Introduction In this article, we take a look at two add-on scenery packages for FSX from SimGiants. The Canary Gold for FSX product contains three airports: El Hierro – GCHI – is near the town of Valverde on the westernmost island of Hierro in the archipelago. Tenerife North – GCXO – is one of two main airports on the central island of Tenerife near Santa Cruz de Tenerife. To complete the Canary Gold package, we also tour Fuerteventura – GCFV – near Puerto del Rosario on the eastern island of Fuerteventura.
Then, we move to Europe and northern Italy where we visit one of the three major airports near Milan - Malpensa International airport – LIMC.
Packaging Both products come as direct downloads from the SimGiants website, and boxed versions are also available, although will cost you almost 20% more. Canary Gold for FSX is a 336mb download, and Milan Malpensa is a bit over 286mb. The zip format archives expand on your disk and the setup utility is ready to run. A license key for the products was provided in the form of an e-mail. Installation Installation is quite simple and void of any prompts outside of the obligatory licensing information. The setup program found my installation of FSX on Vista 64. I was again disappointed to find a setup program unable to accept the entire license key in one “paste” from the registration e-mail. This forced me to paste or type the individual chunks one at a time, an unnecessary inconvenience. Most setup programs are now smart enough to do the entire thing for you, so this is in my view a point of improvement. The process is otherwise entirely automatic, and took but a few minutes on my system. The scenery ends up in the Add-On Scenery folder in your FSX installation. There is one folder for each product, and we find a clean directory structure including a documentation folder containing the individual information for each airport in the packages. Canary Gold for FSX utilized 456mb of disk real estate, and Milan another 358mb. SimGiants notes that some users may need to add the scenery files manually in FSX, that wasn’t the case for me. FSX found the new scenery and re-indexed on startup and I was ready to go visit new places. All in all, both products took less than 10 minutes to install.
Documentation Each airport has its own PDF file holding basic installation and airport data information totally about 10 pages each. The tables hold frequency and other airport data, but no charts. A section provides helpful tips on keeping performance high. I note in passing that I also found digital airport charts for the Canary Islands (AENA is the equivalent of the FAA in Spain – the site provides free electronic charts after a simple registration process). Visuals
While I’ll let the screenshots speak for themselves, I want to first make some general comments on the two packages from SimGiants, as both are similar in look and feel. First, I found the overall quality to be good and balanced between detail and performance. What also immediately caught my eye were the ground textures, in particular the numerous ground markings and variety of ground textures that really make the scenery standout. The signage is excellent, so is the associated night lighting for taxiways and runways. For example, some hold short markers are associated with alternating red/yellow flashers, a nice touch. Second, there is a good effort in blending the add-on scenery with the default scenery. SimGiants uses background textures based on satellite photo scenery and manages to blend quite well with its FSX scenery surroundings. FSX does a barely passable job at rendering the desert like Canary Islands (I had inconsistencies such as spruces in the middle of what should largely be parched terrain, certainly not a good home for lush alpine forests…). SimGiants blended reasonably well, although it clearly clashes with the auto-gen and default scenery unless you also have a package that correctly remaps the terrain type for this region of the world. The default scenery provided in the FSX box just shows how much improvement exists when juxtaposed to a product that maps the local terrain correctly. As a result, I found myself wanting for a much larger area than that covered by SimGiant’s three airports in the Canary Gold package. The coverage area is limited to the immediate airports only. Next, SimGiants adds a few interesting details, such as construction vehicles, coffee tables with umbrellas, glass lined gangways leading to the terminals that are amazingly transparent. Parked cars and other static objects can be found scattered about the airport although all are static. Some of the construction workers are animated, and there are some static figures around terminal entrances. Overall, I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t find much animation included in the packages other than the obligatory radar antennas and jetways. The texture quality is good. As said above, the ground textures for paved surfaces is clearly a notch above the rest, although some of the textures for buildings are perhaps not as detailed as some other products I’ve seen. This is not a let down by any means. The perception I get from the SimGiant packages is a strong desire to blend performance with eye candy, and some design decisions had to be made. It looks like a lot of time was spent on minimizing performance hits while providing a good atmosphere capturing the essence of the locales represented. The end result is good average performance, yet no excruciating detail is found. The balance is appropriate given how poorly the scenery engine in FSX reacts to extremely complex scenery. An example of this optimization is the “flat” stairs in some buildings where the texture gives the illusion of 3D stairs where one needs to travel with a camera around the airport from angles never seen from the cockpit. Where they can be seen, the level of detail is there is full 3D glory. Overall, I found the level of detail met my expectations, and one that should make the scenery usable on most systems – a refreshing change. While some packages provide stellar detail, they can also easily bring FSX into slideshow territory. Not the case here. I found the lighting quite nice for the runway and taxiways. I was not enthused with the glow of the parking and other general airport night lighting, however. The yellow glow effect is not very convincing and totally clashes with the surrounding areas, in my opinion, giving it an eerie look that only gets worse with bloom enabled. I found the terminals to be awash in yellow. The effect would be better if a bit more toned down and not as, well, yellow. Perhaps this is just my perception, but everything else looked right, so this really stuck out. Finally, the new scenery worked very well with my FSX add-ons from terrain mesh to AI traffic, always a good thing! Fuertoventura – Canary Gold Fuertoventura is located on the eastern island of Fuertoventura and has a single 11,400’ runway. As always, clicking on the thumbnails below brings up the full resolution image.
El Hierro – Canary Gold El Hierro airport is on the south western most island of the archipelago. The runway is 4,100’.
Tenerife North – Canary Gold This airport used to be called Los Rodeos, and is one of two major airports on the main island of Tenerife (the other airport is aptly named Tenerife South, and is not modeled by SimGiants). Tenerife North has the distinction of being the site of the worst aviation accident when two 747s collided on the ground due to a communications mixup and poor weather. The Pan-Am 747 was taxiing on the runway when it was hit by a departing KLM 747 in the opposite direction – the collision took 583 lives. Tenerife North has a single runway a bit over 11,000’.
Milan Milpensa Our visit ends in Italy at Milan Malpensa, with two parallel runways just shy of 13,000 (4km) each.
Seasonal Changes SimGiants supports all seasonal changes for Milan Malpensa, again blending well with the surroundings. Similar changes are of course not present for Canary Islands Gold because of the permanent desert type climate in that geographical region of the world.
Performance and conclusion I found performance to be quite good compared to some other scenery add-ons that take a heavy toll on the visual frame rates. The SimGiant sceneries we looked at here are well balanced. Examining the design up close shows the designers paid attention to polygon counts and other objects that easily impact the FSX scenery engine. While I found myself occasionally looking for additional eye candy, in particular in the animation and ground object departments, I am very pleased with the overall renditions of the airports in the packages. The ground texture and signage are one of the best I’ve seen out there and there is a nice attention to detail for the important buildings. The airports depicted improve the default scenery so much that I can only ask for many more airports to get the SimGiants treatment: pleasing on the eye, and pleasing on the frame rates. |
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