Intro And History

In this scenery review, I shall belooking at Berlin Brandenburg for Prepar3D V4/V5. This scenery was oneI was very keen to try out as it was produced in part by 29Palms,makers ofSkiathos,which I reviewed previously and enjoyed very much.

Berlin to date has had three primary airports serving it. Arguablythe most famous of these being Tempelhof, known for its curvingterminal and hangar like structure. You also had Tegel, but just likeTempelhof, this has now been closed to see Brandenburg become theonly/primary airport to serve Berlin.

Brandenburg, once known as 'Schoenfeld', served Berlin alongsideTegel, but only did so with one small terminal (now known as Terminal5) favoured by low-cost airlines such as: EasyJet, Ryanair, andEuroWings. However, when a new terminal building opened on the site inlate 2020, the airport was renamed 'Brandenburg'. The terminal'sconstruction actually started way back as 2006 but was delayed due tobuilding issues.

Manual

That's enough history on Brandenburg, let's talk about the manualincluded in the package, a PDF document available in both English andGerman. I really liked the manual as it contained a lot of usefulinformation about airport parking stands, even as far as mentioningwhere you should stop on the stand for each type of aircraft used.

There was also extensive information about, installation,recommended settings, and even a Q&A section. These where quite usefulas it meant you didn't need to jet off to the forums to find an answerto a rudimentary question. The manual also included information aboutnavigational aids, but I found the information relating to ILS,lacking when it came to certain important data.

Another issue I came across was that most of the settings weregeared towards Prepar3D V4, I couldn't find any mention of V5. Thiswas concerning because V5 and V4 perform differently, so I would haveliked to have seen more information relating to optimised settings forV5.

Apron, Runways, Taxiways

The apron area of Brandenburg featured good use of both asphalt andconcrete textures. I also liked the way the developers had used rubbermarks on the taxiways, aprons, and runways, mostly seen aroundTerminal 5. This shows good attention to detail by 29Palms as thenewer southern end of the airport has only just been made operational,so tire wear here would have been minimal at best. One issue I didcome across was the signage on the ground itself. In some areas Ifound these textures to be rather dim and struggled to read them.

Terminal Buildings

The terminal buildings have been wonderfully and accuratelyrecreated, with some fantastic use of high-quality textures.

Those of you who have read my previous reviews, will know I reallyenjoy it when developers model terminal interiors, and luckily enough,one has been included with the new terminal. However, as nice as thiswas to see, I found the modelling to be extremely repetitive andslightly off putting.

Despite not featuring an interior, the modelling of the now closedold terminal 5 building is still featured and has been crafted veryaccurately, with good use of texturing and modelling.

When it came to the gates themselves, please be mindful thatdefault 'CTRL + J', jetways have been used instead of SODE. This issomething I would expect to see as standard, but it is possible toinstall SODE manually and can be done so very easily.

Link:https://sode.aerosoft.com/

Surrounding Scenery

Even though I am not all that familiar with the city of Berlin, Ican say without any hesitation that some great work has been carriedout on the local area to enhance the user experience. Some of theincluded features are retail parks, housing estates, and of course thefamous autobahn. Overall, I very much enjoyed seeing all the detail,it made the scenery even more immersive.

Night Lighting

Night lighting has been used to good effect in the scenery, withdynamic lighting effects being used in all the right places. Iparticularly liked the flood lights used throughout the airport; theywere extremely bright...so much so that I recommend you wear somesunglasses!

If that wasn't enough, you even had some impressive neon lightingeffects on the control tower and adjacent maintenance hangars. Itreally did look fantastic, especially the neon glow, and it is afeature I haven't seen before in a scenery.

Performance, Settings And Texture Issues

The settings required for this scenery are stated in the manual,and for the most part almost all the display sliders need to be placedon or near their maximum. The manual also states that the 'TextureResolution' should be '2048x2048' (High).

When it came to performance, I would say on average I used about4.9 MB of VRAM with 5.1 being available. If you are using a lower endGPU like myself, then there is a noticeable performance hit. I wouldsay this mostly comes from the use of '2048' textures. If need be, youcan turn this down to '1024', and this did reduce my memory footprintto around 4GB. However, in my experience this did seem to contributeto blurrier like textures throughout the whole scenery.

Unfortunately, no matter what the texture resolution was set to, Istill ran into a few texture issues. The first of these being with thetaxiway centerlines only being rendered when I was very close to theaircraft. I could physically see the rendering taking place only a fewfeet from the aircraft's nose, thus resulting for the most part in ablurry centerline texture.

Another texture issue was with the roads, as in a lot of areas,these were incredibly blurry. In fact, in some areas I couldn't evenmake out that they were roads at all!

Conclusion

So, in summing up my experience of Berlin Brandenburg, I did enjoymy time there, but it was far from perfect, namely for the abovetexture issues mentioned above. In saying that, these didn't detracttoo much from the overall experience, it was just a shame they werethere in the first place. Overall, this is a scenery I wouldrecommend, but one which I think could do with a bit of polishing.

Alex Dickinson

Purchase Aerosoft - Mega Airport Berlin-Brandenburg Professional for P3D v4/v5