Las Vegas Downloads
By Phil Colvin (10 August 2005)
ou know, if I did an
article about every download I liked a lot I'd quite literally have
time for nothing else. So please let me say right now how much I
appreciate all you developers of aircraft, scenery, utilities and
everything else that makes it possible for all us lucky recipients to
make FS2004 a brand new sim every time we play it if we so choose,
and to continually enhance its virtual world in so many ways. But
Vegas has always been one of my very favorites to visit. I'm a VFR
eye-candy junkie, and it was in fact the screenshots of Sin City on
the back of the box of Flight Simulator 98 that motivated me to buy
it (instead of a different flight sim) for my very first try at
non-military computer simming. That, and the fact that it came
shrink-wrapped with an MS Sidewinder Precision Pro joystick, all at a
special price. And while I don't use FS98 much anymore, I'm still
using that joystick. Gotta hand it to MS: for over seven years that
thing has taken a licking and kept on ticking!
And now I'll be using it more than ever over Las Vegas, which is why I'm covering a combination of downloads which completely transform that area. To show what I mean, the first six screenshots are three sets of before and afters - each time with the default FS2004 scenery only, then with all three add-ons activated.
 Before |
 After |
First there's Shigeo "Shige" Ishii's Las Vegas 2004. He's been doing updates of this scenery ever since FS2000, and I've been using all of them. It concentrates mainly though not entirely on the Strip, adding great detail to buildings that were already in the default FS2004, plus many new buildings that weren't. Not to mention the famous street itself, complete with tree-lined medians, intersections with traffic lights, street signs and pedestrian overpasses, and even static traffic.
There's so much to see here you'll be motivated to travel slowly up and down the Strip and do some exploring, perhaps in one of the numerous street vehicles you can download. And the textures are worth looking at in day, dusk and night - very nicely done. Even the local McDonald's is there!
 Before |
 After |
Secondly there's the much more recent upload by Raimondo Taburet. It's his new photorealistic mesh scenery covering a large area around the city. Now you can see what the area really looks like from the air, just as with some expensive payware sceneries of other areas. Roads, golf courses and parks, housing developments, industrial complexes, etc. are just where you'd find them, and you get a far stronger feeling than with the default scenery that you're in a real place. Nearby mountains look much better too, as do the textures around McCarran, which benefit greatly from the far more accurate coloration of that part of the U.S. Touch-and-go flights from McCarran to Nellis and back are now more fun than ever. This scenery works for summer only, but that's no biggie, and it comes with day and night textures. Much more importantly to me, it gets along just fine with Shigeo Ishii's scenery mentioned above. I'd been hesitant to try them together, thinking I might have to make a tough decision to choose one over the other. Fortunately this was not the case.
 Before |
 After |
Finally there's Ron Ezra's Las Vegas Autogen, which does exactly what it sounds like. Ron actually endured the tedium of looking at each one of Raimondo's 1254 scenery tiles and manually adding autogen objects for them! You just transfer all the stuff in Ron's scenery and texture folders into the same folders in Raimondo's download, then remove or rename two bgl files in the default scenery that his readme file will point you to, and you're good to go. Again, I'd been hesitant about conflicts between the three downloads, trying just Shigeo's and Raimondo's together first - but again, my fears were unfounded. He even created things like water and fuel tanks which autogen itself can't do because they're round.
So once again, we have a combination of downloads that work together to vastly upgrade an area. I say "once again" because I did an article about some downloads for French Polynesia that worked similarly to transform that part of the world in FS2002. And I wanted to mention it here because not only do all those downloads work just fine in FS2004, Bill Melichar has since updated every one of his elements to be better than ever. Furthermore there's now a landclass file by James Thompson that will add even more detail. So check those out as well, and if you're so inclined go exploring in the file library for other such combinations. There are some very nice ones indeed.
You may have noticed, in his article about David Copley, that Andrew Herd declares FS10 to be "at least a year away, perhaps more than that". This would certainly seem to be born out by the rather extensive surveys that MS is doing, the second of which I just completed, to get developmental feedback. Well, you know what? Although you know darned well I'll have my copy of FS10 prepaid and waiting for me the day it hits the shelves, I'm nevertheless not terribly disappointed. The reasons why are two: first, with free downloads working in concert like the ones mentioned above to vastly improve FS2004 (not to mention some outstanding payware sceneries you can buy), one can easily go to many parts of the world and enjoy scenery which may greatly surpass the next default version of FS anyhow...and second, I can't afford a brand new system right now. Heck, I can't even afford right now to fix my broken time machine, which means I won't be able to travel eighteen months into the future beyond FS10's release date to purchase that new system. And as we all know, that will be the only way to have a computer that will get good frame rates on the blankety-blank thing! :-)
Phil Colvin
Download Las Vegas 2004
gimpyfoot1@yahoo.com
Download Raimondo Taburet's Scenery
Download Las Vegas Autogen
Bonus: Add Some Fireworks
