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Screen shots by Newport Scenery |
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Melbourne is Australia's second-largest city (after Sydney) and the largest city in the State of Victoria. Founded in 1835, it became among the world's larger and richer cities by the 1880s after gold was discovered in the region in the 1850s. Today Melbourne is a major center for arts, commerce, education, sports, and tourism. With a well-protected harbor and a large bay, it is Australia's busiest seaport. Melbourne International Airport is Australia's second busiest. About one-third of Australia's technical labor force works out of Melbourne. The greater metro area's population is 3.9 million.
Newport Scenery has released a photorealistic ground texture replacement for the entire city of Melbourne and the surrounding area. This is among numerous photorealistic sceneries for FSX that Newport has created, such as Miami, Florida; Los Angeles, California; Copenhagen, Denmark, and Sydney, Australia.
Bill Stack
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Bill Stack |
Newport
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Melbourne Australia Location
Screen Shots as Indicated |
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Newport Scenery touts the following features:
This scenery package is easily downloaded in a few minutes from the FlightSim Pilot Shop. No license key is required, but a brief end user license agreement is required. The installation program extracts all needed files quickly.
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Melbourne International Airport
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Essendon Airport
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| Screen shots by Bill Stack | |
The scenery's colors overall seem more realistic when compared with satellite photos I found on the Internet — richer green than the green/yellow that's typical in FSX default scenery.
The geographical texturing appears more realistic — hills, ravines, and similar contours are easier to see even though those contours are the same as in the FSX default scenery.
Inland water appears more realistic than the default FSX scenery, which looks more like plastic drop cloths than water.
Urban areas such as downtown and suburbs look much more like satellite photos I found on the Internet than in the FSX default scenery. I cannot include those photos in this review, but they are easily found on Bing maps, Google maps, and Mapquest.
Three of Melbourne's five airports are included within the photorealistic area: International, Essendon, and Morrabbin.
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Downtown Melbourne
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Melbourne Suburbs
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| Screen shots by Bill Stack | |
Scenery objects such as buildings and bridges that are unique to Melbourne (not auto generated) remain in the scenery.
Frame rates are unaffected because there are fewer autogenerated objects.
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Melbourne Bridges Screen shots by Bill Stack |
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International Airport
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Essendon Airport
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Downtown Melbourne
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Melbourne Suburbs
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Night Scenes Screen shots by Bill Stack |
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An excellent map of the area can be found on the World Atlas website.
Good satellite photos are available from Google Maps.
Information about Melbourne Australia is available at Wikipedia.
Western Edge
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Northeastern Corner
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Screen shots by Bill Stack |
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The installation program places files into a catchall FSX subfolder named "Addon Scenery\Scenery," along with scenery files from other sources. None of those files is uniquely identified, resulting in a folder of various scenery files from various sources. Newport's installation program allows some but not enough liberty to change the installation folders. Users can choose the basic installation folder, but they will always have their scenery files deposited into a subfolder named "Addon Scenery" and a subordinate folder named "Scenery." To avoid having my Melbourne files mixed with other scenery files, I reorganized my folders so Newport's Melbourne files are in a dedicated and specifically identified folder.
Even though most water appears more realistic, especially rivers that are appropriately wider than in the FSX default scenery, some rivers and lakes appear inclined on sloping terrain, instead of flat as water should be. (See screen shots.)
Night effects are not as good as in the default FSX scenery. Without autogenerated objects, roads lack street lights. Buildings seen as light rectangles during daytime are white at night as though the entire roofs were illuminated.
The bland taxiways and aprons at Melbourne International Airport look bad enough in FSX's scenery, and they look awful atop Newport's photorealistic scenery. This is an unfortunate consequence of enhancing only the terrain is that it makes lame default features look even more lame. (See screen shots.)
As shown in the screen shot, two of the Melbourne area's five airports are just outside Newport's ground-texture area: Port Cook and Williams Landing. (The former Williams Landing military base is depicted in FSX but is no longer an active airport.) As a result, simmers cannot enjoy this scenery at all Melbourne's airports. I wonder if the photorealistic area could have been moved westward a few kilometers to include those airports.
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Sloping Rivers and Lakes
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Urban Night Effects
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Bland Default Pavements
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Port Cook |
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Airports Outside Photorealistic Area
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My screen shots were made with FSX display settings on "default" because that's what I presume most flight simmers would be using and because the package recommends no special settings. I made one screen shot with the frame rate set on "unlimited" to see what rates were possible, and they were very good.
This photorealistic scenery for FSX is useful for its intended purpose: Enjoying more realistic terrain and color. The urban areas, especially downtown, are remarkably improved and actually appear like satellite photos. Some water looks better, and some looks absurd. Night lighting isn't realistic, however. Frame rates are unaffected because of the low number of autogenerated objects. All considered, this scenery is worth the price for what it is.
Learn More About Newport Scenery's Melbourne Australia
Bill Stack is author of several books about flight simulation, a regular author in flight-sim magazines, and a contributor to Flight Sim Com. His website is www.topskills.com
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