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Scenery Review : LEBL Barcelona El Prat


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Scenery Review : LEBL Barcelona El Prat

El Prat Airport, also known as Barcelona Airport, is the main airport of Catalunya, and the second largest of Spain, it's located around15 km from Barcelona City and coast, and 3km from the Seaport.

Barcelona airport (LEBL) has 3 fairly large runways, each of which is either concrete or asphalt. Barcelona is also so complex it has 5 control towers, each of which are included within the scenery. 38 Million passengers flood through the gates at LEBL making it a very popular destination and hub in Europe. DAI's latest release covers LEBL in lots of detail, after eight months of work by the team the scenery has finally been released to now add to your XP scenery collection.

To review this scenery I will be taking a B757-200 from Barcelona (LEBL) to Bristol International (EGGD), leaving the sunny Spanish coast behind to return to some great classic British weather, rain!

Features:

  • Layer Ortofoto 20cm/pix
  • 2 terminals and lot of buildings high detailed and textured but optimised (specular maps for windows)
  • All animated local jetways with objects on ramp
  • 3 runways actives customized
  • Custom navigation objects, all light markings and ground markings
  • Volumetric 3D grass and local vegetation
  • Static and dynamic vehicles, e.g. buses, baggage carts, services, firefighters, police, medical, etc
  • Custom roads with custom traffic in airport roads
  • Scalable options according your X-Plane configuration
  • Option static aircraft traffic enabled or disabled

First Impressions:

The airport is very detailed, this was after I changed my rendering settings, first I thought the detail was poor but that was my mistake as when I increased object density in XP settings the airport came to life with misc objects. Parked at the gate and whilst performing the walk around inspection, the concrete is actually very clean! Dirt has been applied but maybe a little more would be nice, then it will look really worn and how a busy airport should.

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The gates included are custom 'autogates', this means that the jetway will dock to your aircraft when parked at the gates with the engines off. This is a great tool developed by Jonathan Harris, therefore his plugin is required for this to work. If you don't want automated jetways or don't want to install Mr Harris's plugin then the jetways will remain, but just not work! Around the gates the attention to detail can really be noticed, small trucks and cones populate areas and makes the airport feel 'busy' and realistic.

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The textures on the buildings and static misc objects are a mixture of photo-real and artificial, despite that it looks very good and the smallest of details can be seen within the textures. For example, on most concrete textures moss has been applied to give the airport a dirty feel, not just on the ground but on objects too. The 3d grass looks great! It is very difficult to get good grass in XP, believe me! However DAI has managed to get some good grass at LEBL. Although it can be hard to spot whilst taxing to the runway, I think more dense grass looks realistic, but then again LEBL is very 'industrialized' having concrete and asphalt literally everywhere! 

3D Detail & Texturing:

The detail in the airport is amazing, I think I have already said that, a few times! Certain buildings have been modelled extremely well, especially the main control tower, the spirals look phenomenal in the sim! Misc objects such as stairs and vans have been modelled and textured well, I like the addition of flashing coloured beacons on these objects, it looks great in the day and night.

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The static aircraft look great and come in many different liveries including Wizz Air, Iberia, Vueling and Lufthansa. I would expect to see a BA, Ryanair or easyJet aircraft but it doesn't matter too much. The aircraft are very spaced out as well, I think some more aircraft would be nice.

The ground markings are superb, especially the textures on the runway. The asphalt textures are of a very high resolution, and every marking has been placed with precision as you can see from the images above. The runway is dirty from aircraft wheel marks, I like what DAI have done here, it's not too dirty or too clean and just how a realistic runway should be!

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Despite the ground polygons being of a high resolution unfortunately I cannot say the same about the orthoimagery. The whole area looks good at a high altitude although when lower to the ground it is clearly blurry. This is not a big issue as you will never come into contact with the surrounding ground, unless you fall short of the runway!

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Animations are not as plentiful as I would have hoped however they are still very present. The radar on the control tower rotates and some vans and cars will travel around the airport utilising another one of Mr Harris's great plugins, ground traffic.

Night Lighting and Configuration

LEBL by DAI can be configured to meet your computers demand, if you have a mega powerful machine this scenery will be plug and play high resolution and highly detailed. However if you have a lower end PC don't be put off by the complexity of this scenery. One feature I like is that this scenery will play to your rendering settings, if you turn down airport detail and object density in XP settings, this scenery will reduce misc objects and help your computer cope. It also has compressed textures and 3D models to help it run a bit smoother.

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The night lighting is mostly baked into the scenery, so it looks good with HDR ON or OFF, again if your computer is not powerful it won't matter too much and you can still experience this scenery. Nearly every building has it's own night texture which is great and makes the experience even more realistic. I especially like the lighting under the control tower to light up the advertisement! This scenery was very frame rate friendly for me, even with the Flight Factor 752 running, which surprised me if I am totally honest. I averaged at 32 FPS whilst using this scenery and payware aircraft.

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Summary

Overall this scenery can't be faulted, it is fantastic! Most certainly worth adding to your scenery collection, making it the next destination for your flight. The ground markings are superb, especially the textures on the runway. The asphalt textures are of a very high resolution, and every marking has been placed with precision. The orthoimagery is a little blurry but that's not an issue. The 3d modelling is great in most places, other places it is let down a little, the main area with not very detailed modelling is the car park behind the terminal however this is a flight sim, not a driving sim! Therefore the missing detail in the car park makes no difference to the realism created by DAI in other areas of the airport.

According to the DAI website in a future update the coast line will be custom modeled, textured and included which is very exciting and will  make the approach into the airport even more great! If you haven't got this already then I suggest you get it now! It won't be disappointing. It is available from the DAI Website for 34 Euro.

Available here:

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DAI-MEDIA

Barcelona El Prat   for   €34.00

If you have any questions please feel free to comment below.

 

Reviewed by : Joe

©copyright 2015 : X-Plane Reviews

 

Technical Requirements:

Windows Vista or Windows 7 (32 or 64 bits) or

MAC OS 10.6 (or higher) or

X-Plane 10.40 (or higher - 64 bit compatible)

Pentium 2 GHz

- 4GB RAM/1GB VRAM150MB available hard disk space

Version 1.0

______________________________________________________________________

Review System Specifications: 

Computer System:

-Intel Core i5 3330 @ 3.00GHz

-4.00gb of RAM

-Geforce GTX 650 

 

Software:

-Windows 7 64 bit

-X-Plane 10 Global version 10.31

- Barcelona El Prat by DAI-Media

- EGGD Bristol by Pilot Plus

Hardware:

- Saitek Pro Flight Yoke System

- Saitek Rudder Pedals.

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