Review: LatinVFR San Diego v2

Recently, I got an opportunity to take a look at LatinVFR’s San Diego v2 Scenery for Prepar3D. First of all, I’d like to thank LatinVFR for making this review possible by providing us with a copy of this scenery.

Introduction

Let me first introduce the airport itself. San Diego International Airport is an airport located near the city of San Diego, California, USA. With ICAO code KSAN and IATA code SAN, the airport served almost 17 million passengers back in 2009. The airport is served by Air Canada, Alaska Airlines or Southwest, with routes to Toronto, Portland, San Francisco, Albuquerque, Austin and Chicago. Keep in mind, that this airport does not serve any long haul routes.

First impressions

The very first impressions of this airport were great. The scenery is really good-looking, it has plenty of details and it feels very natural. Because of the nearby skyline, which has been modelled as well, I knew, that this is not only an airport scenery.

Modelling

Modelling of this airport is good. There are some, in my opinion, imperfections, especially when looking at the terminal buildings. You may already know, that I am a big 3D interior fan. The 3D interior is only in some of the terminals, the rest is just a building with texture. The quality of the terminal buildings varies. This can cause problems in the areas where two terminal buildings meet each other, as it doesn’t look natural. However, when there is a 3D interior in a terminal, it is really good-looking and very detailed.

What I also really like is the detail of jetways, the model of it is sharp and very clean, so big thumbs up for that. This also applies to the ATC tower. The models of the nearby skyscrapers are great as well. Of course, they don’t have a 3D interior, but in this case, it is not so important. I am very satisfied with the skyline modelling and non-airport buildings overall. Also, the backyard of the terminal is detailed, and plenty of vehicles at nearby parking adds a huge immersion, and the FPS is not bad either.

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Texturing

The texturing of this airport is great. However, I think there is a lack in detail sometimes. The textures are in my opinion not very contrasting, and the colours of it are somehow washed-out. However, this is only at some places and is especially visible at the terminals without 3D interior.

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What I also didn’t like is the glitching textures of taxiway lines. This is visible when you move the camera. When I was checking out the surrounding area, I noticed, that there is a location nearby to the airport, where you can see a “summary” of all ground marking textures. This can be a bug or an issue with the scenery itself, but I did not manage to solve that.

Surrounding area

The surrounding area, at first glance, is looking very good, but you’ll see more when you fly up to the skies. I was very surprised by its size, which is shown in the screenshot below. It is not only an airport scenery, as I mentioned, but also covers a big surrounding area, which blends well with Orbx FTX Global product.

I really liked the smaller details of the surrounding area, like boats, custom buildings, vegetation, etc. I’d say this is where the scenery does not really stagnate, the issue is with some texture layering issues, where you can see a big texture difference.

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Performance

Formerly, I was really sceptic about the performance, as I don’t have some good experiences with LatinVFR sceneries, regarding the performance, and this surprised me a lot. Although this scenery is big, has a huge surrounding area with a variety of custom 3D models and a lot of cars on a parking place, the scenery has really good performance, even on my slower computer with FSLabs A320, which is infamous for its optimisation.

Conclussion

Overall, I’d recommend the scenery, the pricetag of it is fine, but I’d wait for sales, as the scenery has some blind spots. The performance of it is good, but the lack in detail and some minor bugs did really bring the immersion of the scenery down.

The scenery can be bought through the LatinVFR store.