Latin VFR Carrasco : Hot test

FS9/FSX. After the large Miami KMIA project, the Costa rican team was probably looking for a peaceful mid-size place. Although i am desperately looking for airports located between west coast and east coast of South America, Montevideo Carrasco is offering new routes toward Chili, Argentina and Brazil.

LATIN VFR MONTEVIDEO CARRASCO
( SUMU )

Version tested : FSX. V.1.0

File : 288 MB on FSX, 64 on FS 2004.
Manual : 2 manuals of 11 pages, one for explanations and one that includes charts.

Framerate : Very friendly.

Installation : fast, simple and automated.


The bad :

* The glass shield of the main terminal has been textured in green. I would have prefered some translucid effect showing the life inside the terminal.

* Some ground textures would have required some higher resolution (roads).

The good :

* Animation and realism. You will find a lot of car traffic (native animations) around the airport, many static aircrafts and the AI traffic is working fine (tested with defaut FSX aircrafts). Birds included too.

* Very effective night ligths.

* Latin VFR is among the very few editors to work on South american airports. I support that.

This is the old terminal, dedicated to cargos and some bizjets, like here.

A wide view of the terminals at dusk.

The ground textures (taxiways, runway, aprons) are irreproachable and really give the sensation of asphal and concrete materials. A lot of developers are mastering these textures very well today. Question is : what will be the next step ?

Many hangars have been designed with care. A dozen and more are even open. What impressed me the most at the first look are the sheet-metal rooves. Several hangars even have realistic textures with rusty effects.

Here is the inside of a large open hangar. The work has certainly not been sacrified.

The famous roof of the main terminal. From a certain distance, it looks all white. But take a deeper look and you see the details of the arch designed by the Uruguayan architect Raphael Vinoly (opened in february 2007). 

Reflections on top of jetways 

Typical Uruguayan architecture ? Anyway, there are a lot of these colorful houses around the airport and along the ocean. As soon as you can see these houses from your cockpit, let's say during approach stage, you immediately get the exotism of this region. And there are thousands of these houses.

I really like this kind of configuration when you are landing over a crowded highway.

On a I7 processor, i tried to set the cursor of traffic animation to 40-50 % without any drop of the framerate. My only regret here is that Latin VFR could have used some higher resolution for the roads. 

I thing this is the first time LVF is putting so much static cars. Nice impression although here too, i would have liked higher ground resolution.

Ah, thats the kind of thing i don't like... Okay, you can't see it from your landing pathway but you will tell to yourself  "dammit there are these awful trees over there".

Airdailyx June 2012