Fly Tampa Midway : full test

The secret ? Kept until the last minute. Six years after the first FS9 version, FSX is finally released. The unique one square mile airport has inherited this shape from an old ordinance of 1785, dividing land in townships of 640 acres. To Martin and George, Fly Tampa developers, Midway is the good size airport between two major ones (the next is Athens LGAV). Under some aspects, Midway is technically more complicated (than Buffalo) with motorways and roadbridges, many more air-bridges and - for the first time - a sophisticated typical houses autogen.

Tested on a mid-size core processor, my quadcore 2,33 Ghz, the airport is pretty much smooth, maybe even more than Buffalo. I got something like 15 fps (with a small Beechcraft 58 loaded) and i had to diminish the global texture resolution to very high - as advised in the manual - in order to get this performance.

Note that the scenery is doing very well despite Chicago city proximity. We perfectly see the skycrapers from this point but its okay. And with US Cities Chicago ? You don't even want to think about it, unless you already got your last generation core processor...I5 or I7.

To improve the lighting, Fly Tampa advices us to use EMB series HDR Bloom plugin from AVSIM ; This strongly improves night lights but i did not wish to try it on a ATI graphic card.

http://forums1.avsim.net/topic/248307-adaptive-lighting-effect-forfsx/ page__hl__ENBSeries

The screeshots are taken with Ultimate terrain USA working. This considerably enhance background lights at night.

Some reflective textures here.

Too bad, Martin and George were probably a bit too lazy

to build a road bridge here.

A new interesting autogen. Very nice and include night lights too.

High definition ground textures.

Oliver Pabst is already working on AES conversion.

Summer seasonal textures.

Conclusion :

A great addition to FSX world.

A real work on framerate efficiency.

A total surprise gift (sometimes we like that).

And the price is fair.

I am giving a 9,5/10 because of this missing road bridge.