FSX St Louis Photoreal Scenery

St Louis PhotoReal Scenery. This is high resolution, 1 meter/pixel, terrain scenery for St Louis, Missouri (MO).

This package includes all of the 30 files in one easy to download zip.

A map and decriptions show the section locatons and some feature details. This photoscenery is for DAY USE ONLY and will work for any season, but shows only the USGS aerial photo data taken in March 2002. The default FSX mesh works well with this photoscenery and no additional mesh for the area needs to be purchased. The 30 sections of scenery, totaling 2 Gb, contains photoreal terrain textures, encompassing an area bounded by 31.7 E-W and 27.4 N-S miles (about 870 square miles). Each section is independant, but the user may want most or all sections to provide continutiy and completeness. By Jim Jones.

St Louis, Missouri 1M PhotoReal Version StLX1Ma
For use with FSX
By: Jim Jones

SECTIONS:

General Notes and Comments
Installation
FSX Configuration Notes
Author's System Specs
Acknowledgments

GENERAL NOTES AND COMMENTS

This is high resolution, 1Meter/Pixel, terrain scenery for St Louis Missouri for Section A, see details below.

This photoscenery is for DAY USE ONLY and will work for any season, although the source is from USGS aerial photos taken in March 2002 and shows only that season. The resolution of this scenery is 1 meter/pixel. Photoscenery areas prevent autogen scenery from appearing within the photoscenery area, but autogen will appear outside the photoscenery area. The default FSX mesh works well with this photoscenery and no additional mesh for the area needs to be purchased. I have no plans to create 1M seasonal or night scenery. If the 1M scenery is active at night the default FSX night scenery terrain scenery will not show.

The area covered by all 30 downloads will require about 2 Gb of disk space, thus each download is about 67 Mb each average. The corner locations are approximately:

NW Corner: 38.847649, -90.603167
NE Corner: 38.847649, -90.119240
SW Corner: 38.452193, -90.754032
SE Corner: 38.452193, -90.135170

The 30 downloads of scenery contains photoreal terrain textures for St Louis, encompassing an area bounded by 31.7 E-W and 27.4 N-S miles (about 870 square miles). No new objects have been added and none have been removed. So, misplaced or misligned objects placed in the original FSX scenery remain as is. Main FSX highways, large airport runways and rivers match well with the photoscenery. FSX minor roads, taxiways and building placement match less well.

Refer to the photo named StLouisMap.jpg to see what is included in each download. The following shows a list of the 30 downloads and a brief comment for some their contents.

SECTION

SLFX1Ma
SLFX1Mb
SLFX1Mc
SLFX1Md
SLFX1Me Lambert International, St Charles Casinos on Missouri River at I70
SLFX1Mf Lambert International
SLFX1Mg
SLFX1Mh Lambert International
SLFX1Mi Lambert International
SLFX1Mj Spirit of St Louis Airport
SLFX1Mk
SLFX1Ml Chain of Rock Canal, University City, Helman Park, Calvery Cemetery
SLFX1Mm Spirit of St Louis Airport
SLFX1Mn
SLFX1Mo River front City Center, Shaw Park, Zoo, Museums, Jefferson Memorial
SLFX1Mp
SLFX1Mq
SLFX1Mr River front City Center
SLFX1Ms
SLFX1Mt
SLFX1Mu Carondoled Park
SLFX1Mv Greensfelder City park, Amusement Park, Castlewood and Lone Elk parks
SLFX1Mw
SLFX1Mx
SLFX1My
SLFX1Mz
SLFX1Maa East St Louis
SLFX1Mbb East St Louis, Chain of Rock Canal
SLFX1Mcc East St Louis, St Louis Downtown Airport, Chain of Rock Canal
SLFX1Mdd East St Louis, St Louis Downtown Airport

Major highways include: I270,I70, I64, I44, I55

Some larger communities include: St Charles, Maryland Heights, Hazelwood, Florissant, Ferguson, University City, Kirkwood, Webster Grove, Afton, Concorde and Mehlville.

The textures cover the rivers and lakes with their natural color. Consequently, these textures will not show reflections or other water effects such as wakes by float planes and boats. The lakes have not been processed to act like water, so boats and floatplanes will not provide water effects.

INSTALLATION:

For the first section that is installed, create in a location of your choice a folder named StLX1M. Create two subfolders named Documentation and Scenery.

Unzip this zip file into a temporary folder. This places a few files in the base of that temporary folder plus the subfolders of:

Documentation
Scenery (contains 3 BGL files)

Note: There is not a Texture folder since the BGL files contain the textures within them.

Copy the files from the temporaryDocumentation folder into your StLX1MDocumantation folder. (Optional)

Note that the text document is nearly identical for each section thus only one section's text files is recommended to be saved. The jpg file is different for each section.

Copy the BGL files from the temporaryscenery folder into your StLX1Mscenery folder. (Mandatory)

The purpose of this is to have all the BGL files in one scenery folder. This allows having to activate only one scenery folder.

Activate only once, the StLX1M scenery, through the FSX Scenery Library.

FSX CONFIGURATION NOTES

Some FSX configurations are essential for getting the best detail in these photosceneries:

Full Frame mode (non-windowed) - very important
Level of Detail Radius: Large
Scenery Complexity: Extremely dense
Mesh Resolution: 19 M
Texture Resolution: 1 M

Modify or add to your FSX.CFG file as follows:

FIBER_FRAME_TIME_FRACTION=0.33

Adjust other settings to your computer capabilities and your tastes. However the following are some starting suggestions for this scenery:

Mesh Complexity: 60
Ground Shadows: Off
Traffic Road Vehicles: 14%
Ships and Leasures boats both at 15%
Set Water effects to lowest setting
Max out your RAM

FPS is a very important adjustment. If set too high the textures will not appear sharp. Phototextures are usually presented by FSX at startup in its highest resolution. If you go too fast, if the Target FPS is too high, or you do a lot of panning in or out of the A/C the terrain will go to a lower blurry resolution. In time the blurry terrain will improve ahead of your view. If not you need to set your FPS target lower, or fly slower or stop panning your view -- or all of these. The amount of non terrain scenery and panel also has an effect. You may wish to view with no panel at all.

I get the best result using the Trike at low speeds, with an exterior view above and behind, zoomed out and looking almost directly below. That is where FSX seems to generate the highest resoution terrain first.

AUTHOR'S SYSTEM SPECS

--------------------------------------------------------------
Intel C2D E6850, 3Ghz, 1333FSB, 4 Mb L2 Cache: (QuadCore FSB1333 ) EVGA nforce 680i DDR2: 4Gb(4x1)DDR2/800 Corsair Xtreme:
EVGA GeForce G8800 GTS 640 Mb PCI-E: Two WDC 500 Gb SATA II, 3 Gb/s 16 Mb Cache, 7200 RPM: CL SB X-FI XtremeGamer: Sony 18X DVD+-RW Dual: 16X DVD ROM: Coolmaster 600w PS: Thermaltake Maxorb CPU fan: NZXT Case w/6 Fans: Vista Home Premium (sp1) 32 bit.
NVidia 175.19
400Gb Seagate USB drive (where I locate my photoscenery)
--------------------------------------------------------------
Base Score............5.6
Processor.............5.6
Memory (RAM)..........5.9
Graphics Aero.........5.9
Gaming Graphics.......5.9
Primary hard disk.....5.8

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Microsoft for providing the flight simulator and their continuing improvement of the software and SDK tools.

To Terraserver and USGS for their photoscenery data.

To Doug Cox for his USAPhotoMaps program to extract Terraserver data and produce BIG jpeg files.

To Scott Gridley for direction to the DGWarp tool to convert from Terraserver UTM projection bitmaps to WGS84 projection in GeoTiff format for input to the FSX SDK Resample program.

This is freeware and is not to be distributed for any monetary gain.

The author of this scenery is not responsible for any problems you may encounter with your system or other files as a result of using the programs provided here.

Enjoy.

Jim Jones

⇲ Download Now 2.1 GB

Adam McEnroe

Adam McEnroe is a flight sim enthusiast who has been simming since the days of FS95. Adam writes all of the download section editorials after testing each of the files. Adam has extensive knowledge using various flight simulator packages and thoroughly tests the files before writing about them. Adam also like to fly real-world aircraft in his spare time and is training for his PPL.

Should you wish, you can contact Adam via email at adam@flyawaysimulation.com.

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