BEHIND THE SCENES AT GATWICK AIRPORT - British Airways ...

@bavirtual.co.ukbut this trades off to better performance. The taxiwaymarkings are all clear and look good, as do otherfeatures like hold short lines. That is the day lighting, butwhat about night lighting? Night lighting is done inUK2000 Gatwick very well. This scenery, unlike somany others gets that very weird Sodium lighting justright. Sodium lighting is the artificial yellow lighting seenat almost every airport during the night. The othernotable thing about the night textures is how well theSodium lights at the gates blend to the darker parts ofthe scenery. It is a great, gradient that fades out. This ismuch better than a lot of sceneries and really showssome skill at texturing. Overall the night lighting is verypleasing and makes this a great airport to fly into duringthe night and day.Another very important part of any scenery is how itperforms. No one is going to want to fly at an airport if ittanks peoples frame rates. Thankfully this is not an issuewith UK2000 Gatwick. Partly as a function of the texturequality mentioned earlier, this scenery is very frame ratefriendly. Using the default Cessna 172 in FS9 this is howUK2000 Gatwick stacks up.Scenery – Frames Per Second (Avg. Daytime)Fly Tampa KSEA – 55FPSFSDreamteam KJFK – 40FPSUK2000 EGLL v2 – 43FPSUK2000 EGKK – 57FPSNot only does the scenery give good frames, it does notstutter when textures load which keeps the experiencenice and fluid. Even more, After operating out ofUK2000 Gatwick several dozen times I have neverexperienced a CTD or scenery related crash of thesimulator.There is also a bunch of great, smaller things that addto the experience. One of which is the amount of trafficat the gates. Traffic meaning airport vehicles and movingcars. Seeing catering trucks driving around, buses takingpassengers to other gates, pushback tugs going to pushout airplanes, it all adds up a very immersive groundenvironment at the gate. Not only this, but when at thegate the jetway extends out to the aircraft and baggagetrucks come greet the airplane by attaching them to thebaggage doors. Although cool, this does not work 100%of the time. For example, the Wilco 737 PIC seems towork fine and is gladly accepted by the gate crews.However the Project Opensky 777 does not work aswell. One other really neat feature is the ability to seelittle silhouettes of people walking. This is reallynoticeable in the air bridge and terminal areas. Reallyadds to the feel that the airport is alive and reallyfunctioning.This brings up another point, the lack of AES (AirportEnhancement Services by Aerosoft) support. No AESwork has been done for this scenery and it does notappear that there are plans to include UK2000 Gatwickin future updates for AES.Having never been to Gatwick myself I cannot speakdirectly to how this scenery compares to the real dealbut from comparing to pictures taken in real life,UK2000 Gatwick seems to get it right. All the terminalbuildings are accurately modeled and look good. One ofthe nicest touches is the animated traffic one seesbehind the terminals and on the roads. Much like thesilhouettes this really adds to the feel that the airport isalive and nothing is more immersive than that.In the end, UK2000 Gatwick is a great piece scenery. Ifone can look past some lower quality textures on thebuildings and no AES support, one finds an incrediblyimmersive and pleasing scenery. It includes greatphotoreal textures for the immediate surrounding area,great runway and taxiway textures. It performs great andit very stable. I highly recommend UK2000 Gatwick toall.Airways magazine October/November 2010 47