Installation
Unlike most freeware, and some other payware sceneries for X-plane, this airport scenery uses an installation program instead of the typical X-Plane folder drop. This takes a little longer because the installer downloads the files to your computer after receiving a valid password. This is almost certainly driven by piracy concerns, which is understandable.
Buildings and Mesh
The airport is surrounded by nice high resolution satellite orthophotos used as the ground textures. One thing to understand is that like most freeware airport scenery, the orthophotos only cover the immediate area surrounding the airport.
This includes the local golf course,
commercial / industrial area
and a water treatment plant.
Lucky for us, X-plane doesn’t simulate the aroma of the last one! Future game shop also went through a lot of effort to make the vegetation of the area line up with the satellite imagery
This looks great when you’re low level really close to the airport, but leaves you with a sudden jolt when the scenery goes back to the default landscape. Using othrophotos in heavily populated areas is a little easier because the ground textures disappear into the auto generated buildings and other scenery. The default scenery that surrounds KPAO is very lightly populated in some area which makes it difficult to blend the scenery into its surroundings. Because of this you can see a very sharp line where the add-on scenery starts, and the default scenery begins.
Most of the buildings here look custom made which helps make this scenery stand out, less generic. A lot of these custom objects like the hangars, are used over again in various places on the field, but it’s still better than the most of the generic “lego brick” airports out there.
There are also lots of static objects other than airplanes and hangars sprinkled across the airport.
I like this a lot because if you’ve ever been to any general aviation airport, you know there is much more there than just airplanes and hangars. This gives the KPAO scenery the look and feel of an actual living general aviation airport. A lot of general aviation airport designers tend to leave that stuff out. This is another case where the same set of objects is used over and over, but it goes to good effect.
The terrain mesh is relatively flat in this area in the real world, so there isn’t much to critique in that aspect. However, KPAO is located right next to the southern end of the San Francisco Bay, which is another area where the use of the orthophotos is difficult to blend into the default scenery.
Frame Rate impact
There is a good amount of detail here, but not so much that it drags down the performance of the sim, at least in my case. Individual results may vary, but I’m pretty sure this scenery will have minimal impact on most systems.
