees and it looks like they put a lot of effort into them. When I landed right next to the trees, there was hardly any blurriness or pixelation. One problem I saw, though, was the shadows. The trees cast rectangular shadows, but one thing I found odd was only some of the trees cast the rectangular shadows. Other trees appeared perfectly fine.
The Mesh
The second part of the package is the mesh. With all the surrounding mountains and hills, the mesh is a very nice touch for the package. The resolution of the mesh is very high, producing crisp textures and stunning detail. Also, since you fly over a lot of mountains on the approach, they really add to the realism. The mesh extends quite a bit away from the airport, so you can fly away from the airport and still get the excellent mesh.I noticed near the water, the ground just cuts off, rather than there being a shore. It's not very noticeable though. A good thing is if your computer has problems with meshes, you can disable them by pulling just one file out.
One I didn't like was the low frame rates. When I was flying a detailed plane like the PIC 767, the frame rates hit the floor. I was getting 5-6 fps. I did do most of my review flying in the standard Bell 206 and frame rates were average, in the 10 to 16 range. I noticed the biggest slowdown near the Iberia MD-88 and the terminal.
Final Thoughts
PROS:
