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TerraScene has altered the experience with Fly! in such a way that simming is now flying—not so much sitting in front of your computer flying, but more like being in a 172 cruising the skies. We can now say that Fly! has a tool that makes realistic VFR possible in this sim. TerraScene converts USGS Digital Elevation Model data into the elevation mesh used by Fly! and provides land use and line graph data to generate Fly! scenery files.

The process begins with downloading the 74 Megabyte base package and running the 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, TRI's Richard Harvey released Flyeditor 1.05 essentially as a favor to all TerraScene users. That eases the importing of Night Scenery into Fly. Also, there is a TerraScene FAQ that has been updated since the manual was written.

Create a new project, acquire and select your data. Then choose your bounds—usually one degree squares to keep the rendering time down. Then render, and import into Flyedit. Typical rendering times for these one degree squares hover 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.

At year's end How in the World released its update, TerraScene2. Scenery rendered with the first version of TerraScene, though very good and highly accurate, lacked some of the subtlies necessary for complete immersion into flying in Fly!. The original TerraScene lacked corrected ground shadows, for example, as to the position of the Sun and so forth. Well, TerraScene2 has now corrected this oversight; scenery rendered using this latest version has shading or shadows based on a user selected position of the sun. The relief shading is based on 30-meter DEMs and the position of the Sun. Plus they've added a far more realistic snow coverage texture which also includes the spring thaw. The 3-D shading can be applied to anything, like roads, rivers, rails, or whatever you wish.

In addition, TerraScene2 downloads the USGS data automatically, then automatically renders the scenery; you then launch your Fly! editor and create the EPD. A while later your scenery is complete and ready to install into your Fly! sim. This updated program with the improved texture library has resulted in some of the best scenery we've yet seen for any flight sim! Download TerraScene from the Avsim Library by clicking here; or click here to download the new TerraScene2 files and anything else that is TerraScene related.

The Finalists ...

The broad spectrum of supporting utilities – this year especially – make FS2000 and Fly! far more interesting and immersive indeed. Add-on's for Fly! are well represented this year, and last year's crop for FS2000 have been enhanced and refined. The goal is to create a more immersive experience in terms of more accurate geophysical features in scenery and other scenery design tools, more realistic and more convincing weather, "traffic" at both airports and while airborne, aviation charts and approach plates, flight planners that include SIDs and STARs, push-back automation, and even automatic regulation of display settings to smooth things out. Again, we're seeing a trend toward commercialization of features such as these, especially for voice ATC program generators. The best of this year's freeware offerings are presented here.

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FSUIPC by Pete Dowson is the successor to the famous FS6IPC.dll, which was designed by Adam Szofran. It allows external or third-party software to communicate and at times control certain operations in Microsoft Flight Simulator. It is the depth of this interaction which makes FSUIPC an essential cornerstone for aviation simulation enthusiasts.

Installation is very simple, with the user only needing to drop the FSUIPC.dll into the modules folder of MS Flight Simulator. When you go to the Module folder on the FS menu bar you'll see a configuration screen that shows all of the default settings—these allow a whole host of weather, adventure and other programs to operate in the MS Flight Simulator environment. As for documentation, you will find few programs which come with the depth of documentation Dowson has developed for FSUIPC. Just as amazing is the fact that all this documentation is updated every time the software is upgraded. And that has been quite often as Dowson cracks the MS Flight Simulator 2000 code allowing more and more control for external applications.

Dowson also includes several other programs along with FSUIPC. There is WeatherSet, a basic weather manipulation program which was originally used to test the weather functions in FSUIPC. Now it is offered as a standalone program for those interested in how the program works. Also look for the Advanced Weather Interface; WideFS, which allows the use of multiple computers while running FSUIPC; and Patch2km, which helps some of the FS98 legacy software interface with FS2000.

Download the current version of FSUIPC from the AVSIM library here.

 

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InfoMETAR V1 for Fly! – David Sandberg

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While others have worked diligently on Scenery for Fly!, David Sandberg has been working on weather utility enhancements. We dare say that he has now become the METAR guru for Fly!. David initially provided us with Thinmetar, a METAR utility that provided lots of options to enhance and improve Fly!'s handling of METAR Data. We reviewed the Thinmetar product in February; that review also contains some useful information about METARs and some person preferences on the Thinmetar options menu. Many of those comments hold true for InfoMETAR—you can read that review by clicking here.

InfoMETAR continues to refine Fly!'s realism. InfoMETAR is actually an entirely new product, although all of the functionality of Thinmetar is still there. InfoMETAR is actually two very distinct sub-programs although related. First is the METAR utility that is most similar to Thinmetar. The user interface is greatly improved with a Map display being the primary interface. The second program is the Random METAR Generator. This is completely new, and provides a means for the pilot to create weather for FLY! that although not real, is consistent with weather experienced in your flight plan region.

We think the Random METAR Generator is the best thing that has happened to Fly!'s weather since SKY!. With this option you can create realistic weather for FLY!. This is perfect for those days when the "Interesting Weather" is not where you want it to be. Now for those of you that are thinking, "Big deal, I can do that in the Fly! environment page," remember that weather created on the environment page will be the same throughout your flight. With the Random Weather Generator the weather will change enroute based on the climate common to the region you are in. The create utility will still permit you to choose the reporting stations for your weather. Another advantage of the Generator... now you can get good and consistent layers—something that is almost impossible when the data is dependent on imported METAR data. You can download InfoMETAR from the AVSIM library here.

 

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