MegaScenery USA 2005 Volume 4: Pacific Northwest

By Andrew Herd (30 May 2005)

C Aviator swam into my consciousness a while back with the original releases of their MegaScenery, but for some reason these passed me by, an error I do not plan to repeat. If you enjoy VFR navigation in Flight Simulator, if you hate the way the default scenery looks the same wherever you go, if the edge has gone off your enjoyment of simming because it is so dull and repetitive, then I have the cure right here. MegaScenery Volume 4 comes in a double-thickness DVD-style case and the only complaint I have about it is that the box ain't big enough to contain all the stuff PC Aviator have packed into it.

The package covers 30,000 square miles of Washington State and the Pacific Northwest - we'll call it PNW from hereon in -and provides replacement textures and mesh for a box 175 nautical miles on a side. Within this area you have Seattle, Tacoma, Mount Rainier, Mount St. Helens, parts of the Cascades, Olympic and Wenatchee mountains, Puget Sound and a stretch of the Columbia river. The place is littered with dozens of small and medium sized strips in addition to Seattle-Tacoma, so you could fly around it for weeks without visiting any place twice.

I would suggest buying the 'full kit' version, which contains the installation DVD, a terminal area chart and a sectional for Seattle, a perfect bound book of approach plates and a slim manual. The manual is a little disappointing compared to the one supplied with the Northern California MegaScenery, which includes a virtually complete simmer's VFR navigation course, but that particular pack is particularly lush and I have never seen anything to match it for documentation. Nonetheless, the production and packaging of PNW leaves PC Aviator's rivals in the dust and it would make a great present for a simmer or a pilot living in the Seattle area, because not only does it install photographic textures of the whole area, it provides a winter season and night scenery as well. The 'lite' version is cheaper and comes without the charts and the approach plates - given the expense of sectionals, my own view is that buying it is a false economy if you don't already have the relevant charts.

Hardware requirements are any machine that can run FS2004, as long as it has 5.1 Gb of hard disk space - the textures don't put any particular stress on a system, because all they do is to replace the default ones. Installation took around half an hour and I found the process much simpler than the earlier MegaScenery packs because a single DVD is used, rather than a leash of CDs. Having set the autoinstall away, I made myself a cup of espresso - okay, two espressos - then came back and ran the next stage of the setup, which reconfigures FS2004 to run the scenery optimally. Expert users can leave this stage out, but PC Aviator have clearly spent some time over it and their choices were good enough for this simmer.

What do photographic textures do? Well, be my guest and take a look at the 'before and after' screenshots, because these pictures tell more than any number of words. What you are looking at is satellite photographs which have been specially processed so that they can be aligned in their real-world position on FS2004's terrain - with the product installed, you fly over photographs of the real landscape and as long as you stay above around 2500 feet, the illusion is remarkably effective. The Seattle area has been created using one foot per pixel aerial photographs, although a basic limitation of FS2004 means that no texture tile can have a resolution of greater than 4.75 m per pixel means that much of this quality is wasted. PC Aviator's website states that you see individual shrubs on golf courses, which is true, but the 4.75 meter resolution means that a 5 meter wide shrub will show up as a single pixel, so professional shrub spotters may need to look elsewhere. However, there is no doubt that the city areas are definitely sharper than the surrounding countryside and Seattle itself looks a million dollars. Once you get above 5000 feet, the textures really strut their stuff and given that you get the high-res city textures included with the surrounding 30,000 square miles of MegaScenery, PNW surely is a bargain.

The three features that distinguish this package from other photographic sceneries (apart from the sheer volume of kit in the box) are that it supports Microsoft Autogen and that you get night and winter scenery thrown in, the other three seasons being taken care of by a single set of textures. Most other photo packages limit you to single season daytime flying. What you do not get are any new buildings or bridges, by the way - the 3D objects you see are the ones provided by Microsoft and all the developers have done is to reposition them so they match up to the textures. To date, MegaScenery packages have provided photographic ground textures and mesh only; you don't get any enhancements to the existing airports or other ground structures in FS. But believe me, what you get is more than enough.

Having taken a look at the sectional, it sounded as if it might be fun to make a flight out of Pierce Co-Thun (1S0), fly north for a couple of minutes, before turning east over Lake Tapps, then climb as I flew up the valley towards Greenwater and turn south towards Mount Rainier. This was going to be pure ground to map stuff and I chose the trip because although you can do it with the default scenery, there aren't quite enough features to do it comfortably, the smaller lake outlines, for example, being so simplified that they are useless for navigation unless you are looking at the only lake for a hundred miles in any direction, and even then, you can never be sure, because there is no discernable logic governing which pieces of water Microsoft included.

So, the first screenshot shows us levelling out, with Seattle-Tacoma (KSEA) in the far distance alongside Puget Sound. I have set the shots up in threes, the left one showing the default scenery in Summer, the center one showing how Summer looks with PNW installed, and the right shot showing the PNW Winter scenery. There are some slight positional differences, but as I have remarked about other sceneries in this set, there is no contest the default textures can offer and having flown around the MegaScenery a few times, I have no doubt that I could get in a plane and fly VFR around the Seattle area and know where I was most of the time - quite a tribute.

The next shot shows us at Lake Tapps - just compare the outline of the default lake with the way it actually looks. If you gave me that shot of the lake as Microsoft have it, there would be no way I could give you a positive ID on it, other than an opinion based on its location, because it is a caricature of its real shape. The same goes for every other body of water in the FS2004 world, the majority of which are at best rough approximations of reality. This is no particular criticism of Microsoft, although it would be fantastic to see correct outlines in the next version of FS, but it demonstrates to perfection one of the reasons why anyone who is keen on making their simming as real as it gets should buy this product. While we are on the subject of water, all the larger lakes I tried were landable - although there are a few puddles up there in the mountains which look like they may not be.

You've seen a few shots of the Winter textures now and I am sure you will agree that the developers have done a very good job with them. If you scan down the right hand column, you can see that if it snows anywhere in the Seattle scenery, it snows everywhere, but given that a compromise had to be done, the effect looks real and it is definitely better than the default Winter textures, of which the less said, the better.

Okaaay, so we've made a slight alteration of course to position us to make the run up to Greenwater and the mountains are in sight ahead. In a standard FS2004 setup, the view at this point is so boring it makes you want to give up. The left hand screenshot shows a featureless landscape with a single road running through it. Fortunately, the Real World (tm) does not look like this, or no-one would fly.

Now check out the center shot - the view is transformed, with a large block of forestry under the plane, a couple of lakes have appeared from nowhere and you can take your pick of roads. The stream has graduated from an unispiring ditch to a rather interesting little braided river - could be worth fishing, or then again, maybe not, since it is so close to Seattle. Now I look at it, I bet they are shoulder to shoulder down there. Amazing, when you consider how many places there are to fish in this state.

We're climbing over the foothills now, with Mount Rainer ahead in the distance - these shots are a representative view of the large areas of wilderness that characterize PNW. The new mesh comes into its own here and it looks good, though I surely would not want to have an engine failure anywhere out there. Compared to the default scenery, the contours are much more convincing and the rivers are much more likely to lie in the valleys than pass the time climbing up mountainsides. The shots above show a good example of this, the default scenery having the river at lower left flowing upwards at times along a broad featureless slope, while with PNW installed, the river runs on a valley floor and takes a bite out of the escarpment it has created at bottom center.

After overflying Greenwater, we have turned towards Mount Rainier so we can get a good view of the mountain. This is where the deficiencies of the default mesh become seriously apparent, with gross simplification of the mountain and particularly of the ridge leading up to it from bottom left in each of the shots. The default scenery is boring compared to the MegaScenery - just look at the snow left on the eastern shoulder of the ridge in the center screenshot. Also check out the little glacier melt lake below and left of the left hand wing of the Beech; I have swung the viewpoint around slightly in the center screenshot to show it, but I guarantee it isn't there in the default scenery.

If you own any of the GeoRender sceneries, marketed by Lago, or Orcas Island by FS Addon, you will be pleased to know that many of them lie within the area covered by PNW. I tried Emma Field, Strom and Orcas Island and they all fitted in as if they belonged, with no obvious mesh mismatches. What I did find were texture mismatches, which is reasonable, given that the GeoRender sceneries were designed to blend in with the default textures and the MegaScenery is not - there is an obvious demarcation line where the PNW phototextures butt up to the default ones. What I didn't expect was that the GeoRender sceneries would highlight a color cast in the mountain PNW summer textures, which have slightly too much cyan and yellow in them. I guess I was surprised because I hadn't noticed this before; either the cast isn't apparent when you are flying over PNW, or you get used to it, but it stands out like a sore thumb when you reach an edge and fly onto a different set of terrain tiles in a mountainous area.

Since the default textures (and hence the GeoRender ones, which have been designed to blend into them) are slightly too dark, the PNW mountain scenery appears to have a kind of turquoise glow for the first few miles you fly into it; then the effect goes away as your eyes and brain adjust to it. The best screenshot for appreciating this effect is the center picture, second row above - if you compare it to the default textures, you will be able to see what I mean. The true color lies somewhere between Microsoft's gloomy greenish-black and PC Aviator's greenish-turquoise, but as I say, the latter isn't noticeable if you are flying over it all the time. As it is, the color is a dead ringer for how things look viewed through a pair of RayBan Aviators (-:

I had also better mention the Achilles heel of photographic sceneries, which is blurring. Blurring of ground textures is a fact of life in Flight Simulator - I first became aware of it with Austria Pro in FS98 and, Microsoft having had no pressing reason to upgrade their terrain engine in the meantime, it has been with us ever since. The symptom is the landscape ahead not coming into focus until the last moment, when the ground tiles do a little shuffle and suddenly crisp up. You can demonstrate the phenomenon with the default textures by checking 'extended terrain textures' and then slewing a jet quickly into a mountainous area, hitting the Y key to drop out of slew mode and blasting away at full throttle; most often the landscape degenerates into a streaky mess and it can take a long while to catch up with itself. Minor degrees of blurring happen all the time, but it is more noticeable with photographic textures, simply because you tend to look at them more closely - the default tiles don't attract attention because they are so boringly repetitive that you take 'em for granted and so most people don't see what is going on literally under their noses.

Verdict? The MegaSceneries are landmark products, no question. The 'full kit' version of Pacific Northwest gets an Armchair Aviator Award because it is so well presented - at a time when many FS publishers are selling boxes full of air, PC Aviator have packed a box full of goodies and I just can't resist it.

Learn more here