USA Roads For FS2004

USA Roads For Microsoft Flight Simulator (described as USA Roads in this document) will dramatically enhance your VFR flight experience in Microsofts Flight Simulator 2004, by adding nearly every road for the continental United States (except Alaska).

As you know, the roads that come with FS2004 contain only major highways, and not all of them at that.

USA Roads For Microsoft Flight Simulator will add primary and secondary roads, highway access ramps, trails, and local/neighborhood/rural roads. Unless your home is on a brand new street or dirt road, it is probably included in this package (actually some dirt roads are included too).

Accuracy: USA Roads utilizes specially licensed source data, which provides the most accurate and recent road information currently available. Divided roadways/highways are displayed in their correct positioning for both sides, not just as a single line using a divided road texture.

Optimized For Frame Rates: Flight Simulators have been lacking quality road presentations for a long time now. A good reason, is the difficulty in transferring very detailed road data to the simulators. Millions and millions of points are necessary to describe the millions of miles of roads in the USA. All these points and line segments would overwhelm even the fastest CPUs available today, without some major optimizations.

Scenery Solutions has developed an automated process that greatly reduces the number of points necessary to display a road correctly in FS2004. This is done without causing visible differences to the user.

With USA Roads, the frame rate impact is not noticeable on most systems. This is true even in the most densely populated urban areas.

Improved Road Textures: USA Roads includes its own set of road textures. The new daytime textures blend in better with the landclass textures used in FS2004. They also give the appearance of highway traffic from some altitudes.

Night flight has been greatly enhanced. You are given the option of choosing from a variety of texture sets.

The type of lighting (high/low pressure sodium, mercury vapour, or FS2004 color match).
The pavement reflectivity (bright or dim)
The road traffic density (high, mixed, low, or very low).

The new night textures provide for more accurate looking street-light effects. Also, the street lights taper away as you leave metropolitan areas and isolated cities (this feature can be turned on/off by the user).

Two Data Sets Included: The USA Roads distribution contains two interchangeable sets of road data. One set contains every available road in the USA. The smaller set contains only highways, major roads, and highway interchanges. It's really just a matter of preference as to which one to use.

Using the USA Roads setup utility, you can quickly switch between either set of road data. Or, you can quickly switch back to the road data included with FS2004 without uninstalling the USA Roads package.

* See the FAQ for more detailed information