Introduction Melbourne is the second most populous city in Australia, located just over 960 km (598 mi) south of Sydney. Melbourne airport (or Tullamarine as it is commonly referred to) hosts a wide variety of domestic airlines such as Qantas, Virgin Blue, Australian Airlines, Regional Express and Jetstar. International airlines such as British Airways, Thai Airways, Malaysian Airlines, Air New Zealand and China Southern, to name a few, also have services from Melbourne. Qantas’ low cost subsidiary, Jetstar, is also stationed here and operates a fleet of A320’s and 717’s. Jetstar entered service a few years ago, and flies similar and unique routes to Qantas. To my knowledge, this is the first payware FS scenery package for an Australian airport. So, let’s take a look at this particular title. Installation and Documentation Once purchased, you’ll download a 5 megabyte zip file. In this, is a simple readme in txt format, the product manual in pdf format and the scenery folder. Some simmers may get nit-picky, and complain that this package requires the user to manually install the scenery, but one simple look at the readme will let us know that all that is needed is to drop the file in the Addon Scenery folder, activate it in the sim and re-start it. Perhaps an auto installer would have been better for some scenery installing “newbies”. Before activating the scenery in the flight sim, I had a look at the manual. Like a lot of scenery manuals, it was very brief. Unless the scenery itself is very complex, or needs specific documentation to cover issues within the package – it should be only a few pages long. In the manual are the airport and runway info, and links to real charts and plates. And of course, the all important info on how to go about contacting the author. After you’ve manually installed the scenery, you’ll find that you only lose 17 megabytes on your hard drive. Melbourne re-born As all simmers are aware of, the detail for the default airports isn’t that fantastic. All airports use identical terminal textures and basically there is nothing distinctive from one airport to another. That’s where the fun of add-on scenery comes into play. Hundreds of airports have been re-created by freeware and payware designers to give them that “unique” look that they deserve. Melbourne 2006 is no exception. The entire airport has been re-created in great detail, including custom taxiway and terminal textures. This package is a massive upgrade from the default, and I’m sure it will please the many Melbournian and Aussie simmers out there. Other great features include new taxiway signs, static vehicles around the aerodrome and even the roads and buildings around the airport have been modeled.
When I first booted up the scenery, I slewed around checking things out. A strange thing I found was that the main runway uses both concrete and asphalt runway textures. I honestly thought it was a design fault, but after a quick check with developer Andres, he told me this is the case with the real runway. Asphalt at the ends, and the middle is concrete. These are the sort of things which make a good scenery (and developer for that matter), going to all means possible to bring us with the most realistic scenery with ultra fine details such as this.
In Comparison Included below are a few comparision shots of Andres Valenzuela’s rendition to the real thing. As you can see, the shots from the sim are incredibly close. Of course, if anymore buildings or roads outside of the airport were modeled, we would experience a significant performance hit. Thanks to Julian Adams for allowing me to use his photo’s for comparison.
Night Lighting I particularly enjoyed the night arrivals on my flights into Tullamarine; Andres’ scenery really shines here. All aprons and taxiways are appropriately illuminated, however I think the terminal and buildings are a bit overdone.
A very realistic feature not mentioned in the manual, is the animated light movements around Melbourne. I’ve heard of it in scenery packages before, but never experienced it first hand. All around the airport and leading east into the city are little yellow lights that zip around everywhere. If you zoom into the lights, you’ll see they aren’t modeled, but merely just a little effect. Unless you spend your time flying around reporting on the traffic to the virtual local news crew, you won’t care! I found this to be yet another step up for our quest for ultimate realism. No animations The commercial scenery bar is ever moving up, therefore a lot of designers such as Fly Tampa and Sim Flyers have, for some time, included moving animations within their scenery. Unfortunately, this is not the case here. There are no moving baggage cars or gate marshallers. Although we would have to pay for this in frame rates, I would have enjoyed seeing such features such as this to help bring the airport to life.
Performance FS9 Settings: Scenery and autogen complexity: normal. AI Density at 75%. Sight distance maxed out. 3D clouds 50%, with detailed clouds. Mip mapping quality at 4, Hardware Rendered Lights 6. Trillinear texture filtering. Anti Aliasing 4x, anisotropic filtering 16x. As you can see, I’ve displayed the frame rate display in my screenshots. Using that info, as well with my computer specs and FS9 settings, this should give you a fair idea how this will run on your system. I noticed a very small frame rate drop whilst testing the scenery. Considering the complexity from the excess modeling outside the airport, I found this scenery to be very performance friendly. In Closing Considering this is a one man effort (to my knowledge) Andres did an awesome job with his attempt at an accurate Melbourne airport. I thoroughly enjoyed reviewing this package and, more importantly, my flights in and out of Tullamarine. Lots of detail has been given to the airport and surroundings, and I feel all Australian simmers out there should give this product a serious look. The
price tag this title wears is dirt cheap, and considering the amount
of time Andres probably spared in the package I will even
go as far as
saying you are almost stealing the product for $11 US dollars! Hopefully
Andres can go on to complete other major Aussie airports in the future,
I’m sure that would please us Australian flight simmers. |
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