The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk is an oceanfront amusement park located along a half-mile-long stretch of the north shore of Monterey Bay in Santa Cruz, California. Originally built in 1907, it is California's oldest amusement park, and two of its rides (the Giant Dipper wooden roller coaster and Looff Carousel) are national historic landmarks. The boardwalk has featured in many films and TV shows over the years, most prominently 1987's "The Lost Boys" and 2019's "Us."

Adjacent to the boardwalk, the Santa Cruz Wharf is the longest pier on the west coast of the United States, at just over 2,700 ft. in length. The current wharf was constructed in 1914, and presently is home to dozens of shops and restaurants.

Features

• Highly detailed, fully hand-modeled recreation of the Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk, the adjacent Santa Cruz Wharf, and selected other landmarks in the immediate vicinity (including the Santa Cruz Dream Inn, NOAA Monterey Bay Exploration Center, lifeguard shelters on the beach, and multiple bridges), replacing the native photogrammetry. As of the release, the park is somewhat in flux, with multiple rides being relocated or removed; my depiction, roughly, is of how the boardwalk appeared during Summer 2023.
• Park-wide custom night lighting, including emissive textures for some models, as well as lights placed in Blender.
• LOD models used throughout. Though this is probably my most complex set of models, I found performance to be smooth (no worse than 40-50 fps on a near fly-by) on a mid-range machine running MSFS in 1080p
• Animated flags (requires tfrsto's Windy Things addon, available on flightsim.to)
• Terraforming and vegetation correction as needed, including hand-placed palm trees in vicinity (palm trees require the free World Update X to be installed). Vegetation placement/scaling optimized for REX AccuSeason w/ short trees.
• Shoreline corrections around the boardwalk and a short distance up and down the coast and San Lorenzo River

Please note that this scenery is not yet compatible with mistercoffee1's Santa Cruz County water fix addon; I've reached out to him in hopes of getting this worked out.

• (Optional package) Hand-placed cars in parking areas for wharf and boardwalk (from native model library). Some people have requested this for other scenery packages I have made, so figured I might as well do it here. That said, the default models don't appear until you're pretty close-in already, and the LOD models aren't particularly good either. That's probably helpful for performance, but a little annoying in other respects. This is included as a separate package, so you can choose whether to use it or not without impacting anything else in the scene.

How to Donate

If you enjoy this addon or my other scenery addons listed below, please consider using the PayPal link to the right or on my profile page to make a donation. I'm not specifically looking to monetize my work, and intend to keep it freely available, but keep in mind that putting these sceneries together requires a significant investment of time, effort, and research, and every bit helps.

Happy Flying!

Other Scenery By Me
    (all available on flightsim.to)

    Cedar Point
    Six Flags Magic Mountain
    Knott's Berry Farm
    Kings Island
    Six Flags Over Texas
    Busch Gardens Williamsburg
    Globe Life Field

    San Francisco Bay Area Bridges (now in one bundled package)
    Ambassador Bridge
    Downtown LA Bridges
    Coronado Bridge (and other San Diego area bridges)
    Balboa Park (San Diego) vegetation overhaul

Installation

• Download the ZIP file and extract the "whitearcades-santacruzboardwalk"  and (optionally) “whitearcades-scbb-cars” folders to your Community Folder:

For the Microsoft Store version: C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Local\Packages\Microsoft.FlightSimulator_\LocalCache\Packages\Community
For the Steam version: C:\Users\[Username]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator\Packages\Community

Scenery package takes up approximately 160 MB as installed.

(Remember to first delete any previous versions of these that were already in your Community folder.)

Dependencies

• Recommended Windy Things by trfsto

GPS Coordinates

36.96435141920276, -122.01622953952916