PC Aviator MegaScenery X Phoenix For FSX

By Andrew Herd (21 September 2007)

ery few simmers can have failed to hear the word 'megascenery', a title which evokes some of the most memorable experiences I have had playing around with Flight Simulator. Yes, it is only a game, but when you couple the incredible level of realism that third party addon planes have reached with photoreal scenery and FSX, it can be hard to believe that what you are seeing isn't real.

The MegaScenery series goes back a long, long way; nearly a decade, when I think back. The first title we reviewed was 'Pacific Northwest', which bowled John Haley over in October 1998. In John's words, 'Nothing, and I mean NOTHING, comes close to the sheer wonder of Pacific Northwest MegaScenery!' An FS98 package, the downside was that the installation took 800 megs, which isn't anything now, but amounted to a serious committment back in the days when 20 gig hard drives were standard and Microsoft Office was distributed on 22 floppies (my disc 19 turned out to be a bad one, but that's another story).

The package came in a thick DVD-style case with the usual colorful PC Aviator box art that brings with it the warm feeling that the contents are going to be good - these guys have never let me down. Inside I found a 111 page manual, a color VFR terminal area chart and two DVDs. The first pages I flicked through told me that the minimum system requirements were FSX (this package will not run on FS2004), a 1 Ghz Pentium/Celeron/Athlon, Windows Vista/XP/2000, 256 Mb RAM, a 64 Mb graphics card and 5.4 Gb of hard drive space. Here, thought I, do we get into the semantics of Flight Simulator addon product promotion. Since, technically, the scenery doesn't make any extra demands on Flight Simulator, you ought to be able to run it on such a configuration, but they also tell me that there are places in our universe where pigs can fly - and personally, I would stick with FS2004 on a setup like that.

A little further on, the manual states that PC Aviator's minimum recommended system spec is a 2 Ghz processor or better, with a 256 Mb 3D card and either Vista or XP. The flying pigs tell me that they are happier with that, but that level of PC doesn't quite serve up the goods even with a 'clean' FSX installation... so onto what the developer's call the 'recommended system for Absolute Best Performance' otherwise known as the RSFABP, aka in the pig's (and my estimation), the 'minimum system spec for running FSX and addons like this at adequate frame rates', which is... [FX: fanfare] a 3.0 Ghz or faster processor with 2 Gb of RAM, Vista/XP and a 256 Mb 3D card. That is the spec that lies at my bottom end for running FSX - in fact, it is near enough the system I used to use before upgrading to my present system. The bad news is that although you can run FSX on a 3.0 Ghz Pentium, you can't run it with much detail enabled.

My review system, which I find runs FSX pretty well, is a 2.66 Ghz Core2Duo with 4 Gb of RAM, a 768 Mb GeForce 8800GTX, Windows Vista and FSX SP1. This setup seems to cure most of the problems I used to experience on the 3 gig system, which used to slow down to single figure frame rates on approach in the Baron, let alone anything more complicated. The solution was to run with Autogen set to zero, but in the end, I replaced the machine.

The installation takes quite a while, with much disk activity while the files are being copied across, so while my PC was busy, I settled down to read the rest of the manual - someone has to do it, and I know you won't. The back end of the manual has over a hundred plates for the area, which has at least eight medium to large airports in it and numerous smaller ones, ranging all the way down to farm strips. Most of the approaches to the large airports are, needless to say, IFR, to which the scenery will add little more than background atmosphere, but there are a few VFR approaches in there. The terminal chart will be more to the taste of GA simmers and shows what a varied landscape the Phoenix MegaScenery covers, ranging from desert, through farmland, the city and out to the mountains; it also bears the scary news that there is 'concentrated student jet transition training' going on out there, which translates into testosterone-fuelled Tom Cruise wannabees who wouldn't spot a Cessna if it hit them on the end of the nose. Which they occasionally do.

One thing worth noting is that once the files are copied over, the MegaScenery installer offers to adjust your computer's performance settings to make the scenery look its best: which amounts to setting the 'level of detail radius' to large; mesh complexity to 30; mesh resolution to 38; texture resolution to 1 meter; water effects to low 2X; global texture resolution to very high, land detail textures to off; and target frame rate to 25. It also adds a variable to FSX.cfg which adjusts fiber_frame_time_fraction to 0.33, which forces the simulator to spend a greater proportion of the processor cycles allocated to it to loading textures into memory. This last tweak cuts down the 'blurries' which were such a feature of FS2004 photoscenery and seem to have been largely sorted in FSX SP1. The final act of the installer is to check to see if you have the SP1 patch installed into FSX and it takes you to the download site if you haven't, because this patch fixes a significant problem with phototexture loading. PC Aviator advise running visiblity at 40-50 miles with a 'few clouds' and I concur that this improves the look of an already great set of phototextures.

I slipped in the one meter texture resolution to test whether you are concentrating, but that is the big news about the FSX MegaScenery packs - they display at five times the resolution of the old set and it makes a huge difference to a series that was already one of my all-time favorites. The good news is that as long as your video card can handle it - and I would suggest a 512 Mb card, because there are a lot of textures in play when FSX is trying to show a plane as well as a detailed landscape - one meter terrain textures tiles are certainly well within the display capability of the system I described above and the addon appeared to have zero impact on frame rates, which is what you would expect.

When photoscenery packages go wrong, the result is not a drop in frame rates, as you might expect, but blurring. This is a matter of considerable interest and debate and one on which the Microsoft team are known to be working, but the good news is that it is much less of a problem using FSX SP1 than it was in FS2004. Blurring seems to occur because of the way textures are locked into place and it affects the default textures as much as phototextures; but it is harder to spot with the default textures because of their repetitive nature - that being said, a really bad attack of the blurries can result in the ground looking like guacamole. In FS2004, the blurries happened all the time and the only solution was to fly at less than 150 knots and not to make too many turns, which kind of defeated the object of the exercise. Although blurring does occur from time to time in FSX, it is nowhere near as common as it was in FS2004 and it may get even rarer once DX10 is released.

Being able to fly over a blurry-free FS landscape has long been one of my dreams and with this package installed, I realised I was getting near to my goal. Take a look at the top set of screenshots, which show the default Airbus departing from Chandler (KCHD), with the FSX default textures on the left and with MegaScenery Phoenix installed in the right shot. The plane is at about 5000 feet above ground level and quite apart from the vastly more realistic appearance with the photographic textures installed, it is clear that Microsoft's landclassing is approximate at best.

The second pair of shots show the Lear departing Scottsdale (KSDL), again with the default FSX scenery shown on the left and the MegaScenery installed on the right. The result is just as spectacular to fly over as it looks in the shots and because all the landmarks are there, VFR navigation is a breeze. If you live anywhere within the area, you will be able to find your own house - the package is that good.

The lowest row shows what the scenery looks like when you are flying at GA heights, in this case 1500 feet above ground level, or so. The shot on the left shows the Maule climbing out from the Donnelly strip (2AZ5), while the one on the right shows the Caravan just levelling off after departing Mobile (1AZ0). In each case, the plane is well below the height at which the 5 m photoscenery we were used to in FS2004 showed more than the coarsest grain of detail - yet here, the terrain looks much as it would with older sceneries with the plane at 10,000 feet. In practice, 5 m photosceneries ceased to show anything worth viewing at much below 2500 feet above ground level, while 1m sceneries like this look good at a thousand feet, which, conveniently for our purposes, is the standard circuit height. At long last, therefore, it is possible to fly realistic visual circuits in Flight Simulator, the only limit being how fast publishers like PC Aviator and Horizon can release packages and, I guess, the amount of hard disk space it takes to accommodate them.

One meter is not the limit, by the way. In the manual, PC Aviator say that it is seven inches, but in fact it is seven centimeters. I doubt very much that we will see much 7 cm scenery, partly because aerial photography comes in around 30 cm a pixel and because MegaScenery X Phoenix at 7 cm res would occupy something like 80 gigs of hard disk space. The total area covered by the scenery is approximately 7000 square miles, which the box states works out at approximately 95 miles square - oh yeah? My calculation comes out at nearer 85 miles a side, but the phototexture tiled area isn't exactly square, being shaped like a broad arrow with its head pointing to the north-west.

The shape of the scenery raises another issue with these packages, which, much though I rave about them (and they are really, really, really great) is annoying. Take another look at the Caravan shot and you will see a yellow area above the plane's tail. Just below the yellow is a line, which is where the phototextures meet the great beyond of the FSX default terrain tiles. The join is a line as sharp as any drawn with a ruler and you can't help seeing it on a regular basis if you fly around the scenery for long enough. One solution would be for the developers of these sceneries to provide tiles that blend between the photoscenery and the default textures, but the surrounding terrain tiles will vary in users' systems depending on whether they have replacement default terrain tiles sets installed and also if they have addon landclassing packages, so I guess this is a no-win situation.

Verdict? I am inclined to use a standard English phrase here, the first word beginning with F, the second being 'great!' because this package really is that good. You only get one season, but then Arizona looks the same way most of the time, but you do get night textures, which are a vast improvement on the originals. The box states that 'this is about as close as you can get to visual realism' and that is no word of a lie. I cannot wait to see the other titles in this series, because MegaScenery X Phoenix is as near to perfection in an addon as I have come across to date and I take my hat off to the developers for producing it.