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The quick explanation is that the FSX world is built from a terrain mesh, over which a grid of ground texture tiles are laid to form a believable-looking landscape. There is a huge variety of tiles available from which FSX chooses on the basis of data known as 'landclass' which tells it which kind of tile to put where. If the database says that a particular ground coordinate should be a city, in goes a city tile, and if it says that the area is steppe, in goes a steppe tile. Because the grid relies on geographical coordinates, it is possible to substitute tiles based on satellite or aerial photographs for the default landclass tiles, so that instead of flying over a generic landscape, you can fly over one which looks real. The effect has to be seen to be believed, but I was a convert to photosceneries roughly ten seconds after I saw the first PC Aviator MegaScenery, which was several versions of Flight Simulator ago - but until FSX came along, the problem with photosceneries (apart from regular attacks of the blurries) was that the resolution was only adequate if you flew at 2,500 feet or above. Most of the time, this wasn't a problem, because that is the height at which most GA flights are made, but the instant you descended to land, the ground broke up into a horrible, pixellated mess which spoiled the whole effect. The other problem was that most of the sceneries were based on satellite photography and for some reason no-one ever seemed to be able to color-correct it so that it looked totally convincing in Flight Simulator, but that is another story. Hokay. So your money gets you a solid DVD case, that lands on the mat with a thump. The contents are heavy enough that if you got into a tight spot, the box could be used as a defensive weapon, which is a far cry from most packages I see these days, which follow the rule that users are only satisfied if they buy an enormous box full of fresh air. As I remarked earlier, apart from the montage on the front cover, which isn't that far from the truth, the artwork really does show you stuff you are going to see with the product installed. Inside you get a couple of DVDs... no, hold on, there's another... gee... there's one under that, too... make that four DVDs. Epic. Following MegaScenery tradition you also get a VFR terminal area chart and a thick manual, which follows up 17 pages of advice on how to make the best of the scenery with a thick wadge of approach charts. Disk includes more sectionals and 84 SIDs and STARs, so if you set out to fly every one of them, you won't need to buy any more addons for quite a while. PC Aviator quotes the minimum system requirements as:
While their recommended system requirements are:
...and the manual goes on to say that to get the best performance out of FSX requires a 'top-of-the-line system' which exceeds even the recommended spec above. Do we not know this, Microsoft... I did the review using a a 2.66 Core2Duo with 4 Gb of RAM and a 768 Mb GeForce 8800GTX, running FSX Acceleration under Vista. Installation takes a long while, as you might imagine, with nearly sixteen gigs of data having to be transferred from here to there, but when the disk swapping is done, you are presented with a library update dialog, followed by another which tweaks FSX to work at its best with the MegaScenery. Having allowed this to do its stuff in the past, all I can say is that I have never been aware of it affecting the performance of any other FS addons, but one of the crucial things that it does is to check if you have FSX SP1 installed, because if you don't, you are liable to run into problems. The manual may not have many pages of advice, but all of it is good and the developers recommend flying with vis set to a maximum of 50 miles and add that the lowest height at which the photoscenery will look at its best is a thousand feet, which is absolutely correct. The developer also suggests turning off Autogen, which will spoil the look by spraying random trees and buildings all over your lovely new photographic tiles; and to shut down every other app you possibly can before you run FSX. If you are a seasoned FSX user like myself, at this point you will also get out your lucky rabbit's foot and invoke the spirits of departed ancestors before launching the sim, but that is for another article. I can feel an op-ed coming on here... When you start FSX for the first time after the addon has been installed, be prepared for it to take a while rebuilding the scenery library.
One other thing. Southern California MegaScenery X only has a single season and night textures. What! Where did the other three go? I can hear the screaming. Er, well, yeah, you have a point there, but four seasons would mean a 64 gig installation and even in these days of terabyte disks, it wouldn't take many of those before FSX took over the planet, not that it isn't doing a fine job of it right now without the help of full-season photosceneries. When I was a boy, you know, in nineteen hundred and mumble mumble, you could run Flight Simulator on a Tandy TRS-80 in 16k of memory and still have enough RAM left over to load a program you had spent three weeks typing in from a magazine. Seems a long time ago [it was, get on with it, you old fart]. Anyway, I guess the one thing one can say with total confidence about southern California is that the landscape doesn't change that much with the seasons, at least as seen from the air, so one season is what you get. But what a season! The results are, as you can see, quite stunning. I flew the scenery four different ways: first, with a big iron departure from KLAX; second with a chopper flight along the highway; third with a GA flight that didn't make it into the screenshots; and fourth with a scream around the mountains in the F/A-18. I restricted the vis to 50 miles or less (real weather took it down to 20 at times) and in no case did the addon make any impact on the frame rates, which is what I would expect. The only time I had any real trouble with blurring was when I flew the F/A-18 flat out on the deck, at which point FSX simply gave up on the idea of loading textures. I tried the scenery with FSX Acceleration's DX10 preview enabled (also available in FSX SP2), which didn't make any difference at all, so I can confirm that SoCalX is DX10 compatible, even if half the addon aircraft I tried ran into skinning problems. Despite the recommendation in the manual to turn Autogen off, the SoCalX install leaves it turned up fairly high and after flying around with things left like that for a while I gave up and turned the Autogen off, which improved the look of the scenery tremendously and boosted frame rates, as it always does. There are a few bugs in the scenery, mostly relating to runways at peripheral airports, some of which end up being partially submerged by the phototextures, so that you can see bits of Microsoft runway interleaved among the phototextured runway, with neither side scoring a convincing win. The result looks messy but could be solved fairly easy by creating a flattening file, if your favorite airport happens to be affected. Whiteman is a good example. Flaws in the mesh result in places where the highways would be kind of difficult to drive, but this is the kind of thing only reviewers are bothered about. Otherwise, as you can see from the screenshots, SoCalX makes LA look exactly as it does in real life. In times past, MegaSceneries have had a slight cyan cast, but I am pleased to say that this is not evident in SoCalX, nor has it been in any of the aerial photo based sceneries PC Aviator have released to date; the color cast on the satellite sceneries may well be something to do with atmospheric filtering. Once you are flying at 1500 feet above ground level, the textures look uncannily real - above a thousand feet they aren't bad and below that they progressively break up, but given that few flights take place at less than a thousand feet AGL, this is hardly a problem and you shouldn't be admiring the scenery during take offs and departures! The only problem with the scenery and it is common to all
photosceneries with the exception of the
Alaska Cinematic packages for FS2004, is that unless you go
around in circles, you will end up flying off an edge. As the bottom
screenshot on the right demonstrates, if you look beyond the
mountains toward the horizon, at that point, the illusion of reality
ends with a sharp and obvious join between the phototextures and the
default textures. There is little one can do except be philosophical
about this (or turn around and fly back the way you came), but I do
Andrew Herd  Copyright © 2008 by FlightSim.Com. All Rights Reserved. |
here is addon scenery and then there is PC Aviator MegaScenery. It isn't often that I know I am going to be looking at something really, really good before I get as far as opening the box, but I haven't come across a duff MegaScenery product yet and Southern California MegaScenery X is no exception. If you are into MegaSceneries, read no further, because you are wasting valuable time that could be spent purchasing this superb product - you already know what you are going to see and I don't think you need me to tell you any more.
