Petrified Forest National Park.
I was rather disappointed with this park. The problem is that, like many of the parks in the desert Southwest where tree cover is minimal, ground textures are front-and-center. This is particularly true for this park, where there are no majestic mountains, canyons, mesas or lakes, but an almost flat landscape that is, IRL, ablaze in color that changes both with time-of-day and season, and full of the fossil remains of a forest - the reason that this park was created.
Neither the DEM data nor terrain textures capture either of these two signature features of the park very well. The DEM resolution does not capture the fossil remains at all, and poorly represents some of the geologic features of the park. In places the DEM resolution appears less than in other parks.
To illustrate this, I’ve tried to match screenshots in MSFS with their real-life counterparts shown on the National Park Website. These photographs are from the links provided for the various audio stops along the main park road shown on the park map. The first is in-game, the second from the website.
PEFO Audio Tour North Stop 16 and South Stop 17. The park picture shows how green and verdant the park can be at times during the year:
The Tepees North Pullout. This shows how the DEM is barely capturing this rock formation, and the terrain is not recording the different colors in the rocks (which may be hard to do if the recording camera is pointing vertically down):
Off the Beaten Path Billings Gap Overlook Route Stop 1. The most similar pairing that I could find in the park:
PEFO Audio Tour North Stop 24 and South Stop 9. In this pair, the MSFS DEM and textures are simply nowhere near close to the real rock formations or color:
Comparions at the Crystal Forest Trail and PEFO Audio Tour South Stop 2 also show a wide variation between in game & real-life DEM, terrain texture colors and vegetation (see this topic for pics)
There is also significant tile color mismatching in the park. These two screenshots were taken at 34.9986° N 109.8052° W, just before the park road crosses the Puerco River. The first shows the corner of four tiles, all of which have a different color
On the plus side, the Painted Desert Inn is nicely modeled that one can fully walk around, including going up & down stairs and around the paths through the cacti gardens, and readable signs about the park.
Thare are only a few very minor issues with the POI that are not worth logging bugs for:
- The mens restroom is call “MAN”, not “MEN”
- The door handles are a little bit too high on the doors, and one door is missing them.
- A rock on the upper patio is elevated a foot or so above the ground
- There is no flag atop the flagpole. This appears to be a design decision for WU22 as all flagpoles I’ve seen so far are missing their flags.
- One set of stairs does not have a sloped collision mesh, so the avatar walks through the stairs rather than up them.
On my personal SmotheryVase scale, I’m giving this park a 5/10.