Introduction

San Francisco is a well known city on the west coast of the United States, the city is known for its architecture, earthquakes, fog and of course Alcatraz prison.

Aerosoft has published a series of cities from the USA; these are designed as enhancements of the default cityscape, and as such only cover a small area and only include one season and no night textures. Also they have been designed to be less frame rate intensive than the mega city or VFR series.

Installation and Documentation

Installation is a breeze, Aerosoft seem to have a knack of making things easy to install, and this is no different, about the only thing that will be tested is your typing skills if you have to type the serial number in, it is a long number!! Once you have entered the registration information, the installer will install the scenery and activate it in FSX so you are ready to go.

The manual is a simple affair which covers some issues that you may have, some tips for getting the best performance out of the product and handling the removal and reinstallation of Aerosoft’s Alcatraz scenery if you have already installed this before.

The area covered by San Francisco X

San Francisco Itself

As this is a city only product the airport is not covered, this is not a big issue as the default covers it. The buildings of the downtown area look to be placed correctly and look very good, having never been to San Fran, I can only go by pictures from the good old internet. If you have a system that can handle it, turning everything up to max and enabling ground shadows will produce a very real look out the window.

I tested the city with my normal settings for my system, and I had a 10 to 15 fps drop, but I have everything except autogen maxed out. Turning down the settings produced a stable 25fps (what I have my system locked to) and had very little difference in the look of the city.

The default city area is very generic in comparison	The difference is very noticeable when comparing side by side, but blends well with the default coverage area

The great thing about this product is that you can scale the amount of objects displayed to suit your system.

The default looks nothing like the real Alcatraz	Whereas the Aerosoft version looks much, much better

Included in the download is the famous prison island of Alcatraz, this was released by Aerosoft some time ago as a free gift. If you already had this installed before you brought this product, the installer will automatically remove it and install the latest version included.

An interesting side note is that there are no helipads used in downtown San Francisco due to resident’s concerns about noise and possible accidents.

The downtown area is not very well represented as you can see here	Compared to the default, the high rises and downtown area spring to life
The highways are covered as well, comparing default to...	...these is like chalk and cheese, with the add on ones looking so much more realistic

The ground bitmap is not a super high resolution, and as such the ground does suffer from this. However, from 1000’ up it is not that noticeable but you do notice the textures on the ground and buildings are blurry when you get close.

The blurry ground texture is evident here

Summary / Closing Remarks

This is a short worded review as I think with this sort of product the pictures say more than I could. The downtown city area is well covered, yet there is a slight let down by the ground bitmap and building textures.

The roads don’t line up and the autogen looks the same with the default	Whereas the autogen and roads match perfectly and the autogen looks good

The lack of seasonal textures is again not really an issue and it helps to reduce cost and download size as well. The same goes for the lack of night textures, being primarily a VFR product, i.e. highly detailed and accurate, you don’t do many VFR sightseeing flights at night.

This product sits nicely between the default and a mega city like London VFR X and such; it is less expensive yet doesn’t lack detail. Its small coverage area will disappoint some people, but for the majority they will be happy with the coverage and realism offered.

Printing

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US Cities San Francisco

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