NOTED FTX NCA: San Jose Area - some suggestions

[aviatornick]

Hello,

 

I have really enjoyed using FTX NCA. Today I happened to have some free time (well quite a lot), so I went through and found some discrepancies between FTX and the real world for my home area of San Jose, CA. Let me make clear that I am not asking for all of these "discrepancies" to be fixed; I was simply having fun finding them and marking them on the screenshot below. In a SimCity-like manner, I rezoned the land to what I thought it should be. I "prioritized" the changes I would make, so that the top of the following list contains those things which I think are a combination of important and easily fixable/addable.

 

1. Landclass southeast of downtown San Jose is actually suburban instead of industrial (just to the right of the red cross hair).

2. The suburban/wildland border on either side of the valley doesn't have such a blocky look (you can't really see the blockiness in the image because of my "rezoning".

3. Mount Umunhum radar tower! It is actually south of the image area, but would be easy to model as its basically a grey cube. It stands out in the otherwise natural Santa Cruz Mountains ridgeline.

4. Creeks! Upon close inspection, the FTX region has them, but they are very difficult to see, except the nicely modeled Coyote Creek and part of the Los Gatos Creek. In real life, the creeks in the Santa Clara Valley are often heavily lined with trees, especially closer to the hills. They break up the suburban "wasteland". There are some nice "creek neighborhood" textures with the trees I'm talking about, but they seem to be misplaced and could do with moving closer to the hills, especially in the Saratoga area.

5. Stanford University  (The pink POI shape in the northwest). I would be happy with just a bunch of red-roofed buildings and maybe Hoover Tower and Stanford Stadium. The Stanford Dish (radio telescope) and linear accelerator are some other interesting landmarks.

6. NASA Ames Wind Tunnel- World's largest. Used for aerospace research. (POI shape by the bay is the Ames Research Complex).

7. Shoreline Amphitheater (POI star right by NASA Ames)

8. Pruneyard Towers (POI star southwest of center of image). A prominent local landmark.

 

That's it! This is mainly for my amusement, but I'm hoping maybe one or two of these from the top of the list could make it into a service pack.

 

 

 

[Stewart Hobson]

Nice work!  I'd be interested to see some of these additions you have suggested.  I usually fly *over* the San Jose area. 

[Holger Sandmann]

Hi there,

 

thanks for the suggestions, nice bit of constructive feedback indeed. I have my doubts we'll be able to add or fix some of the requested features, especially anything related to custom models or textures given the limited budget we have for those within a given FTX region project. However, we'll certainly take a closer look when working on the next NCA service pack.

 

Also, some of the issues are simply limitations of the FSX landclass system like the "blocky" blending of suburban/wildland boundary in your 2nd item; if the blendmasks of the wildland textures had display priority they would cut through features (roads, buildings, etc.) on the suburban tiles.

 

Cheers, Holger