Xiamen airport : our review

FSX. In less than a year, Pacific Islands Sim has prouven its ability to jump from small Pacific islands to large airports. The team (Graham Michael) has learnt to rapidly design hundreds of custom made buildings. Dense animated car traffic and detailed airports ads to the realm.

P.I.S. XIAMEN AIRPORT (ZSAM)

OUR REVIEW

Version tested : FSX V.1.0.

Manual : 7 pages in english and one chart (plus a link to access more charts).

File : 404 MB

Installation : very easy and auto-registration of the scene in the library.

If you buy it from Simmarket, the serial key included in the email will help generate the
authorization code.
Framerate :
Official : more than 40 fps announced with sliders 100 % to the right.
Airdailyx : 25 to 35 from PMDG NGX cockpit (around 20/25 on approach).
(all sliders 100 % except for the sea and traffic)

Size of the scenery : approximately 20 square miles.

The bad :

* Buildings are not (or don't seem) really lighted at night.

* More containers and static aircrafts could have been added in the cargo area.

 

The good :

* Ground textures in the apron area are great (see picture below).

* Very dense scenery with a lot of road traffic, custom buildings and many photoreal textures.
   many VFR details (bridges, tower cranes, signs on buildings).

* Good choice. There is a real lack of chinese airports for  FSX.

With Puerto Vallarta, one of his last work, we knew that PacSim could handle a large airport and Xiamen ZSAM along the chinese coastline made sense. It's a good departure point to cross Pacific ocean or reach all the pacifican islands already made by the team (Marshall's, Fua'Amotu..).

On the other hand, if you just want to fly around the Pacific coast, you will not get a lot of good airports. Samsoft Sky of Tapei X is totaly out to date and we will have to wait a few weeks for Asean Sceneries airports Macau X.
So there is only a few connections, to the excellent Elite Air Shanghai airports (Pudong requires a very good computer), to Imagine Sim Hong Kong Chek Lap kok and few others (Seoul, Kobe, Kansai and Fukuoka for instance).

Graham has been helped here by five beta testers and by a chinese team who grabbed all the resources ; photos, landclass etc.

Thank to that, your approach to the runway 05 should be exciting !

* * * * *

You will be impressed by the quality of ground textures, at the main apron. And my picture here, is taken with my ATI card at average quality settings.

Runway signs have been worked carefully to show wear.

Volumetric grass all around the runway

The combination of custom buildings and photoreal textures are really stressing the exotism of this place.

Very good photoreal texture on this front building but below, from the cockpit view, the textures could have been a little bit better.

That's what you should see while on your final approach to runway 5...

Here, i set my traffic at 50 %

I don't know how Graham designed this building here. It looks so realistic. Maybe he put some very high defintion textures but it"s not the case in the other ones.

Approching the threshold of runway 05.

The four next ones have been taken at dusk : 

Here is the cargo area on the left and center.

More containers and maybe an aircraft loading its cargo would have been great.

The six last shots have been taken at night.

Some of them give you an idea of the road traffic ( slider at 50 %).

There is even traffic on the bridges.

More on PacSim Xiamen 

http://www.islandsim.com/xiamen-gaoqi-international.html

Airdailyx June 2012