MegaCITY San Francisco

By Andrew Herd (13 July 2005)

ot off the press from the folks who brought you MegaScenery is a new type of addon - the first MegaCity for FS2004. San Francisco MegaCity is an aerial photographic scenery package that covers 3000 square miles around the shores of San Francisco bay, all the way from Sonoma at the northwest corner down to San Jose in the southeast; and out beyond Concord to Antioch in the northeast. The idea is a good one, because there is a whole bunch of simmers out there flying big iron who like to see realistic landscapes in terminal areas, but are otherwise fly too high to appreciate thousands of acres of photorealistic mountains. MegaCities let them save a few bucks and still get the most realistic arrivals and departures possible.

I did this review immediately after looking at Volume 3 of PC Aviator's MegaScenery, which covers Northern California, including the Bay area; because it gave me an ideal opportunity to take a look at the differences between the two packages. PC Aviator have designed them to go together and even give a discount if they are bought as a pair, so I am sure you are already asking yourself which one you need, or is it both? I guess the first thing to realise is that the MegaScenery covers ten times the area of the MegaCity, from the Sacramento valley way up in the north, all the way down to Monterey, so there is no contest if you want tha maximum acreage. But there are other differences and one of the aims of this review is to bring them out.

The MegaCity comes in a slim DVD-style package which contains a single CD, a card with installation instructions and an ad for Computer Pilot magazine. Apart from that, there is air - so if you want terminal charts and approach plates, you will need to buy the 'full kit' version of Volume 3 of the MegaScenery, or get onto Sporty's. Installation requires a gigabyte of hard disk space and runs from an autoinstaller which displays tips on how best to use the scenery as it goes along. Needless to say, given the amount of data involved, this all takes quite a while; and when the installer is finished, another dialog pops up asking if you want the program to optimize the FS graphics for the package. I clicked yes to this and everything ran fine once it was done.

According to the back of the box, the aerial photos on which the MegaCity is based have a resolution of two feet per pixel, which means they must look pretty lush, but according to Microsoft's terrain SDK, FS2004 only displays at 4.75 meters per pixel. Microsoft state that if higher resolution base images are used to build terrain texture tiles, the excess data will get thrown away in the conversion, and that if lower resolution base images are used, there is a risk that the resulting terrain tiles will look blurred. Effectively, the resolution of terrain texture tiles in Flight Simulator is fixed by this standard, and using images with higher resolutions that 4.75 meters per pixel shouldn't improve it, although that isn't to say that it will do any harm either. What will cause a problem is if a developer uses photographs with a lower resolution than the magic 4.75 meters, because visible jaggies and blurring will result.

Now let's look at the scenery.

What I have done here is to take the same view - bar slight differences due to positioning of the aircraft - three times for each location, and all the grouped screenshots from hereon in follow the same pattern. Above left is the view with the default FS2004 scenery; in the middle we have the Volume 3 MegaScenery package installed (which includes this area, remember?); and on the right the San Francisco MegaCity package only is installed - I went so far as to remove MegaScenery Volume 3 to ensure there was no possible confusion between it and the MegaCity. From the point of view of this review, the left and right shots are the main comparison, because they show how good the MegaCity scenery is compared to the default terrain, but if you are thinking of buying MegaScenery Volume 3 instead, be my guest and examine the center pic as well.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out how much the MegaCity improves the place, does it? Incidentally, although PC Aviator state that the package allows 'flying in all four seasons' there only appears to be one set of textures, so they all look alike.

Okay, now you have your breath back, here is another set. A couple of things stand out from this set of images. The first is that the coastline is far more accurate with either MegaScenery Volume 3 (middle) or the MegaCity (right) packages installed and the contours kick sand in the face of the default mesh - an easy win for PC Aviator. It looks like I took the shots somewhere near San Rafael, but again, although Microsoft's landclassing is pretty good on the left, the 'Mega' shots look much more real and there isn't a contest.

Where there is a contest is for loading times - with the MegaCity loaded, these are considerably extended and the progress bar chugs along between 50 and 60%, but though the delay is noticeable, we are only talking a few minutes on a 3.0 Ghz system. The other issue is that, as always with texture-based packages, occasional, but temporary scenery tile blurring is a fact of life and the only way to minimise it is to fly at less than 250 knots - better below 150 - and not indulge in too many turns. When I say 'too many', ordinary VFR flight tracks should be OK, but whatever you do, you will experience blurring from time to time.

Let's see some more, eh?

This is Point San Pablo - after spending a day doing all these shots, I feel like I have lived here all my life, it would be interesting to see how well I could find my way around in the air in a real plane. Again, the default scenery has brutally simplified the shore outline, guillotined all the breakwaters off, and where did that harbor go? At this point, you might like to scan up the rows and give me your impression of how the color and focus of the MegaScenery and MegaCity packages compare. I did my best to take all the shots with the same weather, at the same time of day and in the same season, although peculiarities of FS2004's weather engine mean that there are small differences. But broadly, the playing field should be even here.

Yep, you see it too. The MegaCity scenery is darker and it appears to be better focussed. If the terrain SDK is to be believed, this cannot be down to using 2 foot per pixel shots, because it shouldn't make any difference at all to the resolution. The color can be accounted for perhaps by the use of aerial, rather than satellite shots, but whatever the reason, the MegaCity textures are significantly better than the MegaScenery ones and they completely trash the default set - so PC Aviator have a case when they suggest buying both sets.

Hokay, this is the killer. The Flight1 172 is about to overfly Oakland International and if you are still prepared to go with the default scenery after this, I shall eat my keyboard. The default scenery does not represent anywhere I wish to see, the shoreline is dull and uninteresting and the screenshot shouts out that you are flying in a simulator. The MegaCity shot, over there above right; and look at the difference - you feel you ought to be able to see people and vehicles and trains down there, never mind airplanes. Compare the MegaScenery shot in the center with the MegaCity shot and all the differences we have discussed are visible.

Last, but not least, you get custom night textures, which the developers say displays 'every single light emitting source in the entire metropolis'. I didn't actually count them all, but I think the effect is better. Call me chicken, but wild horses would not drag me to voluntarily fly single engined night 'VFR' on account of having too good an imagination - just think about what you would do if you had an engine failure? Yeah... you can't land in the lit areas, because that is where all the houses are, and you can't land in the unlit ones, because who knows what is there. But night flying in FS is a another thing entirely and I guess I might just have to give it a go now.

Like all the 'Mega' addons, MegaCity San Francisco is a seriously good package and have no hesitation recommending it. I can't think of any drawbacks and the only potential problem you face is when you fly off the edge of the scenery and go back to the horrors of the default landscape, but then again, even PC Aviator have to draw the line somewhere.