Atlanta Skyline Scenery

By Phil Colvin (21 September 2002)

ow! Good one! Like to add another hi-res city to your list of available destinations? No, I'm not exaggerating. Bill Molony's new scenery download does just that with FS2002's rather sparse and very generic looking city of Atlanta, Georgia, adding over 100 new buildings and other objects to transform it to a place you can really explore. Of all the scenery downloads for FS2002 I've seen, only Shigeo "Shige" Ishii's Las Vegas upgrade rivals this one - and unlike that Vegas add-on, this one doesn't reduce my frame rates to the point that I only use it to drive cars through at twenty miles an hour. Furthermore the quality of the buildings is just as good as the best FS2002 default buildings.

Atlanta before (left) and after

The instructions provided for installation are crystal clear - even a rank beginner will have no problem with them - and nothing is left out. I've never seen such clear and complete documentation for a piece of freeware. You're even told how to remove individual buildings if you don't happen to like them! And although warnings are provided regarding temporarily "white" areas and "moire" patterns on some buildings, I had no such problems on my system, a one gig P3 with 384 megs of ram and a 64 meg GeForce 2 Ultra card. I fly at 1024 x 768 resolution.

Outskirts before (left) and after

And the documentation doesn't stop there. You're given an excellent verbal tour guide and even a zip file with eighty-three jpeg images, identifying virtually every object! A lot of pride and loving care must have gone into this scenery, and it certainly shows. I'm very impressed by the tremendous amount of labor this download represents.

Heading 360 before (left) and after

Not only do you get a very major upgrade to the downtown area (even some of the parking lots look great), but you'll also see some major improvements in various outlying areas. And you also get Turner Field, definitely a landscape-dominating edifice. Both the day and night textures in this add-on are great, but, just with all else in FS2002, things look best and most believable near sunset when there's still some sun out and the city lights have come on.

Turner Stadium before (left) and after

There are only two things I could wish were better: one is the distance from which you can see all the new buildings - not nearly as far, for example, as the distance from which you can see Chicago's skyline (but for all I know that's due to my systems limitations), and the other is the degree of detail given to Turner Field, which doesn't equal the best add-on buildings for downtown. But those are minor points indeed. And the screen shots in this review just scratch the surface, there's plenty for you to find here.

In Flight Simulator 2000 I had added dozens of scenery downloads, and some of them were so great I wish they also worked in FS2002 (they didn't), but in the latest version the default stuff is so much better that this Atlanta download is only my twenty-third scenery add-on, compared to over two hundred aircraft. But this one is so good it's got me wondering what else I've been missing, so I'm going to be making up for lost time with scenery these next few weeks - starting with Mr. Molony's other Atlanta upgrades like Hartsfield Airport and Stone Mountain!

Phil Colvin
gimpyfoot1@yahoo.com

Download the Atlanta skyline scenery.

[ Back | Main Menu | Logout | Help ]