AreoWorks Airbus A340

[Iroquois]

I've got another review in line for you guys. This time it's the new A340 by AreoWorks. AreoWorks claims that their model is "payware quality" and designe was aided by actual Airbus technical data and real A340 pilots. Needless to say their work is not bad. It's sub Meljet but on par with Project Opensky's work. The aircraft looks pretty decent with dynamic lighting and shine. As for the interior, their DVC and cockpit are weak points. The panel is missing a lot of it's guages. The DVC looks really good, on par with project airbus' work but is a real frame hog and even my Geforce FX5200 has trouble with it at more crowded airports. As for flying characteristics, not bad. Pulls to the left slightly on take off and tends to loose energy when climbing over 30,000ft. I assume that these are probably due to real world performance and the fact that Microsoft's autopilot seems to have trouble holding airspeed in a climb by not giving enough power to the engines. This plane comes in several liveries including Qantas, Air Canada, Airbus Factory, and Star Alliance Group. The aircraft and repaints are available at Avsim and probably FlightSim too. It does have an auto install but download it any way, it's worth it.

The Virgin Atlantic Livery is the best looking one for this aircraft. The repainter did an excellent job. It really shows off it's visual features.


This is AW's base pack livery, shown here at Charlotte/Douglas Int'n. The 777 in the background is poking into the terminal because this is addon scenery no updated with AfCad.


A view of the virtual cockpit. There are no guages because I switched panes from theirs to the default 777. The front panel is photo realistic.


Taking off at Toronto Pearson Airport. The Star Alliance Group has an interesting livery, showing off several of their members.


And Finally, a close up of the Virgin Atlantic livery over London.


To sum up:
Hits:
-Dynamic shine and good paint jobs make this a winner.
-Accurate flight dynamics make this a pleasure to fly.
-Opening doors and cargo bay nice touch.

Misses:
-DVC hits frames hard.
-Panel complicated to operate and missing some guages.
-Auto install feature is unpopular with some simmers. (See FS2002 forum on this topic)

Over all rating:
4 out of 5.

Available at Avsim.com

Keep watch for future reviews of Meljets 777 vers 2, Fuel Labs Dornier 728-100, and Peter Brun & Mario Coelho's Dassault Falcon 7X version 2.

[Lurch]

This A340 is pretty good but the textures take too long to load on the external view and I'm running AMD2500+ XP,GeForce 4 Ti4800 and 1Gb of DDR-333 RAM.Anybody else have that problem?

[Depresurisation]

LOL @ PICTURE 2 :
  The aircraft on the back is in the building!!!  ;D

Anyway... Nice aircraft indeed  ;)

[Iroquois]

This A340 is pretty good but the textures take too long to load on the external view and I'm running AMD2500+ XP,GeForce 4 Ti4800 and 1Gb of DDR-333 RAM.Anybody else have that problem?

I did at first but as I said in my review, I think it's the DVC hogging resources. It no longer took forever to load once I switched panels.

[Rifleman]

Orenda..........are these shots all taken with your FX5200?......there seems to be quite a bit of inconsistency on them........I never expected to see any more jaggies on your stuff now, especially since you have 128 megs of vid ram........I think you need to adjust the res you fly at, or maybe some tweakin ?.........the reason I say this is because Wendy has the same card (FX 5200) and we don't get the same jaggies on her machine when running flt sim .....?

[Iroquois]

Orenda..........are these shots all taken with your FX5200?......there seems to be quite a bit of inconsistency on them........I never expected to see any more jaggies on your stuff now, especially since you have 128 megs of vid ram........I think you need to adjust the res you fly at, or maybe some tweakin ?.........the reason I say this is because Wendy has the same card (FX 5200) and we don't get the same jaggies on her machine when running flt sim .....?

What do you mean? They look fine to me. The reason the screenshots are blury is because YAFSScreen take shots in high res. I have to shrink the image quality to maintain a decent size while still keeping the shots within 100k. The jagged edges is due to me turning off antialising. I still have to play around a bit.

[Mr. Bones]

i love it...great shots!

[Guruswarmyoz]

The auto pilot is easy to fix:
[autopilot]
autopilot_available= 1
flight_director_available= 1
default_vertical_speed= 1800.0
autothrottle_available= 1
autothrottle_arming_required= 1
autothrottle_max_rpm = 90
autothrottle_takeoff_ga= 1
pitch_takeoff_ga = 8;

The section above from the aircraft.cfg, what you need to alter is "autothrottle_max_rpm = 90", adjust the number 90 to 100 & that will give you 100% power in autothrottle.
As for climbing above FL300, take out fuel. Airliners won't climb at these altitudes on a heavy load (is why you have step climbs as fuel is burnt off, go higher to get better efficiancy out of jet engines).
Ta for the heads up on this model, appreciated!

[Rifleman]

What do you mean? They look fine to me. The reason the screenshots are blury is because YAFSScreen take shots in high res. I have to shrink the image quality to maintain a decent size while still keeping the shots within 100k. The jagged edges is due to me turning off antialising. I still have to play around a bit.

OK first off....some shots are really jaggie...(zig-zags)...but not all, ...so my first question would be- are you flying in a window or full screen? (alt-enter).....second is, what res do you fly at ? Third- Are you able to max every slider ? and lastly, what kind of frame rates do you average ?

We are trying to build some info on what we should expect from the same card....its nice to see you are running a very similar system to mine and Wendys, even though I still use the GeForce 4 MX440 SE.

[Depresurisation]

Rifleman, may I say that you are using DDR and orenda is using SDRAM? That is a very big differnce!

[Rifleman]

Rifleman, may I say that you are using DDR and orenda is using SDRAM? That is a very big differnce!

I totally missed that ?........Oh no, then that means Wendy has just traded in here 64 whcih may have acted like it was a 128 for a 128 which can't think like more than it is, and uses a different chipset on the card too ?......we may have been better off to stay with the MX440 ?..........looking into the specs now .........

[Rifleman]

After looking into your claim on the type of RAM in use on these two vid cards in question, I have found that both use the (Dual Data Rate) DDR RAM.......no question about it.......this shot came from the front of the box....

[Iroquois]

It's DDR Ram and I fixed it by playing with Riva Tuner some more. I was able to tune the drivers to use full anitalising without substantial frame loss. Scenery is set at a medium-high setting where aircraft is at all sliders maxed. Now, Jedi Outcast looks like a movie and Train Simulator looks like my old electric train set.

[Rifleman]

Thanks Orenda, I knew that your card would do more than you were posting....now we need to get Wendys doing the same thing.....she is taking a frame rate hit still with some certain planes......

[Rifleman]

Orenda, you can see for yourself that we not have all that much different on these boards ?....this is from the manual....same as yours with 4x AGP ....