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Scenery Design

Currently 6 sections. Will add more when I think of them!

There are many things that you need before you can become a scenery designer.

A) Firstly you need a scenery design program.

There are several available:

1.Airport for Windows or www.airportforwindows.com

2.Abacus Airport & Scenery Designer (ASD)

3.FS Scenery Creator

4.FS Architect

5.Groundmaker (I think this link is correct)

These are a few of the more well known ones. Of these 1, 3, 4 and 5 are available as freeware i.e. you do not have to pay for them unless you wish to use them commercially. You have to pay for ASD and also the Shareware version of FS Architect, however these programs do allow you to view the scenery that you are creating in 3D as it would appear in the sim. NEWS!!! Airport for Windows 3.0 is definitely in the development stage. Help the Airport for Windows Project by visiting www.airportforwindows.com for information on how you can help this stunning freeware project continue well into the 21st century.

Whichever one you choose they are always being upgraded and improved so the scope for scenery design improves over time whatever the program.

B) Next you need an idea

I know this may seem ludicrous but if you don't know what you want to design how can you design it?

I found it best to go for something really simple at first which has a basis in real life but you have used your own imagination to recreate it for the sim, i.e. it exists or did exist but not quite in the form that you have created it.

For instance; you wish to do an airport near you, a small airfield with perhaps 1 or 2 runways a few hangars and club houses and maybe even a few static aircraft. This should be fairly simple to achieve, there are pleanty of building macros available as freeware on the net which look good and would be well suited for their intended role.

Once you have released this you could get a program to make 3D objects and do an accurate version of the airfield using correctly scaled buildings that have been rendered using digital photographs that you have taken. etc etc.

C) The basics for FS2000 onwards

A flat area for your airfield to be built on. This is extremely important!!

If you create a simple airfield for any of the Microsoft flight sims then the chances will be that you will create it on non-flat terrain.

In FS2000, FS2002 and CFS2 this can be overcome using the terrain flatten switch. Your design program should include an options whereby you can create this flatten switch when generating your scenery. If not then below is a section from the CFS2 readme.doc on how to put a flatten swith into CFS2. This will work with FS2000 and FS2002 as well.

The Flatten switch syntax is as follows:

Flatten.X=Elevation,Latitude1,Longitude1,Latitude2,Longitude2,Latitude3,Longitude3,Latitude4,Longitude4

X is equal to a number between 0 and 9, but you must start with Flatten.0, then Flatten.1, and so on, up to Flatten.9. You are allowed a maximum of 10 Flatten switches per Scenery Area (thus the numbers 0-9).

The Elevation is in feet above or below mean sea level (msl) and can be any number between -2000 and 99999.

The Latitude and Longitude of points 1, 2, 3, and 4 must be entered in a clockwise or counter clockwise fashion about the four sided area and must be in the form of degrees and minutes. You do not need to add the * or ' symbols to indicate degrees and minutes, and the shape does not have to be a rectangle. Any four-sided shape will work.

The maximum size of a flattened area is 90 degrees of longitude and 45 degrees of latitude.

EXAMPLE: This example flattens two separate but adjacent regions inside the scenery area to an elevation of 1000 ft. MSL.

[Area.100]

Group=Your Area

ID=Your Area

Title=Your Area

Active=TRUE

Layer=100

Local=C:\\Your Area

Flatten.0=1000,N45 30,W120,N45 30,W119 30,N45,W119 30,N45,W120

Flatten.1=1000,N45,W120,N45,W119 30, N44 30,W119 30,N44 30,W120

(note that there are no gaps between the lines of the code when you type this into a suitable text editing program e.g. notepad.exe. This is taken from the readme file for CFS2)

When designing an airfield for FS98 or CFS1 you have to do it on a flat area or be really brave and create a new terrain to replace the existing with a flat area in the desired place.

D) Further basics

Runways: These are important to any airport be it a simple local airfield or a vast international airport. As far as I know there are in FS2000 and FS2002 these default runway types:

Tarmac, Concrete, Grass, Mud. In CFS2 there are Steel Mats, Coral, Tarmac Chips. Airport for Windows also allows Water, Snow and Invisible.

Ground Polygons: these are extremely important. These are used to lay down large areas of one type of ground texture. For example, you need to replace the default town textures with a grass area for your airfield, you do this using a Ground Polygon. You tell it which texture to display and at what resolution (pixels/cm) then stretch it over the area that you want to cover adding points to the polygon where appropriate. An important feature of the polygon is the layer level at which you set it.

Navigation Aids (Nav Aids): I am afraid I do not know much about these however most design programs come with an explanation in the Help section. This will also include Landing aids. My sceneries are limited to NDB's which help to show you where an airfield actually is.

E) Buildings and 3D objects

Most third party 3D objects i.e. those created by other people and posted on the internet as "freeware" come in two basic formats for use in design programs. These are *.scm and *.api. the former are used in FS Scenery Creator, Groundmaker and Abacus ASD, and they do not allow certain parameters to be used unlike *.api which allows these parameters to be used, these files are accepted by FS Scenery Creator, Groundmaker, FS Architect and Airport.

FS2000 onwards gives the possibility to create a standard set of 3D objects that are are part of the game. You can customise the size and textures for these objects and most design programs now have an option which allows you to do this. For example all the basic buildings inn capital cities in FS2000 are made up from these objects and so are most of the Autogen buildings in FS2002.

Custom 3D objects: There are several design programs which allow you to create 3D objects and several of them are available for free. RG Sanchez' VOD (Visual Object Designer) and DDay (a CFS1 orientated version of VOD) allow you to create fairly complex objects but do not have any 3D preview functions. His new "shareware" NOVA program though has a wire frame 3D preview feature and he is constantly upgrading it with plugins for clocks that give the correct time in the sim etc. www.fsnova.com. EOD (Easy Object Designer) is a freeware program by Matthais Brueckner which works in the same way as VOD, DDay and NOVA but has a permanent 3-view wire frame preview of your object. Again he is constantly upgrading it. The best retail 3D design package is Abacus Flight Simulator Design Studio (FSDS) which is available in standard (for just 3D objects) and Pro (for creating aircraft *.mdl files) versions. This gives a comprehensive 3D preview and 3 view design layout and is absolutely brilliant. See some of the objects I am creating with it here.

F) Advanced SCASM editing

This technique is useful when a design program will not let you do something you want or if you wish to manually edit SCASM code to remove bleed through problems with textures.

I can recommend the SCASM tutorial by Andreas Klish and Ralf J. Triebel at Combatflight.de to help you understand what SCASM editing is all about. There is also the documentation that comes with the SCASM compiler to create the *.bgl scenery files that are used by FSx and CFSx. This can be obtained by downloading Manfred Moldenhauers superb SCASM compiler at www.scasm.de. This is used by all add-on developers to compile their scenery designs into a format that can be used by the sim and as such add-on producers owe him a very great debt.

For further help I suggest you visit the Forums at www.netwings.org which have some of the worlds finest designers and people who actually understand how all the coding for Flight Simulator works. There is a specific forum for scenery design chat.