REVIEWS

MegaScenery: The New Gold Standard For Photorealistic Scenery

By Cap Mason, Flight Simulation Editor

(Note: Click on the images to see each screen shot enlarged to full 1280x1024 screen resolution as viewed when flying. The detail is unbelievable! This is recommended only for people with high-speed Internet connections due to the large image file sizes.)


Lifting off from LAX and heading northeast, you get the signature view of what makes the LA basin great -- freeways, urban sprawl and the San Gabriel mountains. MegaScenery places all the roads and landmarks right where they ought to be.

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I had heard the hoopla, read the press releases, listened to the developers waxing rhapsodic about it and just had to see it for myself. I'm a hard-nosed skeptic when it comes to flightsim add-ons. Seeing is, after all, believing, right?

So, as I lifted off runway 25L at Los Angeles International and performed a climbing left turn to the southwest I looked over the port wing -- and my jaw dropped! Instead of the decent, but slightly gamey-looking stock FS2004 scenery, I saw the LA area the same way I do when I fly out of LAX on a Southwest Airlines commercial flight. The hills, buildings, freeways, streets -- everything -- looked absolutely real. There was the infamous 405. I could see Wilshire Boulevard and even make out UCLA to the north in Westwood. The exquisite details in the terrain and autogen buildings gave me powerful visual cues that I was actually "there". This was no run-of-the-mill simulation. Somehow, I had been magically teleported to the sky above Los Angeles and everything I saw was real. The shocking part wasn't that the view looked incredibly cool, but that all the hoopla about MegaScenery is true. Woohoo! I wanted to see more of this.

What is MegaScenery?

Photorealistic scenery has been around for a long time in the flightsim world. MegaScenery USA takes it to a much higher level. Developed by Aerosoft Australia and published by PC Aviator, the scenery for just the Los Angeles to San Diego area fills two CDs with over 74,000 files. This is a serious load of exciting visual detail.

The first release of MegaScenery Volume 1 covers the Los Angeles to San Diego area from the coast to the desert. It's an area 112 nautical miles, north to south and 125 nautical miles, east to west and includes Catalina and the Channel Islands. MegaScenery is based on 5 meter per pixel, high resolution satellite imagery. So, instead of flying over repeating background tiles with vague, indistinct images -- you get the real thing presented in eye-popping detail.

Like taking a vacation in Southern California

Starting my tour from San Diego, I played airborne tourist and hit all the hot spots. For the first time, I could actually make them out from the air in FS2002 and FS2004. San Diego is a jewel of a city that's loaded with tourist attractions including the US Navy base in the harbor. I could clearly identify Sea World, Balboa Park, the San Diego Zoo, the Wild Animal Park, UC San Diego and the Scripts Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla.

Los Angeles, “The City of The Angels”, is certainly a far cry from heaven. With its sprawling urban landscape filling the coastal plain, it covers an area of more than 1000 square-miles. With dozens of interconnected communities, LA is a latticework of concrete, tall buildings, freeways and millions of inhabitants. On the other hand, even though I live in San Francisco, I love LA. I just had to buzz my daughter's neighborhood in Westwood adjacent to UCLA, where she is a student. I also paid an airborne visit to the Hollywood Bowl, the movie and TV studios, the La Brea Tar Pits which are on Wilshire Boulevard next to the LA County Museum of Art (LACMA) on Museum Row. Of course, I also had to buzz UCLA's rival school, USC and circle the Queen Mary at Long Beach. The San Gabriel and San Bernardino Mountains form a 2500-meter high wall to the north and east that is shown with all is splendid detail in MegaScenery. I could even make out the Palomar Observatory on Mt. Palomar in San Diego County east of Temecula and the observatory on top of Mt. Wilson high above Pasadena. About 50 miles to the east, I could see the resort areas of Big Bear Lake. and Lake Arrowhead. Offshore, the Channel Islands provide a welcome landmark. The trip by seaplane to Avalon (KAVX) is always a treat, both in flightsimming and the real world.

Snaking along The Grapevine, heading east toward the desert and Bakersfield, I saw all the familiar terrain details you would expect in a flight over the LA area. Believe it or not, this is a FS2004 screen shot and not an aerial photograph.

Seeing is believing.

I tested MegaScenery both in FS2002 and FS2004. It looked the same in both sims. I noticed that the scenery looked best for sightseeing between 3000 and 5000 feet. With my system's graphics pumped up to the max, I occasionally noticed a slight lag while the scenery details emerged. This is typical of FS2002/FS2004 scenery when you run it full throttle. Since I fly to relax and enjoy myself, waiting a half second for the scenery to emerge was not a big deal for me.

This was an entirely new and exciting flightsim VFR experience because MegaScenery uses high resolution Digital Elevation Model data. The accuracy is down to a few feet so I saw correct elevation details across the entire Los Angeles-San Diego area. This was especially cool when I flew over the mountains. I could identify all the familiar landmarks and reference them on my charts. When I flew along The Grapevine that snakes through the mountains from LA to the desert near Bakersfield, I saw every mountain, hill, valley, ridge line, lake, secondary road, foot trail and highway right where they all should be.

Flying over LA is not nearly as exciting as turning east to fly over the mountains and desert or south to San Diego. Once you get past the urban sprawl of the LA basin, the beauty of California's geographic extravaganza comes into spectacular view. I was simply agog over the fact that I could pick out distinctive landmarks. As I flew along the coast, the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant stood out clearly. When I approached San Diego, the terrain around El Toro MCAS and Miramar MCAS was so crisp I swear I could see people coming out of the BOQ! The Coronado peninsula was breathtaking. As I approached downtown San Diego and looked south across the border to Tijuana, I could clearly see the Del Coronado hotel on the right.

I flew MegaScenery with both pre-set weather patterns and using FS2004's dynamic weather. I found that the best sightseeing was done with the dynamic weather changes set to a normal time synch. That means they update every 15 minutes right along with METARS when you fly while connected to the Internet. But, instead of boring you with words, let me dazzle you with screen shots.

Miramar MCAS is surrounded by detailed suburbs and freeways. When you compare MegaScenery to stock FS2004, you realize what we've been missing. In stock scenery, none of the parks, roadways, freeway interchanges or detailed accurate building placements show up. I also noticed that the water effects are more natural when you turn them off in the FS2004 Settings. My favorite aircraft for photo flights is Patty Wagstaff's Extra 300s. It's a dream to fly and easy to handle when you need to get just the right shot. I only wish my real-world photo shoots could go like this.
On the way to San Diego, you pass the San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant which you can see on the left. This view also shows you the edge of LA's suburban sprawl on the right and Catalina Island straight ahead just behind the clouds. The mountain range below is a natural barrier dividing LA from San Diego. Check out the detail in the mountain roads and hillside topography.


 
This view is taken looking north in the area between La Jolla and Oceanside. La Jolla is about thirty miles behind my location which is just south of Oceanside at the lagoon. You can see the US Marine Corps base at Camp Pendleton just beyond. LA is over the hills on the horizon.
Looking south across downtown San Diego, you see the US-Mexico border and Tijuana in the distance. On the right, you can see the hotels on the Coronado Peninsula and even the famous Del Coronado with its distinctive cone-shaped orange roof.


 
This view is looking due east of San Diego toward the desert. You can even see automobiles on the roadways.
A site familiar to many Marines who went through basic training on the West Coast, Camp Pendleton and the area north of San Diego.


 
On approach to San Diego with the Coronado Peninsula just coming into view dead ahead. See the golf course near the center of the image? That was completely obscured in stock scenery. You can practically count the golf carts in this MegaScenery view.
San Diego looking west with the bay in the distance. One of the reasons people love living there is its natural beauty with sea, city and desert all meeting in one place.


 

See the difference before and after

Click here to see comparison shots before and after MegaScenery.

Click here for a whole gallery of screen shots all taken on low-powered computers.

Even more spectacular after dark

MegaScenery lights up after dark. The satellite imagery places all the street lights where they belong. So, you can follow highways and feast your eyes on the glittering jewels of the night time landscape. Check out this view of LAX and the surrounding area.

Fly only in the summer

You must set the season to summer in order to see MegaScenery when you fly. This isn't such a drawback when flying in Southern California because the terrain doesn't change that much between summer and winter. The only difference is a little snow on the peaks. As I understand it, to make all four seasons of MegaScenery would consume huge quantities of disk storage space plus a fat wad of your purchase dollars. The developers would need to use satellite imagery for the terrain taken during all four seasons. Each set of satellite images costs about $150,000. So, instead of MegaScenery costing less than $30, it would cost us over $120. Plus, with more than 74,000 files just for LA and San Diego, the disk space would be quadrupled to provide all four seasons. So, summertime in San Diego looks just fine to me!

Lots of extras inside the box

There are two versions of MegaScenery. Lite sells for $29.95 and contains just the software and instruction manuals. For $39.95 you can get The Full VFR Kit that adds an excellent collection of official FAA aeronautical charts. There is a very small price difference between them and the Full Kit is loaded with all the extras a serious flightsimmer, or real world pilot, would want to make flying in the LA-San Diego area as realistic as possible. Flying a real course with these charts is a lot of fun when you can identify real landmarks while navigating.

Here's what's included on the Full Kit:

VFR Sectional Chart

This is the primary chart used for VFR navigation in the USA. It is a full color chart with a scale of 1:500,000. There are 38 double sided charts that cover the contiguous United States. These charts show all topographical information required for safe VFR navigation. You can click on each image below to enlarge it.

       

VFR Terminal Area Chart

This is the primary chart used for VFR navigation in and around airports in areas designated as Terminal Areas. Terminal Areas are designated as a result of the busyness of the airspace. Generally Class B. It is a full color chart with a scale of 1:250,000. Their scale is larger as a result of the extra detail required for safe navigation in these busy airspaces. Topographical information. is the same as the Sectional but at twice the scale.

       

Terminal Procedures

Also known as instrument approach charts, these are IFR charts and give you information required to conduct both Precision (e.g. ILS approach) and Non-Precision (e.g. VOR approach) approaches into an airport. These also contain SIDs - Standard Instrument Departure routes and STARs - Standard Terminal Arrival Routes and Airport Diagrams. There's nothing more satisfying than conducting a precision ILS approach down to minimums...in both real-life and in your simulator.
           

Easy to install

The auto-installer works perfectly. There is an independent installation reference wizard that walks you through everything, step-by-step. It also coaches you on how to adjust your video settings for best results. I simply inserted the CD and it automatically recognized that I had both FS2002 and FS2004 installed. With 74,000 files, it would have been a tragic waste of disk space if MegaScenery installed itself twice, once in each sim's folder set. But, the MegaScenery designers figured this one out already. The installer puts a single set of scenery files on your system and then automatically configures both FS2002 and FS2004 to access them. 

The installer configures FS2002 and FS2004 for the best display settings to use with MegaScenery but I found that I needed to make some radical changes to suit the peculiarities of FS2004 and the ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video card. See details below.

My first, and as it turns out only, major gripe about MegaScenery is that the installation wizard only shows you settings for nVidia cards and drivers. The developers should have spent more time testing and tweaking on ATI cards and included that information in the initial release. I brought this to their attention and they will address it with online updates and future scenery volume releases.

Patience has its rewards.

I had to work on FS2004 and my ATI drivers to get them playing nicely together. See all the gory details below. Once I did, I was able to turn on MegaScenery's autogen and extended terrain details. WOW! What an amazing difference that made. The only downside is that both FS2002 and FS2004 will take a lot longer to launch your flight with extended terrain and MegaScenery. It took about 2-3 minute to launch on the XPS and will probably take even longer on a slower PC. But, the wait will be richly rewarded. And, the next time you launch the flight in the same FS2002 or FS2004 session, the wait to load scenery is much shorter. 

Frame Rate Friendly

In addition to giving me plenty of eye-candy, MegaScenery was also extremely frame rate friendly. Even with all my graphics sliders set to their maximums, MegaScenery didn't seem to place much of a performance load on my system. We tested it on a high performance Dell Dimension XPS with a 128MB ATI Radeon 9800 video card, a mid-range, 2.2 GHz Dell Dimension 8200 with a 64MB nVidia GeForce2 video card and even a lowly Celeron PC with a measly 8MB video card. We saw great results on each system as you can see from the screenshots below. Each one was taken on a low-powered PC flying with FS2004.

Santa Ana Mountains
Above El Monte - San Gabriel Mountains in the background


 
Over the top of San Bernardino
Check out the detail you can see even on a low-powered PC and a GeForece2 64MB video card.


 
San Diego suburbs 
San Gabriel Reservoir - Mt Baldy in the background


 

Good news for nVidia users

If you use FS2004, you probably already know this. If you're about to make the switch from FS2002, the good news for nVidia video card users is all you need to do is get the latest nVidia drivers. Install them, and go. Both FS2004 and MegaScenery run perfectly once you do this. Doesn't matter whether you have the latest GFX Ultra or an ancient GeForce2. Update your drivers. 

Special adjustments for the ATI Radeon 9700-9800 Pro vide cards and FS2004

The Problem

As far as I know, these FS2004 graphics issues only show up with the ATI RADEON 9700 and 9800 Pro 128MB video cards. They appear as scrambled text and images in the FS2004 Learning Center screens. They also manifest as flickering scenery and a barber-pole or moiré pattern on buildings and a tiny checkerboard pattern that shimmers and flickers on distant scenery. Basically, these video glitches are a colossal annoyance. Fear not, intrepid flightsimmers, the solution is at hand, doesn't cost you a dime, and you don't have to await a driver update from ATI. If you use the ATI 9700 or 9800 Pro video cards with FS2004, try these configuration setting for both stock scenery and MegaScenery .

The Simple Solution

The important concept that you need to understand is that instead of down-rating FS2004 display settings, as we all normally do when trying to get it to run with a cranky video card -- you need to go 180-degrees in the opposite direction. Max them out. The key inflection points are not the individual FS2004 settings but the ATI filtering and Direct 3D settings in the ATI Catalyst 3.6 driver. I have thoroughly tested this fix both with FS2004 stock scenery and  MegaScenery. It is 100% guaranteed to work, at least on the following system:

The Settings

Change these at your peril. You won't blow up your PC, but if you stray from these setting, or your system is too different from the Dell Dimensions described above, you won't get the same results. As far as I can see, these settings changes will not harm your PC, monitor, video card or FS2004 installation. However, as with all configuration changes, this requires a moderate level of PC operations skill. Do this at your own risk. If you run into unexpectedly negative results, just reset to the defaults and re-boot. You need to have both the ATI Catalyst 3.6 drivers and the ATI Control Panel installed to make these adjustments.

Start with your ATI Catalyst 3.6 display driver settings. To get to this screen in Windows XP Pro, click on START>CONTROL PANEL>DISPLAY>SETTINGS

Next, click on the ADVANCED and then the DIRECT3D tab to bring up the configuration screen shown below. You must have the ATI Control Panel installed in order to do this.

Set the Direct3D configuration to match the settings shown in the screen shot above. 

Launch FS2004 and click on the SETTINGS link. Select DISPLAYS, then the SCENERY tab to bring up the screen below.

Set the scenery configuration to match the settings shown in the screen shot above. 

Under TERRAIN:

Under SCENERY OBJECTS:

Click on the AIRCRAFT tab to access the screen below.

Set the aircraft configuration to match the settings shown in the screen shot above. These are optional settings based on your personal preferences. Aircraft display settings will not affect the ATI scenery flickering and Learning Center image corruption issues at all. On a high-powered system, I recommend maximum aircraft detail settings as shown here. 

Click on the WEATHER  tab to access the screen below.

Set the weather configuration to match the settings shown in the screen shot above. These are optional settings based on your personal preferences and your system's performance capabilities. Weather settings can consume vast amounts of system resources. On a low-powered system, you might want to dial down the weather settings since they also will have no affect on the ATI scenery flickering and Learning Center image corruption issues. On a high-powered system, I recommend the moderate weather settings shown here as a good starting point. Once you get your system stable, you can adjust these up or down to suit your flying needs.

Click on the HARDWARE  tab to access the screen below.

Set the hardware configuration to match the settings shown in the screen shot above.

Under HARDWARE RENDERING OPTIONS:

Click OK. Your will not need to re-start FS2004. 

 

Cap Mason
CapMason@FlightSim.Com
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