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San Francisco is a city in California on the west coast of the United States, known for its fog, hills, architecture, landmarks and much more. San Francisco is one of the most populous and most densely populated cities in the country, with a population of 808,976 (as of July 2008, U.S. Census Bureau) and is a large center of activity for the Bay Area. Living across the bay from San Francisco, I visit often and am on the lookout for new add-ons for FSX of the area. Not too long ago, Aerosoft released their US Cities X San Francisco add-on and I became excited to try it out and learn more. Well, enough with the city and my thoughts; let's get into the details of this add-on!
From the FS Pilot Shop, the download is a 169 MB zip file containing the installer and license agreement in four languages (English, French, German and Spanish). Once extracted, the installer becomes 171 MB. The installer seemed to work alright, but on one occasion toward the end, the installer just disappeared for a short while, leaving me to wonder what was going on. The installer created an Aerosoft and USCitiesX-SanFrancisco folder in the Start Menu containing the manual (Adobe PDF) and a coverage map (Google Earth KMZ). The manual mainly covers settings, notes, compatibility and FAQs. The manual and coverage map are also available as separate downloads on the Aerosoft web site. The installer also automatically updated my scenery library, leaving me ready to fly and explore the new scenery.
As soon as I started FSX, I let the scenery library re-build and got in my trusty Cessna 152 to tour the city. I was greeted by a couple out of memory related errors and a huge drop in frame rate. I decided to continue along with my tour and found it to be almost un-flyable. A few things I noticed immediately were the addition of the new eastern span of the Bay Bridge, which is incomplete in real life as of the time of this writing, and an improved model of the western span of the Bay Bridge. If you like to perform stunts in FSX, or just enjoy landing on bridges, you'll be glad to find that the new span has a hard surface for you to land on. Also, I found some autogen added to Yerba Buena island (the island in between spans of the Bay Bridge), which I thought to be a nice touch. After heading into the city, I noticed a seam in the photoscenery. The northern side had a darker and more natural looking color, while to the south, the textures seemed to be tinted a bluish color. I find it somewhat disappointing that the scenery's western boundary stops just short of the majority of Golden Gate Park. When flying about, I found the custom buildings to stick out, being much darker than the autogen and darker than their real life counterparts. The AI cars driving around on some of the roads also made for a nice visual touch.
The scenery is mainly comprised of photoscenery, custom 3D buildings and objects, and annotated autogen. The package covers the area between the Bay Bridge to the Palace of Fine Arts and the piers to Twin Peaks. I find the photoscenery textures to vary, with some areas being dark, and others bluish, but overall it seems to be pretty good. The resolution of the photoscenery is approximately 1m/px. I also found a relatively visible seam in some areas of the photoscenery. There are no seasonal textures available, but in an area like San Francisco where the weather is pretty consistent all year around, that doesn't matter too much. The one thing that does bug me is the lack of night textures (the reason as to why was explained in the manual citing it was necessary to keep the development process simple). The custom 3D buildings look good, are well positioned and are a major improvement over the default FSX ones. The not-so-good things about the 3D buildings are that they are very dark compared to their real world counterparts and the buildings' side textures are quite blurry up close. Being darker, they stand out in parts of the photoscenery and especially against the autogen. Also, having blurry side textures, it makes for a bad street-level experience, which would be a big minus if you like to weave in between buildings or drive cars on the streets of the scenery. The annotated autogen looks nice in the areas without custom buildings and is well positioned. The Bay Bridge was also improved, and as I mentioned in my first flight section, the new eastern span is in, along with an improved model for the western span. The new models support the vehicle AI and are much, much better compared to the default models. One thing to note is that the lower deck of the western span is not modeled, but the AI on the top deck still goes in the proper direction (westbound). My only real complaint about the bridges is the way the textures look rather bland, and as with the other objects, there are no night textures.
Aside from what's mentioned in the manual, I haven't found any compatibility issues, other than duplicate buildings with UTX and slight misalignment issues with the sceneries I have created. Aerosoft has a patch available to remove the duplicate buildings available at their forum. To remove the misaligned objects from my scenery, remove the nsf.BGL and att_park.BGL files from the scenery folder.
When I first flew into the scenery, I found it to be un-flyable to the point where I was getting dizzy (consistently around 7 FPS with lots of stutters), but with a few quick setting changes, I was able to get the scenery running reasonably well (around 15 FPS with some stutters). When approaching from the east, I found that the stutters would start along the east bay hills at a LOD radius of Large.
Whether you're a GA flyer, Bay Area local, screen shot taker or if you just like eye candy, this is probably a good addition to your scenery hangar, provided you have a fast computer and don't fly at night. Although I've seen better from Aerosoft, overall I find this to be a nice release.
Pros:
Cons:
Aerosoft's system requirements:
Tested on:
Orion Lyau
orion.public@live.com
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