grew up in a
suburb east of Los Angeles in the early 70's and have been back a few
times to visit. Besides Disneyland, I can't remember much from when I
was a kid, but I do remember the scenery and places we liked to
vacation throughout the area - mainly the nearby mountains. Now as a
pilot I would love to go fly the area, and the challenge of all the
class B airspace regions would keep it interesting.After hearing all the gripes of Expansion Pack users, plus the occasional comments of how really awesome this scenery is, I decided to try it myself. The box says all you need is 20MB of hard disk space to run the scenery. Well, I decided to install first with this option as my curiosity had me thinking that maybe, really it would work great without all being on the hard drive. Wrong! Once it loaded and all, I sat in my sim cockpit for at least three minutes just waiting for the scenery to be displayed. At that time I had only 16 meg of Ram and a 2X CDROM, but on a P133 I felt it should be shorter than three minutes CD access time.
After reading a complete article in a magazine, my scenery was ready! Wow! The front view was great! Now, I turned to look out the side and ohmygosh, another waiting time for the CD to run again. This time it was still long enough to peruse any aviation magazine. Arrrrggghhh!
I shut down flightsim, and uninstalled the scenery. That was a lot faster than waiting for scenery to load. Then I reinstalled it using the maximum option, and I wasn't allowed to as it would take 160meg! I was astonished, but thought maybe the scenery is really that good afterall, anything taking 160 meg has got to be good, right? I won't say yet...
After what seemed like days cleaning off things I didn't want to part
with on my HD, I had enough room to install the Socal scenery in the
maximum option. I still didn't want to totally fill my HD so I didn't
install all the adventures and advwav files. It was about 110 meg now
for installation like that.
Okay, now we're talking, or at least loading faster. The pausing when viewing around the plane came from the caching of my HD as scenery loaded. Even with smartdrv set at 6 meg, the pausing was 2 to 4 seconds. To me, a smooth frame rate freak, this was unacceptable. Even during flying, it paused enough to cause me aggravation. Now, mind you this is on the "ultra-pausey" FSFW95. Combined with the FS6 pauses, and Socal pauses... I felt like I was on a 486. In the pauses, you do have time to view the scenery, which I will discuss in a moment.
Well, I thought it's time to purchase more memory. So a few days later I now had 48 meg of ram! I thought, well I've defeated Microsoft! The joke was on me. With smartdrv loaded now up to maybe 12 meg, I still got pauses of 1 to 2 seconds while scenery loaded. Now, this is not just a slowdown, but a complete stopping. Overall, with 48 meg, the pausing was reduced a great deal, and in most areas, flight was now smooth. Frame rate in the new Socal scenery was always fine, even in detailed areas, at least a 9 on my P133, if not often 18.
Okay, so the Southern California Scenery was now running fairly well. But, overall the pausing of FSFW95 was worse in flying in this area than in default areas. I am dissapointed to say that with 48 meg of ram, you will not have fluid scenery as you do in add-on areas like Las Vegas, Hawaii or Europe I & II. Remember the box says a 486 with 8 meg of ram is all you need for this add-on. Well, I guess you really don't need any computer at all to enjoy the box pictures in your hand!
Let's say you do purchase this. What will the scenery be like? It's good. In some places it's amazingly real and shows many crowded suburban and inner city ground textures like I've never seen before including overloaded highways, traffic light intersections and more. The coastal areas are great, and at night the beaches are lit up with soft moonlight. The mountains are photorealistic but as you fly close to them they are quite blocky and blurry. The urban areas are great with many accurate buildings. The airports are the best of all! For instance, San Diego International had all the buildings shown on my NOS approach plate runway diagram. That's impressive to a real pilot!
The desert areas look, well, "deserty". I was impressed with the
changes from woodlands, to alpine to hot, dry, dusty areas as you
approach Nevada. It gave a good feeling of being there.
Although I never saw it, Disneyland is really there and detailed as well. Many other famous landmarks are included but I never saw them.
I never tried the adventures. Several friends who did, told me they were terrible. ATC would forget you and vector you into mountains in some cases. Sometimes it just wouldn't work at all. The newsgroups were bustling with flightsimmers that had been the victims of odd air traffic control mishaps, as often we have all had in our flight sim journeys. The only good thing is that the radio chatter and voices sound really realistic - obviously taped from real ATC centers.
Soon the excitment of the detailed airports wore off as the pausing and jerky loading convinced me to remove the expansion scenery once and for all. I have since, never reloaded it. Instead I just fly the default (fairly good for default scenery in my mind) LA region in FS, and enjoy the extra hard disk space for adding more 3rd party airliners thanks to all the great designers out there.
So, the way I see it, Microsoft gave us some great looking scenery that doesn't fly well and threw in a free set of extra pauses to boot. I can't recommend getting this scenery unless you have a P200 MMX with 48 meg of ram or greater. If you are lucky enough to have a machine like this, then you are in for a treat. Or, if you're one of those flightsimmers that doesn't mind jerky frame rates and pausing - this may be worth considering. If that's you, I bet you don't mind the FSFW95 scenery pausing anyway, so this won't shock you any.
Just so you know, I now happily fly FS5.1. That's great with 48 meg of ram, and smartdrv set at 24meg. To me that's "FS97".