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Houston downtown scenery for FS 2004 - Freeware
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By James Shaddox

This scenery replaces the default Microsoft scenery for the downtown Houston Texas area.

This is a comprehensive, complete scenery package, and has the following features:

-More than 80 major buildings accurately modeled with Gmax. All buildings include night lighting effects. Every single major building, and many others, are here, including City Hall, the main library, Toyota Center, Minute Maid Park, George Brown Convention Center, major hotels, Hobby Center, and St. Joseph Medical Center.

-Ground textures are taken from aerial photography of the area, and include night lighting effects.

It was my desire to have Houston accurately modeled for MSFS that led to the development of this scenery, which was literally years in the making. Despite the fact that Houston is the fourth largest city in the U.S. the default scenery was a mishmash of autogen buildings that, except for one or two (which were not accurately located anyway), in no way resembled any of the actual downtown structures. Additionally , what was there was not properly scaled (Minute Maid Park, home of the Astros, was nearly twice its actual size!).

There are also some other scenery elements east of downtown as you fly down the ship channel and out to Galveston Bay, including refineries, the San Jacinto Monument, and sailboats in the bay.

Future development of this scenery will be for FSX.

No additional third party files are required - everything you need is included in this package.
Comments can be directed to me at jsshaddox@yahoo.com

CREDITS
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SCENERY BUILD CREDITS- thanks to Tom Hiscox for SceneGenX Scenery Creator and Arno Gerretsen for ModelConverterX

REQUIREMENTS:

- Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004

That's it. All required files are provided herein.

INSTALLATION - Follow all steps below in order for this scenery to work correctly!
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Unzip the zip file into a temporary directory. You should have the main folder "Houston_2010" and within it two subfolders, "scenery" and "texture". You can place the "Houston_2010" folder intact in FS2004's "Addon Scenery" folder, or you can place Houston_2010 and its subfolders outside of FS 2004; my own preference is to keep my scenery folder outside FS 2004, like this:

C:\Houston_2010\
\Scenery
\Texture

Now start FS 2004, and from the main menu select "settings", "scenery library", "add area". In the "add area" screen navigate to the scenery folder you created. After creating the path, hit "OK", activate the scenery with the check box on the "scenery library" page if it's not already checked, and return to the simulator. Restart FS2004, Select "create a flight", under "State" select "Texas", under "City" select "Houston" and under "Airport" select a Houston-area airport, then take off and head downtown. Enjoy!

LEGAL
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This scenery is released as Freeware. Copyright James S. Shaddox. As freeware you are permitted to distribute this archive subject to the following conditions,

- The archive must be distributed without modification to the
contents of the archive. Redistributing this archive with any files
added, removed or modified is prohibited.

- The inclusion of any individual file from this archive in another
archive without the prior permission of the author is prohibited.
This means, for example, that you may not upload an archive that uses
my visual models with your own scenery or include it in a
package containing scenery without first obtaining the author's permission.

- No charge may be made for this archive other than that to cover the
cost of its distribution. If a fee is charged it must be made clear
to the purchaser that the archive is freeware and that the fee is to
cover the distributor's costs of providing the archive.

- The author's rights and wishes concerning this archive must be
respected.

Email - jsshaddox@yahoo.com