US Cities X - Indianapolis

[jimjones]

Indianapolis is one of the closer big cities near Louisville, my hometown, so I downloaded Aerosoft's Indianapolis this morning. It contains many 3D photoreal buildings and photoreal terrain as well as autogen. I was impressed by the buildings from 1500 ft, but the textures are a bit coarse at closer inspection. The terrain textures are for day, one season only and there are no night textures for the buildings. For someone living in Indianapolis this is may be one for them to have. Many of the buildings are quite elaborate, but I wonder if all of them are presented faithfully in model and texture. If they do, then this was quite an undertaking to build. The monument downtown lacks the model detail I had hoped to see. The airports are not modeled.

I began a flight toward the city from Indy Int, without autogen, and only got a mile or so before I received an out of memory message. Recently I installed FEX and the SHD upgrade and since have had out of memory problems. I was unable to run Indianapolis without getting an out of memory message until I loaded "clear sky" weather. Aerosoft's Indianapolis
begins showing buildings at normal complexity settings and probably does not get any more detailed, but that is an assumption since I've not looked into it.

Glad I purchased the scenery but disappointed in the lack of night textures and the inability to run with FEX SHD clouds. Price was not too bad at about $15.

http://www.aerosoft-shop.com/products/indianapolis/indianapolis.html

[Navy Chief]

Indy is my home town. Thanks for the review. I was thinking about getting that scenery, but not now.

NC

[jimjones]

Aerosoft's Indianapolis ran successfully with default clouds on the system described below without giving an out of memory message. Aerosoft's notes indicate systems with small RAM and low end video cards will have out of memory problems.

Aerosoft indicates there are about 1000 unique buildings. There are two sets of files for building textures, one low res and one higher res. Should one have out of memory problems, the low res texture set can be substituded. There were 1092 textures files of this type. Some buildings use larger textures for quality.

Aerosoft also mentioned that the buildings design was partially automated. In general that process worked very well. On occasion some building models showed strange dimensions, where part of a building would appear slightly out of rectangular shape, or a peak of a pyramid would not have a true pyramid shape. Also occasionally some textures were applied sloppily where the textures were strecthed incorrectly. These anomalies don't take too much away from enjoyment of flying this scenery provided a reasonable height of about 1000ft is flown. Some high res and detailed building are very well done.

The buildings do not fall exactly in place on the photoreal terrain in most cases, but sometimes lap over slightly into a street. Where buildings don't align exactly one notices that the outline of the building in the terrain matches that of the 3D building. This gives credance that these buildings are unique and perhaps realistic (only my opinion since I don't know Indianapolis well enough to confirm this). The buildings have photoreal texture roofs that blend nicely with the surrounding terrain.

Again, I'm glad I have purchased this scenery, depite the problems mentioned. There is much to see and explore in the types and quantity of buildings. Some cathedrals and multifaceted structures provide interesting sturctural detail.

It will be interesting to see if this new approach that Aerosoft has taken to produce inexpensive US cities will take hold. I'm willing to try more.
--------------------------------------------------------------
Intel C2D E6850, 3Ghz, 1333FSB, 4 Mb L2 Cache: MB(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 180.48

[gajit]

Well - I was tempted at the price but the lack of night textures has put me off. Thanks for the report JimJones :ernae:

[glennc]

I bought it - no surprise. I have a sister there and my dad grew up there - and I lived about 60 miles north for a while.

If I'm reading Google maps right, the detail doesn't go far enough north to include my sister's place.

My only squawk is that it does eat some frames. Too many dots in motion - but its still fun. No regrets, especially for the price.

Glenn

[Navy Chief]

I'll be in Indy 1-4 May for my neice's wedding. Grew up there, but left in '79 to go back on active duty. So much has changed.......

NC

[Panther_99FS]

How are you guys liking this :ques:

[jimjones]

Panther, it seems there are not many here who have or want to comment about Indianapolis.

Was waiting for SOH attachments to become available but now have photobucket. The pics show areas beyond the central city and show industrial areas too.

Still enjoying the scenery. Nice skyline on low approach. The biggest complaints still is that it is a memory hog and requires dumbing down your option to avoid a memory overuseage shutdown. Too bad there is only one scenery complexity setting.

It also halves my fps compared to the default Indy. Jim
http://i578.photobucket.com/albums/ss230/jimjones_04/Ind01.jpg
http://i578.photobucket.com/albums/ss230/jimjones_04/Ind02.jpg
http://i578.photobucket.com/albums/ss230/jimjones_04/Ind03.jpg
http://i578.photobucket.com/albums/ss230/jimjones_04/Ind04.jpg
http://i578.photobucket.com/albums/ss230/jimjones_04/Ind05.jpg
http://i578.photobucket.com/albums/ss230/jimjones_04/Ind06.jpg