simwestSOCAL – for pilots who wish to fly through beautiful, sunny, Southern California in the USA… not over it.
When you are flying, have you ever said to yourself, “Gee, didn’t I just fly over that part of the scenery a little ways back” or seem to encounter “deja vu”? That can happen when flying over landclass based ground scenery. And flying at higher altitudes can reveal a repeating pattern. Good for performance but not so much for immersion.
Well, simwestSOCAL has got you covered… literally, with 38GB of high resolution photoreal imagery from Barstow to the Mexican border. From the oceans of the Pacific blue to the Colorado River red, simwestSOCAL lets your immersion run wild. Then, simwest takes it to the next level. During this multi-year project we’ve scanned every square kilometer and custom placed millions of 3D trees, buildings, objects and nighttime lights to get away from flat “moonscape” photoreal scenery that sim pilots so often encounters. And we work at creating the best performance to further enjoy enhance your simming experience.
And with some 180 default airports found inside the scenery area you can test your pilot skills whether it be finding little bush dirt strips, VFR flying with your favorite GA aircraft or landing a “heavy” at one of the major international airports. And for more immersion, add your own 3rd-party detailed airports. Our goal is to put back in the “real” of photoreal scenery!
Features
Thousands of square kilometers of 1.2m high definition, color corrected aerial photo imagery.
Imagery that blends into surrounding scenery reducing that “hard border” look when transitioning to default or other custom scenery.
Millions of custom placed buildings, vegetation autogen and objects throughout entire area.
Water-masked rivers, reservoirs and lakes to fly with your favorite float plane.
Custom nighttime photoreal textures.
Seasonal winter snow in the San Bernardino Mountains.
Custom 3D night lighting not just for roads but occasional parking lots, shopping centers, golf courses, farms and parks all to add variety.
For the money, this is an excellent scenery package if you're flying a lot around Los Angeles or San Diego. The map provided with the screenshots here is accurate to the coverage area - from Santa Maria in the NW to the Arizona and Mexican borders on the other corner. Note that this is only photoscenery and the associated autogen, not a great deal else in terms of scenery object or airport enhancements. That said, the imagery is well sourced and just looks right in terms of coloration and contrast (from the eye of a SoCal native), and the autogen is plentiful and reasonably accurate, both trees and buildings. Also comes with built in night lighting and textures.
Framerate on my mid-to-high-range PC isn't terrible when flying around, at least in P3D v4; on approach to LatinVFR KSAN or FSDreamteam KLAX in the PMDG NGX, I see generally 15-20 fps, and pretty consistent 30+ flying over most other areas in the region.
Blend-masking with the surrounding terrain is reasonable. There are definitely places you'll see the border where it meets default terrain (not least because the border is 3 very long straight lines and the Pacific), but the transition isn't totally abrupt at least.
One other note: this scenery is gigantic (right around 40 GB installed), and if loading from an HDD the loading times will be quite long. Definitely put this on an SSD if you can.
4.5/5