Mega Scenery USA 2005: Southern California V2

By Andrew Herd (10 April 2006)

outhern California had the distinction of being the launch package in the original MegaScenery series, so I guess we shouldn't be surprised to find it is the first part to have had a makeover in the launch of PC Aviator's 'version 2' range. Sceptical readers might see this as an attempt by the publisher to double their profits, but even a cursory glance reveals that the new package has little in common with the old beyond the title. The headline change is that the original satellite textures are out and SoCal 2 has been created entirely from aerial photography; but the coverage of the package has also been expanded and the new version includes 50% more real estate than the old package did; and the title has been moved onto DVD media.

So is SoCal that much better? Well yeah, actually, it is, although version 1 wasn't bad at all and it is only if you have a chance to compare the two that the differences really begin to stand out - but stand out they do. If you want to check out exactly how different the new textures are, I suggest taking a look at Cap Mason's version 1 review and comparing the screenshots - because if a criticism can be levelled at the original version, it was that it had oversaturated colors and a definite cyan tinge. The Northern California package was much better, with more muted browns and more realistic greens, although the interesting thing is that these faults only stand out by comparison when you put screenshots of the old version side by side with the new. Having long experience in color correcting pictures, experience tells me that the average individual is remarkably tolerant of color casts as long as they are consistent, which is fortunate because if they weren't, color magazine publishing as we know it would have ceased long ago. This truth really came home to me when I took an hour setting up a friend's monitor to display the correct color and gamma only to have him revert to the original settings because he didn't like it the new way and (to add insult to injury) I had made all his digital photos look strange... So if you have SoCal V1, it is only worth changing if you have a beef with the browns.

The move to aerial photos as a source has had another benefit, which is that the textures are sharper. On the face of it, this is kind of odd, given that the maximum ground texture resolution FS2004 allows is 4.75 meters per pixel, which means that the 1 foot per pixel AirphotoUSA shots the developers used have been downsampled to a major extent, but when you reflect that the softness apparent in the satellite photo-derived textures was the result of them being upsampled to almost the same degree, it isn't difficult to understand why the scenery looks so much better.

As far as the extent of texture coverage, version 1 measured 112 nautical miles north to south and 125 nm east-west; version 2 is 150 x 150 nm, although the north and southeast corners aren't covered and there is a large area of ocean in the southwest quarter - if you want to see what is included, click here. Both LA and San Diego are included and you get a large area of San Bernardino and San Gabriel mountains, plus the island of Catalina. Night scenery is included for the entire area, the coastlines have been hand-edited to be FS compatible and the lakes all have landable water. All the custom objects within the area have been repositioned, which means that skyscrapers and stadiums are in the correct positions relative to the textures they stand upon; as, of course, are runways and airport buildings, as you can see in the shot below left. From the virtual air, it looks real, but the usual caveat about photosceneries applies, which is that you have to fly above 2500 feet, or the textures begin to pixellate and the impression is spoiled; and I nearly forgot to say that you get an enhanced 30 m mesh.

I reviewed the 'full kit' package - here I have to hold up my hand and say that I have been an unashamed fan of full kits ever since I got the first one for review and thought "Oooh! Manuals! Sectionals! Plates!" By and large, they do not package addons this way any more and if they do, they definitely do not sell them for under forty dollars. If you buy the full kit you get a fat DVD style box containing a slim manual, a thick (231 page) book of plates, the LA sectional and terminal area chart, and the San Diego terminal area chart, plus the DVD, so you really do get value for money. The Lite version lacks the charts and the plates, but is otherwise identical.

If you haven't seen the SoCal package before, this piece is best read in conjunction with Cap Mason's review of version 1, which contains numerous helpful hints and tips about how to set up video cards and all. Installation is straightforward, hardware requirements being a 1.0 Ghz processor or better, Windows 98 or better, 512 Mb of RAM, a 64 Mb graphics card, 3 Gb of hard disk space, and - needless to say - a DVD drive. Although the package is designed for FS2004, you can install it in FS2002, as long as you are tolerant of some scenery inaccuracies and mismatches; I didn't try this, but since there are significant differences between 2002 and 2004, I can imagine the effects are quite noticeable. Although the package will run on Windows 98 and ME, a design feature means that you will only get a single season if you are running the FAT32 file system, and this means that all the textures will appear gray unless you fly in summer. The recommended system is a 2.8 Ghz Pentium or better, running XP with NTFS, a gig of RAM and a 128 Mb video card - any similarities between this and the ideal system for running FS2004 are purely coincidental, as the package makes very little extra demand over the default FS setup. Ground textures are just textures to Flight Simulator, it doesn't matter what they show, they all impose the same performance hit at standard resolution.

I took a trip from the KCNO (Chino) area towards John Wayne-Orange County (KSNA), before routing out to Catalina (KAVX) and in order to give an idea of how lighting affects photo-textures, set the visibility to less than 20 miles for the first part of the trip and to more than forty for the second, as I neared the coast. The two shots above show the view as Flight1's superb Cessna 172 heads for the coast - just about the only way F1 could improve that plane would be to paint some more liveries for it. The reason for choosing the 172, apart from the fact that I have always enjoyed using it, since it is about as close to the real thing as you are going to get in a sim, is that its cruising speed doesn't cause texture blurring. Photoscenery developers must hunch their shoulders every time I do a review, since I always mention this problem, but it is only fair to readers to point out that cruising over phototextures at speeds of much greater than 150 - 200 knots is to risk periodic episodes of blurring where the ground textures degenerate into a smeary mess. The advantage of using an addon like the 172 is that blurring isn't a problem at all at the kind of speed that Cessna's single ambles along at.

I am running Flight Environment here, which could make a claim to be my all-time favorite package. Scenery developers don't commonly have it in their top ten because it has the power to completely alter the way ground textures look, but as you can see here, it isn't a problem with SoCal, nor would I expect it to be, given the amount of work that Aerosoft Australia put into developing this package. Yep, it is kind of screwy that most of the US texture packages have been developed by non-US developers, but the virtual world we live in makes all kinds of strangeness possible.

Just so you can get an idea of what Orange County looks like without smog, I raised the visibility bar in the last couple of shots. These pics give a good example of how well the 3D objects have been lined up in FS2004, but from the way the subject is dealt with in the manual, I doubt this is the case in FS2002. The dockside in particular is well worth a visit - just look at how well those cranes are lined up. I have some amusing memories of this area, because my wife's uncle Doug once took us on a boat trip around the harbor, which resulted in us getting lost in the USN base somehow. We spent a good deal of time cruising under the bows of warships with Doug trying to recall what he had done with the chart and the pair of us thinking that if the worst came to the worst, at least we had gotten lost with an attorney in charge and a bit of plea bargaining might keep us out of San Quentin.

In the brighter light that comes with greater visibility, you can see that the textures have warmed up considerably - which is exactly what happens in real life. In the flat light that fog brings with it, the ground becomes noticeably grayer and you lose perspective, thanks to the lack of shadows. One of the interesting things about photosceneries is that their apparent realism depends as much on their color as on their shadow quality and parts of every scenery I have seen look worse than others thanks to having originally been shot in flatter light. There is absolutely no way of compensating for this in Flight Simulator and it is one of the reasons why it pays to stay above 2500 - 3000 feet, as it is only at that sort of height that buildings in the textures begin to assume a 3D appearance. As you can see, AutoGen is suppressed in the city areas of SoCal 2 and with good reason, because if you do run it, the houses conflict with the ground texture 'streets' and the result is messy, to say the least.

Do be aware that you only get a single set of textures that appear in every season, even if you are running NTFS. This is the norm for photoscenery packages, except in areas where 'hard winter' textures are appropriate and some PC Aviator packages do offer this, although it would clearly be inappropriate for Southern California.

I liked SoCal 2 a very great deal. As I mentioned earlier, SoCal 1 isn't at all bad, but version 2 offers better value for money in all kinds of ways. The textures are better, no doubt about it, and they cover a significantly greater area than they do in version 1. If you don't already have SoCal and don't possess the relevant sectional, the Full Kit package is a bargain because the publisher effectively throws in a set of plates for free - an already great package that just got even better.

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