AVSIM Commercial Scenery Review Scenery! USA for FLY!

One of the biggest disappointments to TRI's FLY! upon its release was the lack of generic scenery detail. Then with the release of Ground Control by How In the World, things started to look better. Next came a program called TerraScene, which allowed people to create their own accurate sceneries by using US Geographical information and compiling this data to make some pretty darn good scenery. The problem with this for some people is two fold. First you must download a lot of different files from the Internet, which is pretty easy, and then you must start compiling this data with the TerraScene program. This is all pretty easy but could be a bit overwhelming for the novice; it also takes a few hours of your time to complete a scenery area. If the person does not wish to compile their own scenery, they can download it from AVSIM. However, if you are like me and can't get high speed Internet access in your area, you're stuck with a 56k dial up line; hence making 60Meg downloads impossible or at least a real challenge. So what do you do if you want high detailed accurate scenery for FLY!? Well I think I have found the answer!

Peter McLean's Scenery! USA fills the void, and boy does it! I have recently had the chance to fly all three sceneries available to date and let me tell you, they are absolutely beautiful. The three sceneries available so far are Los Angeles, San Francisco and Seattle and are available via online order at Scenery USA and are shipped to you on a CD Rom for approximately $14 each. More scenery will become available as they are created by Peter, about one CD available every two weeks. That my friends, is a lot of scenery!

Features of each scenery are as follows:

• Representation of 37 land use / land cover types
• Roads and trails, differentiating between major roads and minor trails
• Representation of bays, lakes, streams, etc.
• Pipelines, transmission lines and other miscellaneous features
• Realistic coast lines
• Realistic shading to give a 3D effect
• Large coverage area – 1 Scenery! USA CD covers approximately 3 degrees longitude by 3 degrees latitude
• Includes night lights

General Details:

The resolution of the graphics used to create the Scenery! USA CDs is roughly 15m per pixel, so the optimum height for scenery realism is above 1000 m.

• Each Scenery! USA CD contains about 3 degrees longitude by 3 degrees latitude, or roughly 100,000 square kilometers.
• The shading of the scenery was based on the position of the sun in April 2000 mid-morning, and is static (it does not vary with Flight Simulator time).
• For optimum results, the Scenery! USA CD data contents should be copied directly to a hard drive.
• There are no 3D models included in the scenery. However, the scenery control files (".scf") can easily be edited to include other pod (".epd") files that include 3D models.
• The scenery is generated from US Geological Survey data. The scenery is not meant to be 100% accurate due to the nature of the USGS data, but it should be representative enough for VFR flying!

I had several email conversations with Peter and asked him how he got started in the project? Peters replied, "My brother is Andrew McLean, and his company, Aerosoft Australia, makes flight simulator hardware, amongst other things (see Aerosoft). We had jointly developed a 'real' cockpit that "plugged in" to FS98, but were experiencing problems with the flight model (oscillations in the attitude of the aircraft was a big one). Seeking a solution from Microsoft resulted in a denial that there was a problem.

"So my brother went out and bought Fly! We were both impressed by its flight model, but it also lacked in many areas—such as scenery compared to FS98/2000. So Andrew started to generate scenery based on USGS data, with a view to eventually interfacing Fly! to Aerosoft's GA28R simulator cockpit. In short, we'd be plugging our hardware into software with a better flight model and hopefully better scenery.

"I have a degree in electrical engineering, so the mathematics involved in the scenery generation and shading was not a problem. I also program in C++, but Andrew programs in Pascal, and his program was not quite finished. Andrew was very busy with the Aerosoft GA28R simulator, so I decided to 'bite the bullet' and make my own scenery. Three months of programming in my spare time later... I finished my own scenery generation program, and made my own textures to go with it. After a few trial runs on the AVSIM upload site, and a lot of tweaking later, I was in a position to generate huge amounts of scenery rather quickly (it takes about 1 week to generate 1 CD of scenery."

The results of Peter's scenery are incredible. They are very dense and the textures look very realistic. The first thing it reminded me of, was a hybrid TerraScene scenery, but as you can see from the above question, Peter creates his own scenery using his own program. "I place a coarse mesh into Fly! and generate a fine mesh to do the scenery shading. The overall effect is a perceived height resolution without sacrificing too much frame rate," was Peters answer to "Are you using TerraScene to create this stuff?"

Since I am not an expert at scenery creation, I thought it interesting as to what are the secrets behind this masterpiece. The answer to that question was a bit overwhelming, but I thought you scenery designers out there would be interested in his answer, so here it is.

"An alignment process is first made between the two types of USGS data – land use / land cover (LULC) and digital line graphs (DLG). This reduces (but does not eliminate) anomalies in the data (because they are at different resolutions).

"USGS land use / land cover (LULC) files are imported and used to generate polygons with appropriate textures.

"Special attention is paid to farm-like areas to reduce the tiling effect that would be evident over large areas.

"USGS digital line graph (DLG) data is used to draw water - bays, oceans, ditches, rivers, ponds, streams, etc. The water is then shaded to give a feeling of depth away from the shoreline—this was the hardest algorithm to come up with.

"Roads are placed using DLG data. Special attention is paid to forested areas where roads may not always be visible.

"Railroads are placed using DLG data.

"Miscellaneous transport is placed using DLG data (pipelines and transmission lines, amongst other things).

"The elevation data is extracted from the USGS digital elevation model (DEM) data. The position of the sun is then calculated for the particular longitude and latitude of the scenery at a time of 10:30am in mid April, 2000. That time was chosen because it gave a reasonably looking shading effect, and it happened to be April 2000 when I wrote that part of the program!

"I then shade the scenery.

"All the scenery 'tiles' I generate are pieced together into huge 400Mb TGA files that then get imported into the Fly! Editor.

"When a Fly! globe tile is complete, it's packaged into an '.epd' file ready to be burned onto a CD!"

The process to make these areas seem very cumbersome and complicated to me, but I'm glad Peter knows what he is doing, because the results are stunning.

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Installation of each area is really quite simple. You can either leave the scenery on the CD, boot up FLY! And away you go, or you can copy the scenery data into your FLY! Scenery directory and run it from the hard drive. Running it from the CD worked fine, however it did slow down when it loaded new scenery data in. I highly recommend running the scenery from your hard drive.

Visually, the scenery is very nice to look at. The textures Peter used are very detailed and give a good representation of cities, towns, roads and streams. The mountain terrain is also extremely detailed and flying over the California fault areas is very realistic to see. I had several flights from LA to San Francisco using SKY! And they were some of the best flights I have had with FLY! to date. Overall the scenery is more detailed than that of TerraScene because of the textures and 3D effect Peter has created. Flying an approach into Seattle with SKY! running was very realistic. Seeing the textures change from rugged mountain terrain to out lying towns and then finally into dense city textures was very realistic. The same goes for flying into LAX.

The area covered in each scenery area is huge, each CD contains approximately 100,000 square Kilometers and once Peter completes the rest of the West Coast, you will be able to fly from San Diego to Seattle with detailed VFR scenery! To give you an idea of what areas are covered, here is list of some towns covered in each scenery:

• Seattle: Edmonds, Everett, Mt. Rainer, Olympia, Seattle, Tacoma
• San Francisco: Monterey, Napa, Sacramento, San Francisco, San Jose, Santa Cruz
• Los Angeles: San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Santa Maria, Santa Rosa