Introduction

If you have even flown into Los Angeles in FS2004, you sure have noticed that the airport and surrounding scenery were given special attention by the Flight Simulator team. There are some custom objects at the airport and the ground textures were slightly improved. However, the general look of the Los Angeles area is still poor and it does not take much advantage of nextgen hardware. This is why cloud9 decided to develop a custom Los Angeles Intl. Airport (KLAX) scenery: we are in 2006 and it just doesn't make sense to continue using default airports of 2004, especially for such an important city!

Los Angeles International Airport is the world's fifth busiest passenger airport and ranks sixth in air cargo tonnage handled, and its popularity shows no sign of decreasing. In 2004 more than 60 million people traveled through LAX. A commerce leader, its air cargo system handled more than two million tons of goods. LAX handled about 70 percent of the passengers, 75 percent of the air cargo, and 95 percent of the international passengers and cargo traffic in the five-county Southern California region.

Today I will review the cloud9 Los Angeles Airport scenery, which is the latest cloud9 product for Microsoft Flight Simulator. This scenery is developed based on real ground and in-flight pictures and features highly detailed objects and buildings, animations and special effects and realistic night textures. Enough talking -- let's see what it has to offer, shall we?!

Installation and documentation

What is really great about cloud9 products is that you don't have to ask anyone for his/her opinion about the product, search for screenshots on discussion boards or even trust this review -- you get to test the scenery in your flight simulator, for free! It will work for a limited time, then you can choose if you want to buy it or not. If you choose to buy it, simply fill in a simple form with your personal and payment details; the scenery will be activated instantly!

The auto-installer is about 70MB large, which should be downloaded from the cloud9 website. Installation is incredibly simple (next, next, next, finish) and takes 2~3 minutes only. Once installed, you just need to load your flight and the trial mode will become active. The documentation included is a 40 page manual explaining the features of the scenery, from animated marshalls to operation of moving jetways. Also included in the manual is the airport diagram, approach plates and a few tips to improve FS2004 performance. It's a complete and easy to understand manual; I like it.

The scenery

I let my flight load at LAX and went to the kitchen for some coffee. When I came back, I was like "Whoa, what happened?!" -- I was so much used to the default LAX scenery that the photoreal runway that my aircraft was sitting at really impressed me. I apply some forward thrust and start to explore the scenery. Here is where the fun part begins.

1. Ground textures

The scenery itself looks extremely detailed. We all know that LAX is a very large airport with many gates, buildings, taxiways and whatnot, but cloud9 did a great job on modelling and developing textures for all these objects. Most of the ground textures were made from real ground and in-flight pictures, which gives a great look to the airport. One thing that I love about this scenery's photoreal textures is that they actually look good from the ground -- I don't feel like I'm just "standing over a photograph", and it doesn't need to be seen 10,000ft above to look any good. This airport actually has a life. It's incredible to see all that traffic pushing back, taking-off and landing as you watch the airport's operations. Everything looks and feels very real.

  
  

The downside of photoreal textures is that they do not actually look the same for everyone -- it depends a lot on the system's performance. The difference can be enormous, and the only way to find out how the scenery will look on your computer is to actually test it by yourself. This is made very easy with the cloud9's trial system, which lets you test the scenery for a limited time before purchasing it. On lower-end systems, the ground will probably look blurry and there might be a greater impact on performance as the computer tries to render the textures.

It's important to point out that the ground textures and features included in the package are limited to the airport's borders. There is no special scenery for the LAX surroundings. I would definitely like to see textures for the surrounding areas, but the default scenery is already very dense and there would probably be a serious impact on performance for most systems if more textures were added. Anyways, the airport blends pretty well with the default textures for Los Angeles.

2. Active Gates and Marshalls

Possibly one the best features of this scenery (and my personal favorites) are the Active Gates and Marshalls. They are available in many (not all) of the airport's gates, and add a lot to the realism of the scenery. When you approach one of the gates supported by this feature, a marshall will be giving you instructions on how to park the aircraft. It actually works, the marshall knows exactly where you are and where you should go. If you follow his instructions correctly, you will be able to use the active gate feature flawlessly.

The active gates are just amazing, honestly! Most developers link the NAV2 radio with gate animations... that works fine, but it's not very practical to write down all frequencies and tune them when you want the gates to move. This cloud9 scenery uses a much more effective technology: the gate will move automatically once you are parked at the correct position and with the parking brakes set. There is no tuning frequencies, you set the parking brakes and the gates move. I loved this feature, it makes the parking and shutdown procedures quite entertaining.

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