FlightSim.Com Review: MegaScenery USA 2004

At any rate, Mike was raving about these incredible frame rates he was seeing with the Aurora and MS3. He was tossing around numbers that included, "...I was actually getting 95 fps with MegaScenery 3 over downtown San Francisco flying Mike Stone's Connie. I thought I was hallucinating!"

Well, Mike's a Baby Boomer but I doubted that this was some flashback to his San Francisco Summer of Love days. I was intrigued to say the least.

Flightsimming over my home town

One reason why I took so long to do this MegaScenery Volume 3 (MS3) review is that I've simply been having WAY too much fun flying around my favorite Northern California locations with it. I work out of our San Francisco, West Coast Editorial and Sales Office. Like Mike, I to am a long-time San Francisco resident. He's been here since 1976. I was born here, been around the world, and would never want to live anywhere else but in The City by The Bay. So, flightsimming both VFR and IFR with MS3 was a real treat for me.

For starters, this area is very familiar to me. I also took a hypercritical eye to the scenery accuracy simply because I could. My first destination after taking off from SFO, was to see if I could find one my favorite, albeit little known, San Francisco neighborhoods. Amazingly enough, I did!

Finding obscure San Francisco neighborhoods

We all know that the San Francisco Bay Area and the rest of Northern California has lots of famous landmarks. It's easy to spot Golden Gate park, Alcatraz, the Bay Bridge, Transamerica Pyramid or Candlestick Park. I think the true test of photorealistic VFR scenery is how well does it place the more obscure neighborhoods in a city. So, I put MS3 to the test. My first stop was an 80-year old neighborhood in San Francisco's south east corner that few have ever heard of called St. Mary's Park.

Eight decades ago, this neighborhood that now is part of the Bernal Heights area buffering between the Inner and Outer Mission districts, used to be the suburban boonies. The Catholic Church built St. Mary's College here. When the college moved the school to Orinda in the East Bay in the 1920s, the Church built a subdivision of large, lovely single family detached stucco homes here. For those of you who know San Francisco, which is America's second most densely populated city with New York City being first, you also know how unusual this is. Our city is very congested with most homes built as multi-family dwellings that adjoin each other. Front, back and side yards; so common in the suburbs, are a rarity in San Francisco. Anyway, the developers laid the neighborhood out in the shape of a church bell in honor of St. Mary's College. In the real world, with a trained eye you can spot the neighborhood from the air when you're vectored in along certain approaches. If you check the charts that come with MS3, you'll see that the RNAV (GPS) approaches to runways 28L and R, 10R, plus the Eugen 5, and Molen 3, departures take you within sight of St. Mary's Park. Look for the bell-shaped street layout. It borders the Interstate 280 freeway just west of the intersection of the 280 and the 101. You can't miss it, if you know what to look for. Just above St. Mary's Park, you'll see a circular road forming Holly Park. As you can see from the screen shots here, St. Mary's Park is right where it should be in MegaScenery 3. While I can't land a helicopter on the St. Mary's Park tennis courts yet -- MS3 is as real as it gets with today's VFR scenery.

Is it real? Or, is it MegaScenery?

Will the real St. Mary's Park please stand up? This actual aerial photo shows the distinctive bell-shaped street layout that you can also see in the MegaScenery 3 views.

What's in MegaScenery 3

MegaScenery 3, by Aerosoft Australia, takes photorealistic scenery to an even higher level than its two preceding volumes. It fills three CDs with a massive load of 201,460 files for 7.44 Gigabytes of scenery. This is a fat wad of exciting VFR terrain covering an area 175 nautical miles across and 30,000 square miles. MegaScenery is comprised of specially modified satellite imagery. It uses 30 meter terrain mesh. Although not totally necessary because the mountain shading from the satellite image creates an optical illusion of hi-res mesh, the Aerosoft team did it anyway to give flightsimmers that added realism for the area.

Each set of satellite images runs around $50,000 to license. So, when I add that to all the other goodies in the box, MS3 seems like a fantastic bargain for its $39.95 price tag (Full package).

MS3's features include:

Sightseeing hot spots include

Lots of extras in the box

When you get the full kit, you also get Sectional and Terminal Area Charts, a book packed with 236 Instrument Approach Charts and Airport Diagrams, plus a Pilot's Operating Handbook that includes VFR flight lessons.

San Francisco International has loads of tricky approaches. It's one of America's most challenging controlled airspaces due to foggy weather and noise abatement restrictions. The noise abatement approaches you'll find in the charts are a true test of flightsimming skills. Set up for real weather on a foggy day with heavy traffic and you'll have a few white-knuckle experiences, I'm sure.

The wizards behind the curtain

MegaScenery is developed by Aerosoft Australia and published by PC Aviator. The Aerosoft people in Australia are completely different and totally unrelated to Aerosoft Germany or Aerosoft USA. In fact these Aussies are among the nicest people in the flightsim developer world. Headed by Andrew McLean, they are true artists who are very clever with imaging technology. As we have seen, each new MegaScenery volume is better than the last, yet they all share a common look and feel when you fly them. Every new feature of MegaScenery comes from Andrew's passion to make MegaScenery better. "Good enough," just isn't 'good enough' for these guys. And the payoff for their dedication is some really cool flightsimming!

The second Aussie Wizard behind the MegaScenery curtain is PC Aviator founder and MegaScenery publisher, Robert Ferraro. As Robert put it during our recent interview, "Andrew deserves all the credit for the technical brilliance of MegaScenery since he's the creator of it and the brains of the outfit. As publisher, I'm the guy who gets to write the very big check to fund the product development and am responsible for the conceptualization of MegaScenery plus all the marketing behind it. It's a joint effort between Aerosoft Australia and PC Aviator that combines their scenery design brilliance and my marketing moxie."

I asked Robert how he happened to choose Northern California as his latest MegaScenery locale. "San Francisco and Northern California are areas that a lot of flightsimmers told me they love to fly VFR over. It's one of my personal favorites, too. I have to admit that I have a penchant for flying aileron rolls as I cross underneath the Golden Gate bridge at sunset. Try doing THAT in the real world and kiss your PPL goodbye!

"This area is rich with VFR excitement and flight skills challenges. SFO is a very challenging place to fly in and out of properly. You have tremendous diversity within an area that's just 175 nautical miles square. The scenery, and cities are simply gorgeous. I love to fly it at twilight when the blend of street lights and fading sunlight makes everything turn magical."

Easy, albeit long, installation

Installing MS3 was a snap. What takes a long time is simply installing more than 200,000 files! As you install it, MegaScenery will show you a slide show with lots of excellent performance enhancing tips. Set up as instructed and you'll be good-to-go.

Built-in settings advisor

MS3 even sets up the proper video settings for you. Starting with the MS3 settings, I still needed to tweak the video to suit our test systems. Suffice to say that everyone's video setup is different. But, we've learned to fix the characteristic flickering and barber pole moiré that FS2004 exhibits with both ATI and nVidia cards by throttling back the MIP Mapping to 4 and the Hardware Rendered Lights to setting 5 or 6 Regardless of whether your system uses ATI RADEON or nVidia GeForce video cards, set-up simply requires a few easy adjustments to get best results.

Patience has its rewards

Using high-performance Alienware systems, we like to crank up all the graphics goodies to the max. The payoff is eye-popping graphics and baby-bum smooth performance. We had multiple testers run MS3 on Alienware Area-51 Pentium 4 and Aurora AMD 64-bit systems plus a Dell XPS and had wonderful results on every system. The hands-down favorite PCs are the Alienware machines because their extra horsepower, especially with that awesome 64-bit Aurora we used at the IFC, has two practical benefits with MS3:

Before and after shot tells all

In this composite image you can clearly see the difference between FS2004 stock scenery textures and MegaScenery.

Fantastic frame rates

I had to do a double-take when I turned on the readouts and saw the frame rates. Our man in Blackpool at the IFC, had the same dumfounded reaction when he saw the frame rate he was getting on the Alienware Aurora. Mike said that he was seeing 50-95 fps using MS3 and a variety of freeware and payware airplanes. When I tested it, I consistently saw 35-60 fps on the Dell XPS and 40-80 fps on the Area-51. These results are a combination of PC horsepower and the clever way that MS3 creates scenery. Aerosoft have figured out how to get great frame rates, on any PC, even though MS3 uses bit-mapped scenery.

FS2004 dedicates most of its processing power to generating its own dynamic vector graphics scenery and allocates little processing power to bit maps. Somehow, these Aussie Wizards have figured out a workaround that makes MS3 run at much higher frame rates than even stock FS2004 scenery.

Seeing is believing

The proof of all this is in the screenshots. All the screenies in this review, except for the side-by-side shot above, are exclusive, never-before published views of MegaScenery 3. I left the frame rate readouts in some of them so you can see them for yourself.

The new International Terminal at SFO glitters in the morning light.	Check out the landscape detail while flying over Mt. Diablo in the East Bay.
I am always impressed with the crisp, detailed terrain textures that have become a hallmark of MegaScenery.	The west side of San Francisco shows Golden Gate Park, The Presidio, Ocean Beach (excellent surfing here), The Cliff House at Land's End and the Golden Gate in the background with the Marin Headlands stretching off toward the horizon. The foreground clearly delineates the Richmond, Sunset and Miraloma, St. Francis Wood, and West Portal neighborhoods.
Climbing above Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, you see the flip-side of the Golden Gate in the background with Mill Valley and San Rafael on the left.	After taking off from Mountain View's Moffet Field (see the twin airship hangars in the background) and turning south towards San Jose, you get this spectacular view of Silicon Valley on the left (bisected by Highway 101) and the southern reaches of San Francisco Bay on the right.
The gentle curve of Monterey Bay is a distinctive landmark in the southern reaches of MS3.	Northern California's signature landscapes are as varied as they are breathtaking. I love living here and love flightsimming here even more.
After launching the Captain Sim Yak-3 from Monterey, I turned south toward Carmel and Pacific Grove to capture this view. Some of my favorite dive spots are right off the nose of the Yak.	The Sacramento area is one of California's richest agricultural regions. MS3 satellite imagery captures the patchwork quilt of rice, corn and a variety of other crops that fill the area.
Few places in the world can rival the Northern California coastline for rugged beauty.	VFR flying here is a real treat. The landscapes are so accurately simulated that once you know your geography, you can leave the charts folded on the seat.
Coming over the top of Mt. Tamalpais in Marin County, Stinson Beach and Bolinas beckon. This area is actually the northern anchor of the infamous Red Triangle. It's a triangular area that goes from here, out to the Farrallon Islands and south to Santa Cruz. It holds the record for the most Great White shark attacks on humans of anyplace on Earth. Every year, divers and surfers get attacked here.	I just cannot get enough of this MS3 detail over the Santa Cruz mountains. The only downside is that now I'm hooked on it. I just don't want to fly anywhere else. Stock scenery just doesn't cut it for me now.
Looking back across the saddle of Montara mountain you can see some of the best surfing spots in the world. Just watch out for the Great Whites! This, too, is in the Red Triangle.	South of San Francisco, the peninsula create its own spectacular vistas above the Crystal Springs reservoir, bordered by Interstate 280. On the left you can see the 101 making a beeline from San Francisco to Silicon Valley.
Suburban sprawl meets coastal mountains.	Twilight Zone descends on The City.

The bottom line

Grab your copy of MegaScenery Volume 3: Northern California and I'm certain you'll be as thrilled as I am every time you take off from San Francisco International.

MegaScenery Volume 3: Northern California
Creates Some of the Most Magnificent VFR Scenery in the World

By Cap Mason, Flight Simulation Editor

Flightsimming over my home town

Finding obscure San Francisco neighborhoods

Is it real? Or, is it MegaScenery?

What's in MegaScenery 3

MS3's features include:

Sightseeing hot spots include

Lots of extras in the box

The wizards behind the curtain

Easy, albeit long, installation

Built-in settings advisor

Patience has its rewards

Before and after shot tells all

Fantastic frame rates

Seeing is believing

The bottom line

MegaScenery Volume 3: Northern California Creates Some of the Most Magnificent VFR Scenery in the World

By Cap Mason, Flight Simulation Editor

Flightsimming over my home town

Finding obscure San Francisco neighborhoods

Is it real? Or, is it MegaScenery?

What's in MegaScenery 3

MS3's features include:

Sightseeing hot spots include

Lots of extras in the box

The wizards behind the curtain

Easy, albeit long, installation

Built-in settings advisor

Patience has its rewards

Before and after shot tells all

Fantastic frame rates

Seeing is believing

The bottom line

MegaScenery Volume 3: Northern California
Creates Some of the Most Magnificent VFR Scenery in the World