DreamScenery's Milwaukee 2006

By Bill Otten (30 July 2006)

Outstanding downtown photorealistic scenery!

The package is an apparent combination of author Greg Soldo's KMKE scenery and an updated Milwaukee 2005 release. It is designed for the 'low and slow' general aviation pilot, with a huge amount of detail to see. Available in a download format or on CD, the zip file contains two separate executables, one which expands to 197 Megs and another for KMKE of 23 Megs. I mention combination because there are elements in the scenery that give it away as having been pieced together from two separate releases. More on that in a moment...

To its credit Milwaukee 2006 features photo terrain textures of Milwaukee county and parts of surrounding Waukesha and Racine counties at 1 meter/pixel resolution, offering a tremendous amount of detail and realism. I was impressed with street level or better resolution. All buildings over 12 stories tall are depicted, as well as hundreds of other structures. In fact, scattered throughout the scenery are little areas of homes depicted, which tends to populate the scenery nicely without being too much...although even on my system of an Athlon 2.8 GHz, 512 meg RAM, and a 128 meg graphics card there were instances of frame rates into the single digits.

It is apparent that a great deal of work went into the downtown area and the recreation of essentially all the major landmarks and buildings in the Milwaukee area. I was pleased with this realism and it makes the flying very enjoyable.

Note some of the main terminal 'interior' details through the glass...

Most, if not all the downtown buildings are depicted...well done here even with a case of the blurries in ground textures due to my system not keeping up with the CPU intensive demands. This detail is the strength of Milwaukee 2006.

The airport at KMKE was outstanding also...details are visible through the glass of the terminal buildings of the interiors! The hangars at KMKE are also 'radio' controllable. By dialing in a set frequency one can open and close hangar doors.

Unfortunately there are some elements of the scenery package that I mentioned as detracting from the 'realism' of the overall package. One has to do with the fact that this package is an amalgam of two separate prior packages. The clues are readily apparent in the area surrounding KMKE. For all of the labor taken to create a very good depiction of KMKE, the single fault is that the photorealistic textures underlying the KMKE area are a monotone, arid looking brown...the result of having aerial photos taken during the late fall or winter months when not a blade of green existed. The author has addressed this issue in a small block of texture directly at KMKE airport, but once in flight the disparity is glaringly apparent.

A single block of green within an immensely brown photo-texture in the KMKE portion.

And the return to a subtly done green once inside of the Milwaukee part of the package.

This is only evident in the KMKE part of the scenery package, in the new Milwaukee part (the downtown and surrounds areas) the ground textures have been done correctly, yet not to the vivid greens expected during the spring and summer months. Even still, in order to get this green area within the KMKE scenery one has to download a patch to the original file (available at the DreamScenery support forum). While there, get the patches for the addition of Mitchell domes and the one for replacing the odd turquoise green runway textures at Timmerman Field. In my case, I also had to flatten the ground mesh at KUES field (Waukesha County). There were depressions and hills running through the airport and covering runways and taxiways, and I ensured I had installed the Milwaukee package at the top of the scenery library hierarchy above my Ultimate Terrain scenery.

To summarize...the entire package does a very good job at capturing the essence of the Milwaukee area. The details are admirable, but the flaws in the ground textures between the two areas detract from a sense of cohesiveness to the flying experience. To his credit, the author has addressed several of the issues in this package and offered patches to resolve them. I mentioned the brown textures in the support forum and was told that "changing the whole area colors manually would take more than a few months, since we are talking about literally thousands of photos, and even then changing the tone and color of one would make it look different from the next in some areas". Frankly, this one major change would take the program from a " you decide " to a " highly recommended ", in my opinion and should be addressed with a final patch.

Bill Otten
res0958z@knology.net

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