| AVSIM Scenery Review: Spain2K Scenery |
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While Microsoft Flight Simulator 2000 has wondrously transformed the face of flight simulations with its new 3D scenery modeling, not all areas got equal treatment. The United States and parts of Europe are stunning, but other areas got a basic remake, often with less detail than some of the top-notch FS98 add-ons. But that has always been the idea, Microsoft gives us a glimpse of what could be, then waits for third-party scenery makers to target the areas in need of a little touchup or a major overhaul. Spain fits the bill for the latter in the default FS2000 scenery. And Toni Agramont has come through with the first overhaul of the Spanish scenery. Considering it is done without a Software Development Kit, this comprehensive freeware scenery is a marvelous improvement over the default Spanish scenery.
I spent over six hours over three days flying through both the
default and Spain2K scenery. The flight we will look at in
this review began at Barajas Intl. Airport just outside Madrid. There, Agramont
took the plain FS2000 default airport, above right, and turned it into
a fine place to fly. Note the work done, above left, on terminal
buildings, runways, airport lighting, and taxiways. From there, we head north over the
mountainous terrain of central and northern Spain toward the airport in
the coastal city of Bilbao. It is there, where the Cordillera Cantabrica
mountains meet the Bay of Biscay and the Atlantic Ocean, that the
scenery really comes to life.
And it is this coastline—yes one of those supposedly frame hogging coastlines—which really shows the artistry in Agramont's work. Yet,these screenshots were taken with the FS2000 scenery options cranked up to around the default level five range on a PII 333 with 96 meg of RAM and a VoodooIII 2000 card with 32 meg of video RAM. Frame rates were in the 14-20 range with the clear skies, and both the Cessna 182 RG and the B737-400 handled well flying this scenery. See "the mountains meet the sea" below.
Download and installation were relatively easy if you have worked with any
of the FS2000 scenery hitting the simulation websites recently. As with
most, Agramont has the scenery setup with all of the files in a Spain2K folder which sits in the FS2000 root directory. The scenery.cfg file is then modified to point the software to the new Spain scenery. This automatically makes the scenery active, without the installer having to go into the simulation itself. The documentation, or I should say the English translation of the documentation, is a little difficult to read at times. But everything is there and this should not be an impediment to anyone looking to use this scenery.
Now, as you would expect, there are a few bugs in
this massive piece of scenery. One of them, left, is in the beautiful Bilbao
area. As you can see in this overhead, the runway and its approach,
are slightly off the mark after selecting that runway in the Go Directly to
Airport page. But having visited most of the major airports in the package, this was the only major gremlin I saw. You can currently download the Agramont Spain2K scenery by clicking here.
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