Fly Tampa's San Diego International Airport, Lindbergh Field for MSFS2004

Payware $21.00 US from flytampa.com

Reviewer: Tony Gondola, April 2004

The payware scenery company Fly Tampa has been making a name for themselves in the MSFS community with their previous releases of detailed scenery for Miami and Tampa International airports. San Diego just happens to be one of my favorite cities in the US so with the release of KSAN, I decided it was time for a closer look.

The package retails for $21.00 US and is available as a 7 MB download from one of two venders that are linked from the fly Tampa web site. There is also a CD version available from simware simulations for euro $24.95. Download information was provided immediately upon completion of the online order. Once the quick download was finished the installer took care of the rest. One nice feature of the installation is it does give a few options has to how much of the scenery you want to install. something that would be helpful for people who are dealing with slow hardware. The installer automatically updates your scenery settings so there isn't any further action required by the user to get this package up and running.

As with most major airports, MSFS does take a stab at giving you something more then just a runway however it's far from a true representation of the actual airport. With the upgrade installed the airport is transformed into a very accurate representation of KSAN. Everything from the parking lot to the fences are accurately detailed and located. Although somewhat roughly modeled, the large array of static and animated objects is well used to give the sense of a busy airport without going overboard. All taxiway signage and markings are there making it easy to get from the runway to your gate. As a bonus you also get the Coast Guard seaplane facility located just off the north end of the airport. The quality of the textures used for all the ground surfaces and lines is excellent and adds much to the realism of the product. At the end of a heavy jet flight I usually don't bother to taxi to the gate but with this scenery installed, it's worth the trip. There's even an animated, wand waving parking assistant to help you line up for gate and stop at the right point. It should be noted that he/she does a pretty good job.

Of course, it seems that whenever you install highly detailed scenery like this there's always a price to pay in performance. Fly Tampa's KSAN is no exception but for the amount of detail present the overall impact on performance isn't as bad as some. On my AMD 2200+/Ti 4200-64 system I normally fly MSFS locked at 28 FPS. Whenever I got near the terminal area my frame rate would drop down to between 16 and 18 FPS.  Scenery complexity and other adjustments can reduce the hit a bit so you just have to work with it on your system to find what the best settings are. I also found that the MIP setting I had been using all along needed to be adjusted to reduce shimmer with this scenery. The problem disappeared once I turned on FSAA.

Overall I think they have done a good job on this package. There's great attention to detail without giving you a lot of bells and whistles just because they can. Granted, not everyone is going to be willing to fork over $21.00 US just to add another detailed airport but if you fly a lot in the southern California area the upgrade is well worth it. It is also reported to work very well with Megascenery.com's photo-real southern California package. Combined with the great detail at LAX provided with the stock MSFS scenery it all really comes together into a very accurate scenery area to work in.