| Aerosoft Budapest 2007 |
| Friday, 13 April 2007 | |
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Page 2 of 2 A small criticism I have is that sometimes when I loaded things up, the textures took a while to show, but after they had loaded up correctly, I suffered no more problems. Performance-wise my system (which is getting out of date now) managed to produce frame rates in the high teens with 40% AI Traffic running (courtesy of Traffic 2005), which was very acceptable and gave a nice smooth performance as I explored the airport. This frame rate was achieved with the default aircraft and some freeware ones, when I loaded some payware aircraft (PMDG) into the equation, performance took a bit of a hit, but I was still able to navigate around the airport easily enough.
Sometimes with a couple of the airport add-ons I have I find that as I approach the vicinity of the airport and the textures switch from the default ones to the product ones, my system can sometime be ground to a halt while all these new textures are loaded and processed. I’m glad to say that this isn’t the case here! The transition between the two was barely noticeable. It is very easy to see where the 2 set’s of texture begin and end, which on one side of the coin might be a bit of an eyesore if you happen to take a screenshot at that time, but I look at it as proof of how good the textures which come with the product are!
The terminals themselves are visually stunning. The air bridges almost look real such is the quality on offer here. The attention to detail is brilliant. Even when you get really close up, the quality doesn’t drop a notch. My main criticism of the add-on is that it is difficult to get properly aligned with the air gate. When approaching it you follow the guide marker in, and stop when instructed to do so by the board, worth mentioning here is that you need to be approaching very slowly as the distance between ‘stop’ and ‘too far’ is minimal. After I stopped at the right point, the thrust of the engines nudged me forward another inch too far. In the simulated world though, an inch doesn’t really matter that much! The problem occurs when you move out to spot view to see how nicely you have lined up with the air bridge, only to find that you haven’t and that the air bridge is halfway down the fuselage. Of course, this could be remedied by stopping the aircraft a little earlier and ignoring the ‘stop’ board. But then it takes something away from the realism element of approaching the gate. This small problem could also be down to where aircraft developers base the view point for their cockpit. Some developers put it right on the nose of the aircraft, and others put it where it should be, in the cockpit! So I don’t think that Aerosoft are completely at fault for this problem.
Another striking aspect of this airport is the control tower. Situated just away from the main terminal buildings, this large structure is has been built from the ground up and is supported on two huge pillars.
After you have probably wasted most of your afternoon exploring the airport (I know I did), you finally get down to the business of taking off. For your first few flights I would strongly recommend using a low and slow GA aircraft to explore the area and take a good look at how good the included textures and mesh are. It would be easy to miss all this detail just blasting away from the airport in a jet. It would have been easy for the developers to maybe turn the detail down a little as you move away from the airport, but they haven’t. As I’m sure you’ll agree from the accompanying screenshots, the quality of the ground below is of a very high standard. Sometimes when you get low the textures can become a little blurry. I flew at an altitude of between 3500-4500ft when exploring the area, and at that altitude the textures seemed fine to me. Of course, people with a higher spec computer will be able to crank all the settings to max and probably experience even better textures when flying. As you are flying around the Budapest area, what you see on the ground below is awesome. There is no comparison to the default MS scenery, the ground textures really are photo-real! Aerosoft have also had the good thinking to include a different set of textures for the winter season, so you can be sure that whenever you are flying, Budapest will look as close to real as you can hope to get it on your desktop. My personal preference however, was to fly with the summer textures.
To sum things up, this scenery is very very good. If you are a regular visitor to Budapest it’s well worth investing in this package from Aerosoft. There is no need to worry about wasting your money if you are soon to upgrade to FSX because Aerosoft will give you a free replacement for FSX*. The airport is completely transformed from the default offering with realistic buildings, superb textures for the taxiways and runways and brilliant photo-real ground textures once you are airborne. I liked the added touch of including some old communist regime aircraft which can be found dotted around the airport. These aircraft don’t move, but they still add something to the package. As always there are things that can be improved upon by developers for the next release.
It would have been nice if the air gates lined up correctly with the aircraft when arriving at the gate (even though some of the blame for this can be directed to the aircraft developer) and it would have been nice if performance was slightly higher when using payware add-on aircraft. Although this problem may have been down to my system specs. Hopefully these issues can be addressed in a future update. If you are a pilot who regularly flies into and out of Budapest, I can strongly recommend this product to you, your departures and arrivals at the airport will be a lot more enjoyable for it. Oh, I almost forgot to mention, Malev use a version of this scenery in their simulators. As endorsements go, I think that’s a pretty big one! Happy Easter PAY8156 System requirements: *This info is correct at the time of writing this article |
