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First up, Ahmed Akram’s HECA+Cairo International Airport is a good effort and scenery on a grand scale. This is a huge international airport with complex, ornately designed buildings everywhere you look, and by and large these converted buildings are well rendered by XP. Where this effort seems to come undone concerns placement and surrounding detail.

Just poking around during our first look it was obvious that these buildings generally conform to building placement on the ground (see the Google Earth image, below) but that some buildings are simply placed on “ground” textures, and that while at the real facility all the buildings are tied together by ramps, aprons, and roadways, few of these are present in the scenery package. In the end the facility looks good, but not quite busily realistic enough to be truly immersive.

I’ve included the pinned location of the Great Pyramids on the Giza Plateau in the last image just above; take-off from the airport and turn SW to 240 degrees, and their location is less than 20 miles away and almost visible from the airport. However, and this is a big however, they are not included in XP’s default landscape and must be added by developers. An earlier HECA by developer Ted Davis included these in his AFRICA/CAIRO/EGYPT package, but replacing that earlier package with the airport under review here deleted these objects. So, it would be a good idea for the developer to get these into his package. These features are a real bonus, and to have and see these objects when coming into the area is more than simply fun and instructive, and I would recommend trying to construct these with photo-textures as Ted Davis’s are really somewhat plain, as you’ll see below.
Seen just below is the area where the pyramids should be, and what you’ll find with this package installed; the road junction just under the cockpit is an excellent marker, and the structures would be just ahead of the a/c:

Next, a series of shots taken at HECA with Ted Davis’s older “EGYPT” scenery effort. The airport buildings are nowhere near as good as the current file’s and placement is just plain “off”, and even the ‘pyramids’ suffer when seen up close, but the comparison is instructive so let’s take a quick look at this older file now:

Next, a series of images departing toward the pyramids using Ted Davis’s package elements. First, the cockpit view:

I have the NDB set to 340, the VOR on CAI 112.5 for DME. The NDB takes you directly toward the pyramids, and the DME will give you the distance you need to pinpoint the structures, assuming you can’t see them for some reason…but frankly, they’re hard to miss. In the image above I’ve highlighted them (center), and you should be able make them out in the next two images below. Don’t forget to click to enlarge these images (and as always, all our images):



As you can see in the last image just above, the pyramids themselves are rather simple affairs in this package, but they are LIT and therefore really useful as VFR approach landmarks day or night (let alone just fun to have). LIT Photo-textures ought to be fairly simple affairs to make and would be simply glorious to have in XP. A really good texture artist could have real fun with this!

Even without all these additions, XP does a great job of rendering Cairo and the Nile, as is apparent in the image above, and below, with the 737 seen departing Cairo:

That’s audiotracker’s AirFrance “retro” livery, by the by.
Now let’s look at elements from the “new” scenery package, starting with the main terminal buildings. What’s jarring to me is that most just sit on “sand”, and that there are no parking lots or other ground features around them to tie it all together. Missing or angularly harsh ramp lighting only compounds this issue.

As you can readily see, these buildings are both more substantial and more accurately reflect what’s on the ground in Egypt than the earlier effort. LIT textures are well done if a little too bright, but again, you can see that these buildings simply look as if they’ve been plopped down willy-nilly on the ground, and the contrast is not good. This package is crying out for more detail to be added around the buildings: roadways, sidewalks, vehicles, objects on the ramps, static a/c, light towers, etc. There are actually good examples of these in the efforts below, so read on!
Now, to give you an example of just how good detail is in a few areas of this package, look at the towers used for the runway approach lighting, just below, and further on, note that while there are no static aircraft on the vast passenger ramps, there are a few on the cargo ramps and in maintenance hangars. Odd.

Also note in the images just above and below the one building that is terribly off scale. In the image above look at the rightmost building: the doors are three stories tall, the counters behind the glass almost two stories tall. Below, the same building beyond the arced trusses…the huge doors three stories tall, etc… I dunno…call it The Hall of the Giants?

Still, any way you cut it this is a great new airport for XP. It could use static a/c and ground vehicles, generally more clutter and detail, but even as is it’s a grand new airport for OPS all over the eastern Med and beyond. KJFK and KORD are even reasonable destinations, and RJ OPS all over the Middle East now have a new airport to call home! And one benefit of this simplicity is that performance is not too bad. With objects at “very high” framerates were good, in the 30s-50s depending on heading and proximity to Cairo, but with settings maxed out the surrounding Cairo area really bogs things down; I still had rates in the mid-20s but did get fogging.

I hope we haven’t seen an end to work on this one, and please consider this “constructive criticism” and not mean-spirited. With a little more detail work this one could be world class, and it’s certainly Scenery of the Month material as is. Highly recommended.

+++++

المصدر

https://xplane10.wordpress.com/2011/08/29/the-news-heard-round-the-ramps-for-29-august-2011/