Greater Toronto Area Enhancement Pack v1.0

Greater Toronto Area Enhancement Pack v1.0

This pack features hand-picked key areas around Greater Toronto Area to compliment default photogrammetry and autogen areas and default terrain fixes for maximum VFR flight and IFR approaches enjoyment. All areas implement 3 LOD levels, minimizing FPS impact. Photogrammetry is heavily edited and texture color, contrast and brightness is carefully corrected to match surrounding autogen scenery.

Version 1.0:

• Mississauga Downtown
• Humber river “aqueduct” ridge terrain fix
• Oakville Downtown

Coming soon:

• Oakville Trafalgar Hospital wiht helipad and surrounding area
• Downsview Airport CYZD buildings and area
• Burlington Executive Airport CZBA buildings and area
• Bloor One building (missing in default photogrammetry)
• CN Tower (replacing ugly default model and adding night lighting and beacon)
• Humber Bay Shores area including the Humber Bay arch bridge
• North York – Younge street highrises area

Introduction
The areas of the pack are very close to CYYZ – Toronto Pearson International Airport. Toronto has photogrammetry in MSFS, and Toronto Island CYTZ is a custom airport, but photogrammetry ends outside of Toronto proper, and starts again around Burlington and Hamilton area. Many important Greater Toronto Area VFR landmarks and POI are left to autogen.

I’ve decided to correct that as much as I can, as well as fix some glaring terrain errors, such as a huge and long weird “aqueduct” type ridge with a Humber river on top.

Mississauga downtown bildings and condos are very close to where the Pearson airport is and clearly visible on every arrival and departure. Some distinctive areas on Toronto lakeshore beyond photogrammetry area, Oakville Downtown, Oakville Trafalgar Hospital area with a helipad, and two major GA airports in the area: Downsview CYZD and Burlington Executive Airport (Burlington Airpark) CZBA. Buildings are cut off from the rest of the mesh, so all road and trees and minor buildings are from default autogen, leading to good blending of custom and autogen.

I’m aiming for making the whole GTA area comfortable for VFR flights and authentic CYYZ approaches and departures, and make local GA flights more enjoyable. So far I’ve done Oakville downtown and now Missisauga downtown. Meshes optimized and heavily edited, textures color corrected to blend with autogen building.

I left textures unbaked, as all my experiments with baking textures according to guides keep ending up with inferior look and much larger file size with the same FPS hit as hundreds of texture files. 8192×8192 bakes texture look very pixelated with this scenery size, and 16384×16384 produces packages that are 3 times larger, and still ahve weird artifacts. So I concluded that baking textures is counter-productive. However my LOD experiments eventually were successfull, so I’m implementing 3 LOD level leading to negligible FPS impact far from scenery, minimal impact when closer and moderate impact when very close. Note that on screenshots you can see FPS counter from a lowly GTX1660 GPU running a true 4K resolution. Based on this totally inadequate GPU regular FPS is around 28 FPS, with closer to scenery getting 26 FPS and extremely close down to 20-24 FPS. With a better GPU or 1080p/1440p resolution FPS impact should be minimal.

Installation
Unzip into Community folder. Scenery pack will consist of 3 directories: /oakville/, /mississauga/ and /toronto/

Distribution
This free creation contains content from Google Maps or Google Earth. In accordance with Google Terms of Services and especially point 2.2 of Google Maps/Google Earth Additional Terms of Service, this creation is based on « fair use » or « fair dealing » of the data provided by google throught its services. No commercial use or any gain is or will ever be made by the author of this creation, who doesn’t own anything regarding google assets but a simple user Licence. The author will not recieve any form of retribution for sharing his work. If this content would be found somewhere where it is provided in exchange of money or any kind of retribution, I would not be with the consent of the author.

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