In the past couple of years, we have witnessed the sudden growth in popularity of PHOTOREALISTIC or PHOTOGRAPHIC scenery, such as VFR Photographic Scenery by JustFlight and Megascenery by PC Aviator.
I will be reviewing the Megascenery Northern California FULL PACKAGE, split over FOUR threads:-
Part I - Sacramento
Part II - San Francisco
Part III - Night Shots
Part IV - Conclusion
I myself purchased it two months ago from PC Aviator, via International Airmail (I live in the UK) - it took 3 weeks to be delivered to my door; but as always, I had no complaints if the product was worth the money.
The installation took around 15 minutes, but the instruction booklet said that for lower-end systems it could take up to 90 minutes.
The full version comes with an extra 272 page book containing approach plates (SIDS, STARS, ILS Approaches etc.) for all airports in the area covered (175 NM x 175 NM = 30,000 km2) in the Northern California area. It also comes with a book explaining how the scenery was made and how to fly VFR.
Right, onto the review, and in this thread we will be looking at the Sacramento area of the scenery package.
The scenery itself looks very nice - it seems very accurate when compared to the images on TerraServer. The textures on some systems might take some time to load, at the beginning of the flight and while you are actually flying. On the test system (specs in final part of review) it took around a 50 seconds - however, on a Dell XPS system it stated on Flightsim.com that loading took 7 minutes, which sounds hard to believe but is very true.
These pictures were taken at around 4000 feet, so below that it still looks good but the instant that you take off from any airport, the textures look bad as you're so close to them. They start to look much better at around a 1000 feet.
As you can see, the detail is very good indeed, and the colour and saturation is inch-perfect. I recommend that you check out TerraServer to see just how good it is.
The mountains in the background can be seen nicely - unlike default scenery, the visible ground textures aren't just the ones in the 'tile' of the Flight Simulator world you are in.
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