FSADDON - SALT LAKE CITY PHOTO

CoBoy Design has made some wonderful products already, notably their series of French Coast Sceneries, depicting the Normandy coast line (available here ).
But with Salt Lake City Photo they have made their first forray into the world of photographic ground textures. This is a whole different way of showing the Flight Simulator world, using aerial photographs to present a very detailed view of the world under your wings, depicting EVERYTHING that is there in the real world..... roads, settlements, lakes, factories......terrain colour (!).... you name it.

As with everything in life, there are Pros and Cons to photoscenery !
There is of course a downside to it; the photograph(s) used were made at ONE particular time, and therefore only show that ONE floating moment, now frozen onto your flight simulator.
Another factor is the HUGE file sizes still needed to represent all that detail ! (In the 'standard' presentation of ground textures a large number of the SAME 'tiles' are used to cover a large surface. They are repeated many times and only take up very little space).
Another problem often encountered is the 'flat' look of the resulting product..... lack of autogen.

Therefore most photograpic sceneries only depict one season.... Salt Lake City Photo is best used in SUMMER !
You can, however, also select 'winter', but then make sure it is snowing, so the 'Hardwinter' version is used.
Salt Lake City also has NIGHT textures !

The UPSIDE of this technique is that you get to see the world as you would in reality. Every little bush, house, car, building, road and so forth is displayed on the ground below. With the limitations as described above, this provides for a very REAL view outside the cockpit !

CoBoy Design has worked hard to eliminate as much of the negative effects as possible. Especially the 'flat look' is NOT there. That is becasue an extensive, high resolution mesh is included, actually covering some 40.000 square kilometers of terrain, MUCH larger than the photo area.
AND the authors have meticulously added autogen objects, manually aligning them to the streets and roads. This gives the scenery a VERY lively look and a really much improved 'feel' over the older photographic sceneries out there !!

How to be used
We recommend this scenery for two (very different) uses:

1. it is ideal for airliner pilots (flying the 'heavies') flying to and from Salt Lake City International (KSLC). The final approach to the airfield will be so muchmore realistic than with the default scenery!
   And so it really increases the 'immersion' of your simming experience many-fold !
2. but..... it is also a wonderful areas for VFR pilots to putt-putt around. Taking off from the (smaller) municipal airport a few miles from KSLC you can make tours of the city and surrounding valley that last more than an hour ! The area is big enough (2500 square kilometers of photos!) to use it for a nice follow-the-roads flight!

The features..... or 'what you will get'

• 2,500 km² Photo Ground Area : Salt Lake City and surroundings
• Aerial Photography textures with Summer, HardWinter and Night variation
• Seamless integration with the FS landclass
• Full Autogen for the whole area (and accurate placement of objects)
• Default scenery 3D objects (buildings, antennas, factories... ) are re-scaled and re-positioned to align with the photographic texture
• Enhanced airports (KSLC, KBTF, and U42). runways, buildings, taxiways, towers... are precisely placed to fit the ground texture
• 40,000 km² Enhanced Area : the Salt Lake
• High resolution terrain elevation mesh, with 30 meter precision
• Roads, Railways, Rivers, Landable Water Surfaces adjusted to avoid 'climbing’ water

And, of course.. last but not least.... a typical, oblong FSAddon.com color MANUAL in pdf format, with yet another short story of Chuck Merriwater's adventures, tips on how to improve performance of the scenery, some informaton about the actual area and much more.

The manual is also a FREE DOWNLOAD, so you can check what you'll get BEFORE BUYING.

A picture says more than a thousands words..... so check out some of them below !