Flight1 USA Roads For FS2004

By Andrew Herd (7 October 2004)

love roads. When you get properly lost, there is nothing like finding a road and following it one way or the other, because sooner or later it is bound to lead you to something you recognize.

Just in case you take this the wrong way, pilots do not ever become lost, we merely become temporarily uncertain of our position. Should this ever happen to you, there are various solutions: you can try looking at the chart; you can tune a VOR; you can turn on the GPS; or (and this is for when it gets really desperate) you can always ask air traffic but if you do that, everybody knows you are lost. Having no pride, I ask.

C'mon man! How, in this electronic age, do pilots manage to get lost? After all, I just listed at least four ways of establishing a plane's precise position. Well, sometimes it ain't that simple. I have never got totally lost, but now and again I have been unable to say exactly where I was within a twenty mile radius and that can be bad enough. Just imagine taking off and flying for an hour over a flat farmscape, on a really nice day and you go into a trance staring out the window and thinking how wonderful it is to be up there. At the end of that time, the strip you were headed for doesn't show up and when you check out the chart, you can't match what it shows to what you see, and then you find the twenty year old radio has finally given up on you and the nav side hasn't worked since three annuals ago, so no VOR either. You pull out your GPS III and that doesn't work and when you open it up to find out why it turns out the batteries died a month back and you can't get them out to replace them because they have leaked their contents all over and it looks like it will take a week to clean it all out. That's when you mentally file IFR - I Follow Roads. We all do it and there is only one rule: you fly with the road on your left, just in case another pilot with the same problem is coming the other way.

Default roads Microsoft textures	Major roads installed	Every road installed

In Flight Simulator, you cannot easily do this. Large parts of the US are completely innocent of roads in reality, but the sim has about 90% fewer roads than it should - and if you think that's bad, you ought to try some other countries I could mention. To be fair, no one in the development team has ever suggested that FS was ideal for VFR navigation, but if you look at the progress that has been made by third party developers in the past couple of years, you might begin to question that. This is no criticism of Microsoft, who set out to simulate flight and ended up creating a miniature world for us to play in, but while a slew of European VFR sceneries have been released, American simmers have - so far - been left out in the cold.

That has changed.

Flight1's USA Roads for FS2004 costs $29.95 and is available as a 321 Mb download or on CD. Yep, that was not a typo, this is the mother of all packages and rightly so, because should you so choose, you can display every single road in the US, excepting dirt tracks and even then, some of those have found their way in. Only residents of Alaska and Hawaii will find their street left out, but that still gives Flight1 a vast market to play for, with a product that has such breathtaking scope it that there is no way it won't be a top seller. And if you don't have broadband, don't give up, because USA Roads is available on CD-ROM too. So let's take a look at the product.

After the download is complete, installation is a simple matter of double clicking the executable, completing the Flight1 registration routine and letting the file verify its key. I forget how many times I have done this, but I have yet to have an install which uses this system fail on me. This installs the software into FS2004 and creates a program group on your hard disk containing links to the manual and the setup utility - which runs immediately when the main installation is complete.

As you can see from the screenshot, there are plenty of options for running USA Roads. Taking it from the top, you can choose to install every road in the database, or only the major ones. Take a quick look at the line of screenshots up top to see the effect of each option - more of which later on.

All the other options control the look of the roads at night. Not only can you choose from four different lighting sets (I opted for low pressure sodium as shown in the screenshot below), but there is a choice between bright and dim pavement reflection and five options for traffic density. And no, there aren't any FS2000 style moving lights at night.

The setup utility uncovered the only bug I found in the package, which ordinary users are very unlikely to discover - if you repeatedly swap between installed data sets, USA Roads is inclined to forget where it put the 'major roads only' data and the only way to recover it is to uninstall and reinstall. Since most simmers are likely to make a choice and stick to it, I can't see this being a problem, but reviewers who fool around trying to do screenshots with every conceivable combination selected are liable to cuss a little (-:

With the USA Roads installed, boot up times appear to be very slightly extended and there may also be a slight impact on frame rates, but neither effect is particularly noticeable and the package does seem to be a case of getting your cake and eating it, because I have seldom seen an addon which so completely transforms Flight Simulator without any strings attached. As you can see from the screenshots above, USA Roads really does make a difference, especially when you are flying at heights of less than 10,000 feet.

The major choice to be made is between installing all or only some of the roads; and there are pros and cons to each selection. 'All road types' would be an automatic choice were it not for two issues: first, the urban ground textures in FS already give a good impression of a street grid, and imposing another one on top of it - even when the other one is real - gets messy; and second, because of limitations inherent in the way FS displays roads, the USA Road city grids are far too prominent when viewed from 3,000 feet or more. On the other hand, if you go for 'major roads only', while built-up areas look more natural, there are fewer roads to navigate by in the boonies, although there is still about ten times the number the default scenery provides. So to some extent your selection should depend on which type of flying you like best - bush pilots who never visit the cities will want all the roads, while jet jocks will only want the majors.

The only group who face a tough decision (man, how stressful can simming get...) are GA simmers who routinely fly stuff like Flight1's Cessna 441 in and out of urban airports. As you can see in the shot above, the new roads wander around the country in great lazy loops and curves, quite unlike the default network, where even the interstates tend to have sharply angled corners, so it looks absolutely fantastic out of town; but as soon as you fly into anywhere with a dense street grid, the 'all roads option' confronts you with cases where new roads run right over the top of buildings painted on Microsoft's daylight texture tiles. This is rare in rural areas, but becomes increasingly common as the road density goes up, until it is happening all the time in city centers. Whether this is likely to bother you or not is going to be a personal thing, but in my view just about the only way USA Roads could have been improved would have been to provide a fourth option, which is 'all rural roads, but only major urban roads', which would neatly solve the problem - assuming a fix like that could be implemented. After a playing around for a long time, I have settled down to using 'major roads only', but the big plus with this product is that if I get bored I can always change the look. Check out the screenshots and you can make up your own mind.

Default roads FScene textures	Major roads installed FScene textures	Every road installed FScene textures

The next question that needed answering was what happens if you install USA Roads using a different texture set to the ones supplied by Microsoft. Ruud Faber's FScene textures being the most popular ones around, I took some shots with his sets installed and you can see the results above. Ruud has favored a slightly more open townscape to Microsoft, with more obvious groups of dwellings, with the expected result that conflicts between road and house are more frequent, but as long as you don't opt for the 'all roads' option, the effect isn't at all bad. With a very critical eye, the roads blend better with the Microsoft textures, but then you would expect that.

One of the things that is really obvious with USA Roads is how clever Microsoft have been with their Autogen, because the buildings and trees line up neatly at the side of the pavement and the only time you see an overlap is with stuff like baseball stadiums and some of the custom buildings which haven't always been tipped in at their real life locations. But as you can see from the screenshots, this isn't a huge problem and USA Roads fits in well with the rest of the sim.

Things do sometimes get a bit funky near major bridges, there being the inevitable misalignments like the one shown in the screenshot opposite. To be fair, this is a particularly bad example, but it would be no fun doing reviews if I didn't get to chase out stuff like that (-: On the whole, I didn't notice this being much of a problem, since there aren't that many bridges in FS2004 to start with - and on the plus side, unlike the FS2004 default roads, USA Roads do cross the water, albeit at the expense of dipping down in order to reach the surface when the land is at a higher elevation. I am not certain what could be done to resolve the conflicts, short of going into the bgls and hacking out the bridges.

I didn't check out USA Roads with any third party mesh, because I can't think of a package which is widely used enough to be considered a standard, but I would imagine that there shouldn't be too many problems because of the way the addon works - the roads lay on the surface of whatever contours they find as opposed to having their own elevation data built in.

In summary, it isn't often I come across an addon which is so good that I feel like yelling yeeee ha! but this is one of them. Before installing the package, I would never have suspected that upgrading the road network could make such a difference, but having seen it I am sure that other developers will be scrambling to release similar stuff for the rest of the world. Flight1 have released some seriously imaginative stuff over the years, including FS Clouds, Ultimate Airlines and a slew of first rate planes and it is absolutely clear that they don't plan to lose their place as a market leader. USA Roads is a real must-have and I am seriously impressed. Guess it had better have an Armchair Aviator.