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(18.10.2006) FSX and Estonia - Part 2Compatibility of existing sceneries: Estonian LandscapeOf course I was curious, how my scenery 'Estonian Landscape' behaves in FSX, since there have been some significant changes to the scenery engine (higher resolution of the ground textures, different vector data formats). To keep it short: The scenery is unfortunately not entirely compatible, there are some modifications necessary. But it seems that the majority of the data can be kept, luckily there is no need to redo everything. So, which display errors occur?
 ('Estonian Landscape' scenery in FSX: Display errors along the coasts) Most prominent are the display errors along the coasts. It seems that there have been some changes in the hierarchy or format of the land-water-masks, so that land above default water is not shown. I fear that this problem will also be the most laborious one to solve. Furthermore, the default VTP-lines (coastlines, roads, rivers) are not excluded correctly, so they now show up twice. This should be not too hard to correct. 
 ('Estonian Landscape' scenery in FSX: left: missing islands, right: Tartu) I also noticed, that the road type 'concrete' seems to have a different ID now, since everything shows up as asphalt. But there are also some good aspects: The landclass data seems to be correct in most cases despite looking quite different now. The increased texture resolution really pays off, and some textures have been improved (for example, see the swamp below on the right). So to improve the look of Estonia at least a little bit in FSX now, you can install Estonian Landscape but use only the landclass data (delete all files except LC_*.bgl). 
 ('Estonian Landscape' scenery in FSX: it is going to look nice...) So, unfortunately, there are some modifications that need to be done. Since my time is quite limited at the moment and I don't know exactly yet what needs to be done, I can give no promise about when the update will be ready. As soon as I can say more you will read it here. Compatibility of existing airport sceneriesHow are the existing sceneries of Estonian airports and airfields looking in FSX? Unfortunatly, it seems that no scenery is entirely compatible. Everywhere there are smaller or larger display errors to be found, due to a number of internal changes in the FS engine like unsupported texture formats or different flatten-polygons (the earth is now round also in FS). So, let's take a quick look at the sceneries individually:Tallinn 2002 by Raimo Västrik works quite well for its age, but some textures do not show up (they appear black or white instead). I have not yet tested the 2006 beta version, as it is still in development. The other Tallinn scenery by Stanislav Nezmanov suffers from the same problem of missing textures and has some strange effects in the elevation mesh data. 
 (left: Tallinn 2002 by Raimo Västrik, right: Tallinn by Stanislav Nezmanov) The sceneries by Paavo Pihelgas also show some incompatibilities: Kihnu refuses to load at all on my system (FSX crashes), but Ruhnu seems to appear okay except some minor problems with the exclusion of the default coastline. In Kuressaare, the apron is missing almost entirely and many textures are not shown. In Viljandi, the tree textures do not appear. 
 (left: Kuressaare, right: Viljandi) So, there is some work waiting for us scenery designers. As soon as updates are available (which might take quite a long time, so be patient), you will read about it here. For the time until everything is patched, I wish us all many happy hours with FS2004, where you can fly now smoothly with high fps on existing hardware and enjoy all the countless existing addons. |
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