This is not a review copy, I purchased this software from x-plane.org. If ever I am given a review copy or asked to review something, there will be a similar disclosure statement.
Welcome to my second ever review. Here we will take a look at the recently released Drzewiecki Designs Baku XP scenery. Included in the scenery, according to Drzewiecki Designs, is a detailed rendition of UBBB Heydar Aliyev International Airport, lite versions of all other Azeri airports, and city landmarks.
The star of the product is of course UBBB Heydar Aliyev International Airport itself. The main modern terminal building is gorgeous.
Below are some screenshots and thoughts about the scenery, but first take a look at this video which features the airport.
There are some static aircraft. I have not looked at options for removing them, but there are not many and they do not infringe on important or useful ramp starts at all. No problem there. I have thoroughly enjoyed Drzewiecki Design’s New York City product, and their Miami City product. Their airports while they have certainly been good (my only experience here is New York Airports XP) they have been missing some of my favorite things to see in payware X-Plane 10 scenery. Notably I have never seen an animated jetway in one of their airports and that is annoying to me. Other than that their styling and modeling of the actual terminal buildings has been fantastic, and Baku is no exception.
There are some nice ground vehicle models present in the scenery, and thankfully they make the airport seem like it’s functioning without being in the way of other ground service plugins a sim pilot may choose to use with their aircraft.
Again the main terminal building looks fantastic, with a modeled interior and properly transparent glass.
At night the airport is just as gorgeous, with the night textures and interior lighting being done properly. The glass is still transparent, there is not a silly texture used to make it look like a lit window with an interior behind it.
The parking lot has a diverse selection of cars parked in it and adds to the sense that this airport is functioning.
The photo real scenery they chose to use seems to be built on a relatively low resolution ortho, and I’m not a huge fan of it. I also has a very hard break with the surround terrain, as seen in this screenshot. City landmarks are included in the scenery, and they look fine, but it looks as though it could use some autogen to fill in the city a bit.
Overall I do like the scenery, the airport is excellent except that the jetways are static. The ortho scenery I don’t like, and I have not looked to see if they have an option without it, but they definitely might. The city has landmarks, but it does really feel like a city, though this may work better once Laminar Research brings the improved autogen to the rest of the world, as opposed to North America only as it is now. I am slowly purchasing their other products, and I will go through them as I have time. Their New York City scenery is fantastic and makes New York look like it should. If you haven’t taken a look at it you definitely should, it is available here. The New York Airports are available as a separate product and it too is very good, although it suffers from the same absence of animated jetways.
This scenery is available for $23 on the x-plane.org store, or you can click here to go directly.
I’m not sure what I’ll review next, but I will definitely be writing more often, so look for those pieces as they come out, and definitely leave comments with your thoughts.