VFR Photographic Scenery USA Volume One: San Francisco And Sacramento

By Andrew Herd (28 June 2005)

Watch video clips of this scenery in the FlightSim.Com Cineplex

remember San Francisco well. We went there ten years ago to see some of Barbara's relatives and it reminded me of home - it was foggy all the time, except for one glorious moment, when we went to see if we could see the bridge. The clouds just rolled aside and there it was, in all its glory. Made me wish I was flying.

Microsoft did KSFO pretty well, but the rest of the area has to cope as best it can with the default scenery tiles, which means that simmers with aspirations to VFR navigation have to rely on lakes and mountains to orientate themselves - but there is an alternative...

Horizon Simulation have developed a phototexture package which covers 47,300 square kilometres stretching to the north-east of San Francisco, all the way up to Sacramento. Jet jocks will run to the edges in no time at all, but there is plenty of space to play in if you fly spam cans, with the flying over some of the most scenic areas in the West. And you don't just get photographic scenery to die for, you also get a new 30 m terrain mesh, landable lakes (many of them new, as far as Flight Simulator is concerned), night lighting - and over 400 repositioned 3D objects, so you will rarely see a bridge that doesn't line up with a road.

The software installs from a DVD - that's right, not from CDs. Even the largest FS packages come on CDs, which is kind of odd, considering that most machines fast enough to run the latest version of Flight Simulator are likely to have a DVD installed. Hardware requirements include 400 Mb of free hard disk space, Windows 98 and upwards, and FS2002 or FS2004. The recommended spec is a 1.0 Ghz Pentium, with 512 Mb of RAM and a 64 Mb video card. I had no problems with the installation, which went smoothly, although it took a while and required a fair bit of user interaction; the textures are split into five different areas, and you are offered the choice about which sets to install as you go along.

Before getting started, I do recommend reading the manual, which gives some good advice about how to get this type of package to work at its best. The first is that load times are cut dramatically if you uncheck the 'extended terrain textures' dialog, an action which also makes texture blurring less likely. The developers advise limiting visibility to under 20 miles, which reduces texture churn; and they also suggest turning off MIP mapping and setting the target frame rate to unlimited.

Let's go flying.

My first instinct was to go with real weather, but that would have meant flying IFR half the time, because the day I did the review, vis was 5 miles, with persistent rain and few opportunities of doing screenshots. In the interests of completing the review, I compromised and set the vis to 10 miles and flew with the cold front theme.

Straight after departure, I turned ATC off and hung a right, with the vague intention of doing a flight around the near part of the bay. As you can see, the photographic textures completely replace the default tiles and the look pretty good as long as you fly at 2000 feet or above. If you check out the screenshot above left, you can see how the developers have repositioned a tower block in the right foreground to match its image on the ground.

A few minutes later and I am approaching the bridge, marvelling (a) at the fine weather and (b) at how entrancingly cheap virtual avgas is. Just look at that for a view! I tell you what - we'll take a closer look.

The shot above demonstrates how well the bridges line up with the roads. As you can see, there is a certain amount of mismatch, but the effect is pretty darned good and you won't find many instances that haven't been attended to. Just look over there to the west, huh? Who knows, if we are lucky, the sun might even come out.

A couple of views as we reach the northern end of our patrol. This is where photographic sceneries can get problematic in Flight Simulator, because doing too many turns can cause fits of the 'blurries' - all the tiles going out of focus and remaining that way for minutes at a time. Keeping the visibility down to the suggested ten to twenty miles is one way of reducing the chances of this happening - fine for the West Coast, but perhaps less realistic for the central US.

Okay... so we had better turn back now, in case we run out of words, or pictures, or go off the edge of this badly photocopied sectional. I can hear a lot of shouting from air traffic, but what the hell, its a nice day, we'll turn the volume down. Hey, did you see how close that jet came? Those guys should keep a better lookout, or there could be a crash, or something.

Needless to say, the sun didn't shine. In fact, it got worse and worse and I was kind of glad to turn for home, because we had run out of interesting stuff to look at, unless you happen to like wall to wall industrial wasteland. But beautifully photographed.

And there we are, on short final and I can see the state troopers lining the pavement waiting for us. Guess they must have arrested the pilots of that commercial flight and need us as witnesses.

Watch video clips of this scenery in the FlightSim.Com Cineplex

Very nice. There should be more sceneries like this. Buy it.