Seeing is believing.
I tested MegaScenery Volume 2 only with FS2004. I noticed that the scenery looked best for sightseeing between 3000 and
5000 feet. It also looked great at altitude as you can see from the screen
shots above. With my system's graphics pumped up to the max and extended
textures on plus full throttle AutoGen scenery -- I occasionally
noticed a slight lag while the scenery details emerged. 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 area. Unlike Southern California with it spectacular
mountains and rugged Pacific Coast, the New York area is mostly sleepy terrain
and an amazing mosaic of urban sprawl. Take a look at the enlarged screen
shots and see how many landmarks you can identify.
I flew MegaScenery Volume 2 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.
Click on the images below to see the
full resolution, 1280 x 1024 version.
Fly in both summer and winter
After taking off from La
Guardia during the winter, bank over Shea Stadium and check out the
mid-winter Mets game in full swing. The only telltale detail that hints
at the AeroSoft technology that turns summer to winter is the SRO crowd
at Shea watching the Mets during the dead of winter while the nearby
tennis stadium is quiet as a tomb. Click to enlarge. |
You must set the season to summer in order to see MegaScenery when you fly.
But, Since winter snows in the New York Area dramatically change the terrain
and flying conditions, the MegaScenery designers have included a complete set
of snowy winter textures. They were very clever at meeting the fundamental
challenge of satellite imagery upon which MegaScenery is based. The imagery
only provides one season which is summer. So, the MegaScenery team had to
create winter themselves. The results are quite spectacular as you can see
from the screen shots above. One interesting giveaway that the winter scenery
is man-made and not photographic is to fly over Shea Stadium. The stands at
Shea are jam-packed with summertime Mets fans. The football stadium next door
is empty, even with snow on the ground. Other than that small discrepancy, the
winter effect is flawless.
Andrew McLean of Aerosoft Australia took me behind the scenes of
MegaScenery "Winter" technology. "The winter scenery is created
by digital image processing of the standard satellite "summer"
scenery. This was done to ensure that the natural geography, features and
buildings of the original satellite image would be preserved in the creation
of the winter scenery. The image processing tries to replicate the effect of a
snowfall, and the subsequent clearing of the snow along transport corridors
such as roads and rail.
"The first step is to try and change "green" areas of the
original satellite image, such as forests, grassland, parks etc and to make
them "brown". This step tries to simulate the effect of winter
foliage i.e. grass is dead and leaves have fallen to expose the ground
beneath.
"The second step simulates a snow fall. The MegaScenery technology looks
at the underlying satellite image - if it finds a flat, barren area, it
applies snow over the whole area; if it finds foliage or sharply varying edges
such as urban areas, it tries to let some of that "roughness" show.
A lot of the color is also taken out of the image, to simulate the
"dullness" of a winter landscape.
"The third step in the process is to map out all the transport corridors
on the original image, such as roads and rail. The transport corridors are
then blended with the "snow like" image.
"The last step increases the intensity of the images to make it
"whiter" and also applies a slight blue tinge to the scene. The
result is the spectacular images you see in MegaScenery NY."
Loads
of extra goodies 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 plus a 350-page book with instrument approach
charts and airport diagrams for the entire Greater New York-New Jersey-Long
Island-Connecticut area. This is a rich bonanza of valuable documents. There is a very small price difference
between the two versions and the Full Kit is loaded with all the extras a serious
flightsimmer, or real world pilot, would want to make flying in the New York 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.
What's more, the Pilot's Operating Handbook contains VFR flight lessons
that walk the novice through the VFR procedures step-by-step. The actual
Sectional Chart enable you to accurately plot your course just as you would
while flying in the real world. Here's what's included in the full kit:
VFR
Sectional and Terminal Area Charts
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 and are generally Class B airspace. 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
151,400 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.
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. The only downside is that FS2004 will
take a lot longer to launch your flight with extended terrain and MegaScenery.
It took just 40 seconds to launch without extended terrain and 1.5 to 3.5 minutes to launch
with extended terrain turned on. The twilight scenery took the longest to
launch since it combined both day and night textures at the same time.
Extended terrain 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 New York was also extremely frame rate friendly. The
secret is the fact that it uses bit maps for photorealistic scenery and does
not rely of Flight Simulator's dynamic vector objects system. This means that
MegaScenery creates the ground textures over twice as fast as stock FS2004
scenery. As you can see from the enlarged, full-size screen shots above, the
frame rates with my XPS were outstanding: average 55-60 fps, dropping to
35-38 fps in scenery intensive areas such as Midtown Manhattan. Winter
actually ate slightly more frames than summer due to the creation of the snow
over the background summer scene.
If
you zoom it, restart it.
As I was zooming around the terrain
by accelerating the simulation rate instead of slewing, I noticed one anomaly
that was easily corrected. Flight Simulator has a tough time catching up to
MegaScenery when you accelerate the sim rate. As the image on the right shows,
half the scene has caught up while the other portion remains pixilated
awaiting scenery generation. This is caused by Flight Simulator giving top
priority to computing resources for its dynamic vector object scenery and
little horsepower to bit mapped scenery. The fix is very simple. Once I
arrived where I wanted to be, I save the flight and then restarted it. No need
to exit Flight Simulator.
Special adjustments for the
ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video card, Dell Dimension XPS and FS2004
MegaScenery includes a wonderful tutorial that guides you through
video adjustments designed to give you the best results possible with your PC,
MegaScenery and both ATI and nVidia video cards. The problem I encountered is
that the ATI Catalyst 4.1 driver I was running just could not deliver flicker
and moire-free results.
The Problem
Much has been written already about ATI and nVidia video card
issues with FS2004. In fact, we have started a
Video and Audio
Help Forum dedicated to it. ATI has release version 4.1 of its drivers
and they still do not work well with FS2004, as far as I can see. For this reviews,
I thoroughly tested the 4.1 Catalyst driver and found it to be seriously deficient.
No matter how I tweaked it, I still saw undesirable flickering and barber pole
moire patterns on buildings when I flew with MegaScenery.
The Simple Solution
I went back to the original, Dell OEM version, dated July,
2003; of the ATI Catalyst driver for the Radeon 9800 Pro card and it
worked like a charm on my XPS. I won't guarantee that this will work on every,
or even any, other system. But, by rolling back to the Dell OEM Catalyst driver
and correctly adjusting my driver and display settings in FS2004, I got great
results that you can see in the screen shots above. No more flickering, barber poling
or moire.
I had to depart from the MegaScenery
recommendations. 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, except for the MIP Map and
Hardware Rendered Lights. The key is a combination of correct individual FS2004 settings
plus the ATI filtering and Direct 3D
settings in the Dell OEM version of the ATI Catalyst 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:
-
Dell Dimension XPS and the Dimension 8300 using an ultra-fast
3 GHz Intel Pentium 4 processor with Hyper-Threading Technology, 800 MHz
front side bus and the Intel® 875P chipset. 8X AGP port (with full 8X
bandwidth)
-
WinXP Pro and DirectX 9b
-
Dual channel DDR 400 MHz SDRAM memory, 1024 MB
-
128MB ATI Radeon 9800 Pro video card. Catalyst 3.6
drivers, version 6.14.10.6368
-
The Sound Blaster Audigy 2 card
-
18” Dell UltraSharp Flat Panel Display set to 1280x1024
resolution and 32-bit color depth
-
7200 RPM Ultra ATA 120 GB hard drive
The Settings
You won't blow up your PC, but if
you stray from these settings, or your system is too different from the Dell
Dimension XPS described above, you won't get the same results. These settings changes will not harm your
PC, monitor, video card or FS2004 installation. However, as with all
configuration changes, this requires a basic 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, OEM version from Dell and the ATI Control Panel installed to make these
adjustment and achieve the same results that I did. These settings have only
been tested on a Dell Dimension XPS.
Very important note: "If it
ain't broke, don't fix it!"
Install MegaScenery and use the settings that you already have
going on your system. It if looks good, leave everything alone. If not, start
by following the tips that MegaScenery provides. If those don't work, or you
have a Dell Dimension XPS equipped EXACTLY as mine is, then make the changes
noted below.
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
-
If you are using an 18-inch flat panel display, set the screen
resolution to 1280 by 1024.
-
Set it to 1024 by 768 for a 17-inch flat panel display.
-
For analog CRT monitors, set it to the highest setting for the
size of your screen and the resolution capability of your monitor.
-
Color quality should be set to 32-bit.
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.
-
Check CUSTOM SETTINGS.
-
Check ANTI-ALIASING APPLICATION PREFERENCE.
-
Uncheck ANISOTROPIC FILTERING APPLICATION PREFERENCE.
-
Check QUALITY.
-
Move the SAMPLES slider to the maximum of 4X.
-
Move the TEXTURE PREFERENCE slider to the maximum for HIGH QUALITY.
-
Move the MIPMAP DETAIL LEVEL slider to the maximum for HIGH QUALITY.
-
Select APPLICATION PREFERENCE for the WAIT FOR VERTICAL
SYNC.
-
Click OK.
-
Reset your system if required.
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:
-
Move the SPECIAL EFFECTS DETAIL slider to LOW.
-
Move the TERRAIN MESH COMPLEXITY slider to 20.
-
Move the TERRAIN TEXTURE SIZE slider to HIGH.
-
Move the TERRAIN DETAIL slider to LAND ONLY.
-
Move the WATER EFFECTS slider to NONE. The water effects
looked just horrible with this graphics card so I turned them off. Things
went much better when I did. I'm running the this system completely
maxxed-out and getting outstanding frame rates of 35-60 fps from MegaScenery
even over Midtown Manhattan. Your
results will vary depending on your system.
-
Check both DAWN/DUSK TEXTURE BLENDING and EXTENDED TERRAIN
TEXTURES. Note that Extended Terrain Textures is optional. It will give you
spectacular scenery detail with stock FS2004 scenery and it will blow your
mind with MegaScenery. But, with Extended Terrain Textures, your flight will
take much longer to load. Without Extended Terrain, it took just 40 seconds
to load scenery. With Extended Terrain, the scenery took from 1.5 to 3.5
minutes to load. Patience definitely has its rewards!
Under SCENERY OBJECTS:
-
Move the SCENERY COMPLEXITY slider to NORMAL:.
-
Move the AUTOGEN DENSITY slider to EXTREMELY DENSE. I like the
MegaScenery AutoGen buildings. This setting is optional and if you have a
low-powered system you'll want to dial it way down or turn off AutoGen.
-
Check ADD-ON DYNAMIC SCENERY.
-
Move the ADD-ON DYNAMIC SCENERY slider to EXTREMELY DENSE.
-
Uncheck GROUND SCENERY CASTS SHADOWS.
-
Check SUN GLARE and LENS FLARE.
These are optional. If you don't like these effects, uncheck them.
Click on the HARDWARE tab to access the screen
below.
Set the hardware configuration to match the settings shown in
the screen shot above.
-
Move the TARGET FRAME RATE slider to UNLIMITED. I was
consistently getting frame rates around 55-60 fps. In certain
scenery-intensive areas the rate dropped to 35-38 fps. In all cases, the
scenery transitions were very smooth.
-
Choose the appropriate display resolution based on your
monitor's capabilities. The setting above is for an 18-inch Dell UltraSharp
flat panel display.
Under HARDWARE RENDERING OPTIONS:
-
Uncheck RENDER TO TEXTURE
-
Check TRANSFORM AND LIGHTING
-
Uncheck ANTI-ALIASING.
-
Select BILINEAR FILTERING.
-
Move the MIP MAPPING QUALITY slider to 4 for winter and 5 for
summer. This setting along with the Hardware Rendered Lights has the
greatest influence on moire. The higher the MIP Mapping Quality, the more
flickering and moire I saw. Play with these two setting on your system to
adjust away the moire and flickering.
-
Move the HARDWARE RENDERED LIGHTS slider to 7 for both
seasons.
-
Move the GLOBAL MAX TEXTURE SIZE slider to MASSIVE.
Click OK. Your will not need to re-start FS2004.
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 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.
Also bear in mind that if you're sightseeing, you don't want the weather
getting in the way.
Cap Mason
CapMason@FlightSim.Com
Learn more here.
Click
on the image above to check out today's hot deals from Dell
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My
System Specs for this Review
-
Dell Dimension
XPS, Dell A03 system BIOS
-
3.06GHZ Intel
Pentium 4 processor with HTT, 800MHz front side bus using the Intel®
875P chipset.
-
8X AGP port
-
SAMSUNG
DVD-ROM
SD
-616T
-
NEC DVD+RW
ND-1100A
-
Western Digital
120GB Ultra ATA, 7200 RPM hard drive
-
Dual channel DDR
400MHz SDRAM, 1024MB
-
Built-in 10/100
Ethernet port, DSL Internet connection
-
2, IEEE 1394
Firewire ports
-
8, Intel 82801EB
USB Universal Host Controllers
-
Audigy 2 audio
card
-
128MB ATI Radeon
9800 Pro video card with ATI Catalyst 3.9 driver
-
460 watt power
supply
-
Dell UltraSharp
18" flat panel display
-
CH Products USB
flight gear all connected simultaneously: Yoke, Fighterstick, Pro Pedals,
Pro Throttle
-
Windows XP
Professional, DirectX 9b
-
Voice Buddy 1.0
with Plantronics
.Audio 90 stereo headset with noise-canceling microphone
|
Flightsimming With Voice Control
This review
was created using Voice Buddy, Microsoft Flight Simulator Edition.
Click on the
image above to get Voice Buddy.
Read my detailed review:
Voice
control for FS2004 and FS2002 that actually works
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