As I walked through the gate at Hanscom Field onto the flight line it felt like home. I fired up and taxied to Runway 29 for a takeoff. As I departed, I did some sightseeing- I could almost see the Stop & Shop just North of the field on rte 225, TS was that close. Obviously, the textures are still generic, but they do the job admirably. As I continued to the South, off of my Left wing was Rte 128, the inner belt around Boston, and the best landmark to keep out of the class Bravo. TS was so close I could identify specific hills in specific towns- the cell towers in Waltham, The Needham Towers. I even flew over where I work- and the feeling was extremely well conveyed. I could see the intersection that my office building is on as well. Continuing South, I was amazed. This was still Fly!, but it has become so much more now. The generic scenery has been replaced by renderings that really look good- so good that planning a real VFR flight based on TS scenery is a legitimate possibility. By no means is the scenery perfect, but that is a limitation of the data- there’s no real way to tell TerraScene where to place all of the Wal-Mart’s across the country or to place a specific industrial complex.
TerraScene from Todd Klaus and How in the World? is
the amazing new scenery tool that allows the usage of USGS elevation, land
use and line graph data to generate Fly! scenery files. The process begins
with downloading the 74 Megabyte base package and running the painless installer.
Just be sure that you have enough memory and hard disk space for all of
your new scenery! The best place to begin is with the excellent TerraScene
manual. This document, in PDF format, gives an excellent tutorial
on how to go about creating scenery and importing it into Fly!. After
reading this document, anybody should be able to use TerraScene. The
manual is current as of the 1.0 release of TerraScene and the 1.04 editor.
A bit of a note here, Richard Harvey has been working on Flyedit 1.05
essentially as a favor to all TerraScene users. That will ease the
importing of Night Scenery into Fly. Also, there is a TerraScene FAQ that has been updated since the manual was written.
Once installed go visit The
USGS EROS page and begin retrieving the data for your scenery area of
choice. Currently TerraScene uses the 250k DEM, 100K DLG and 250K Land Use
data. As an example of file size, the Atlanta area data that I’ve
retrieved uses about 9.5 Megabytes which covers a 57x43 mile chunk of the
Atlanta Metro area with full coverage—a texture of 65.6 megabytes. Tip:
Ignore all DLG’s that have MT in them. TerraScene does not use the
mountain trail information.
Jak Fearon of How in the World? fame has released one additional
texture pack—Heavy Winter (get it from the Avsim library here). This texture pack will give you
Buffalo in January just as you expect it to be. (Buffalo, NY is known for
lake effect snow in Winter). There are other texture packs planned for the
remaining seasons and for more regionally accurate coverage. I can vouch for
the Northeast textures being just about perfect. Jak is also responsible for
the majority of the textures included in the base download.
My home area is Eastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island so I rendered this area during the beta period—before the addition of Jak Fearon’s additional regional and seasonal textures. Even with this basic
texture coverage, the area is remarkably close to reality. I guess I’d
know since I’ve got a couple hundred hours in a C172. I did two example
flights that I have made many times for real—KBED to KPVD and KBED to
KORH, flights of roughly 30 minutes duration, and yes, I can make out
exactly where my house is.
Well, now that we all know what we’re getting for
output, what is the process like? Really simple. Create a new project,
acquire and select your data (I keep all of my data sorted by
geography/city name as you can see to the left) I
simply select the proper folder and add all of the data. Then I choose my
bounds- usually one degree squares to keep the rendering time down. Then
render, and import into Flyedit, which is the hardest part! Typical rendering times
for these one degree squares hovers around one hour with another hour for
Flyedit to slice the data into a usable scenery area. The hardest part is
getting used to the specifics of the Fly! Editor, and even that is well
covered in TerraScene’s documentation. Simply double the render time to
generate night textures atop the day ones.
Once imported, you are ready to fly and can view your
new scenery in the editor. I’ve found that on my P3/550 Voodoo3 system
frame rates are excellent (25+) with 20-mile visibility even in places
like Pittsburgh where the scenery mesh can be complex. The only remaining step is to create the pod file for portability and space savings. I’ve found that the scenery runs well off of a 2Gb
JAZ drive. I know my scenery solution for the long term :-)
The issue of frame rates has come up a few times—I've had good experience in avoiding the 4 frames per second bug in complex scenery areas. I've found the mesh to be complex in Pittsburgh but my results have been quite good. Check out the Harrisburg final approach to see what I mean.
It seems that TerraScene may even cross the bounds into FS2000 scenery. I think this is almost logical since FS2000 uses bitmaps as textures. I've seen at least one case where this data was already in use.
A brief discussion of Flyedit is in order as this
tool is needed to import your scenery into Fly!. First you note the path of
the output (\terrascene\output) then you slice the .RAS (elevations) and
.TGA (texture) into a usable form. Flyedit creates a series of folders in the
data directory that you can now use to fly over for testing. Once tested,
use the file manager in Flyedit to create your EPD file. The pod (EPD) files
make things much more portable and are a bit more efficient at disk usage.
then delete the contents of your data directory and you're off!
TerraScene is on the short list of 'must haves' for the
Fly! aficionado. In fact, no single product with the exception of PFD
Team's PFD changes the nature of a simulation product like TerraScene does to
Fly! Most would expect to pay $50 for the ability to create scenery like
this, yet TerraScene is freeware along with the data for the USA. Todd hopes
to add a few features to future TerraScene versions- automatic placement of
buildings.
TerraScene has changed Fly! in such a way that it is
difficult to return to MSFS. Don't get me wrong, I like FS2000 as a whole, but
TerraScene has simply altered the experience to such a point that Simming
is now Flying—not so much sitting in front of my computer
flying, but more like being in a 172, cruising the skies of the USA. I can
now say that Fly! has a tool that raises the bar in such a way that
realistic VFR is possible in a consumer sim, something that the most
expensive Level C simulators cannot claim.
Download TerraScene from the Avsim Library by clicking here;
or click here to
download anything that is TerraScene related.
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