Stephen Posted October 29, 2019 Report Share Posted October 29, 2019 Quick Impression : LGAV Athens XP by FlyTampa In a flurry of releases FlyTampa have hit the airports of Greece hard, FlyCorfu XP had been released last year 2018, but then in the last few months we have had three in succession with LGIR - Heraklion XP, then LGTS - Thessaloniki XP and just a few weeks ago FlyTampa released this big one in LGAV - Athens XP. This is not a review of the FlyTampa - Athens scenery, just a sort of quick first impressions overview, mostly to give you an idea if it is worth putting down your hard earned cash for the scenery, a first overall view of what X-PlaneReviews likes or doesn't like about the release, more sceneries in this vein will follow soon. LGAV Athens XP by FlyTampa Athens International Airport "Eleftherios Venizelos" Διεθνής Αερολιμένας Αθηνών «Ελευθέριος Βενιζέλος» IATA: ATH - ICAO: LGAV As per FlyTampa you get a lot of photorealistic textures in area, they are slightly darker than the default textures, but overall they fit into the scenery quite well. The terminal (main) has A1-A13 and B3 - B17 (13 Gates) and there is also a satellite A30 - A39 (10 Gates) that are airbridge active and all are SAM - Scenery Animation Manager plugin (Plugin Required) featured, and come with the lovely branded Piraeus Bank blue airbridges which are excellent... ... there are a huge amount of remote parking stands here, all set out on the North and South aprons, GA apron and even in front of the huge Olympic maintenance hangar area. FlyTampa use the phototextures to do most of the work for them, but like with most of their sceneries the resolution is not great? fine in an overall aspect, but very poor in detail... ... so a lot of landside road, carpark detail is missing and areas around the aprons have missing fencing and that finer detailing that I think is important to the view from the aircraft... so much here is very well done at ATH, but these areas certainly needed more development? Runway and taxiway textures are good but not brilliant, thankfully they come with active PBR (Physically Based Rendering) textures (wet, rain reflections for realism).... 3d grass is included with nice grass in field and lovely spring flowers. Lighting LGAV lighting is excellent, there is masterful use of lighting and it all comes with great tones used to differentiate the different airport areas... Sofitel Airport hotel and Railway Station building lighting is done very well, but their warning (red) building lights are surprisingly quite annoying in the distance. .... highlight is the great IKEA and LEROY MERLIN store lighting, that can be seen on approach or departure from RWY 03L. Athens City can be seen from the airport, and the horizon lighting is very realistic. I am using misterx6 SFD Global autogen, but FlyTampa add in their own custom buildings to create a full realistic city environ. The feature list is long and excellent, with some great vehicle (branded) animations and clutter, and nice some nice static aircraft spread around the scenery. WT3 can be generated here from built in set ATC routes, but it is a patchy generation with a few aircraft popping off on the runways after landing... so the ground routes would need refining (flow) to get the full activity you would like. Features Custom Ground Textures Custom Photo Scenery Custom Terrain Mesh Models baked with Ambient Occlusion PBR Textures Dynamic Lighting with color matching real airport PBR Textures Dynamic Lighting Detailed custom Taxiway, Apron & Runway markings 3D Taxiway Bridges 3D Taxiway Signs & 3D Taxiway Lighting/Units Volumetric Grass Animated Vehicles Animated Train Animated Windsock SAM Animated Jetways SAM Docking Signs SAM Marshals Static Hawker Jet on GA Ramp Static Bell Helicopter New Solar Farm Compatible with World Traffic and other AI Traffic programs. Optimized for excellent frame rates First Impressions Overall excellent, this is a really great and worthwhile Athen's scenery from FlyTampa with a huge feature list. Layout, modeling, lighting and detail is very good to excellent and with WorldTraffic 3 running (needs refining) you have an excellent destination airport. SAM feature is well done. Contrary are the low resolution photo-textures (roads, carparks... etc), inner landside detail which needed more development Four out of Five stars ☀️☀️☀️☀️⭐ Fly Athens by FlyTampa is now available from the X-Plane.OrgStore here: FlyTampa - Athens Price is US$28.00 Requirements are: X-Plane 11 Windows or Mac (not compatible with Linux) 4GB VRAM Minimum - 8GB VRAM Recommended Download Size: 750MB : Install Size: 2.0Gb SAM plugin is required for this scenery Current and impression version : 1.0 (Sep 29th 2019) ________________________________________ Quick Impression by Stephen Dutton 29th October 2019 Copyright©2019: X-Plane Reviews (Disclaimer. All images and text in this preview are the work and property of X-PlaneReviews, no sharing or copy of the content is allowed without consent from the author as per copyright conditions) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
davidal Posted October 29, 2019 Report Share Posted October 29, 2019 The XP version is a conversion of the 10 years old FSX version. Terminal texture is less than optimal unfortunately. http://www.flytampa.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=23&t=13643 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Stephen Posted October 29, 2019 Author Report Share Posted October 29, 2019 Yes most FlightSim crossover scenery is usually the old rehashed work, but at this price it is not too bad, I have seen a lot, lot worse... the lack of ground detail shows it's age. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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