CBC
Design.
Lake District National Park Scenery for Flight Simulator X and Horizon
VFR Photographic Scenery Generation X.
Populating the national park with trees for FS9 began several years ago with two Autogen scenery releases created by other designers. I decided to try and fill the gaps between these releases and began planting trees. Over a period of time I became increasingly frustrated with the limitations FS9 presented and decided to alter my planting style to try and thicken up the apparent density of the vegetation. I tried all sorts of different trees groups and produced some of my own too. Gradually the results of these experiments began to pay off but unfortunately the differences in styles between the work I was doing and the work done by the other designers showed. As a result, I realised that I was going to have to tackle the park as a whole if I was going to get the results I was looking for. You can see an example of some of the work I did for FS9 in these pictures: laked6.jpg, laked3.jpg, tree2.jpg
As well as the tree work I also spent several months working on the Tarns and lakes, specifically re-drawing the masks and editing the shore lines on the photographic tiles. In doing so I managed to reshape the shores so that all the water was absolutely flat. This improved the look of the scenery when viewed from a boat or float plane and helped to increase the level of realism that the VFR photographic scenery (designed by the very talented John Farrie of Visual Flight) conveyed.
FSX: The promise of things to come.
In 2006 Microsoft released Flight Simulator 10, called FSX for short. This new release promised much and included a whole new approach to tree planting which included a much higher number of trees per tile and a huge variety of them that could be planted with far more control that FS9 could ever hope to offer. Unfortunately as many avid Flight Simulator fans will testify, FSX was released too soon and was plagued with problems. These included frame rate issues, problems with add on scenery such as Horizons VFR Photographic Scenery Generation X, mesh terrain problems, transparency issues with existing 3D scenery and issues displaying trees planted by users in that FSX was unable to accurately reflect the seasons in the trees drawn on screen. Many if not all of these problems have now been addressed but it came at a price. Many older scenery releases were rendered obsolete despite promises by Microsoft that backward compatibility would be maintained. This created obvious financial opportunities for commercial designers but left some of the freeware designers including me, deeply disappointed. Models which took days to complete were now useless and modification were so time consuming, it wasn’t really feasible.
Despite the disappointment I decided to press on and try to get to grips with the new SDK. It wasn’t easy and the intricacies of the new kit proved to be quite a challenge. The lack of proper front end interfaces and tools made everything quite difficult to use but in time I managed to get to grips with it and produced some nice dense scenery that I felt did justice to the park that I love so much. You can see the results of this work by clicking the images at the top of this page.
THE FUTURE OF THIS PROJECT
Horizon Simulation are working
on a tool called AgentX that will enable designers to populate the VFR
Generation X scenery with 3D buildings and trees. This tool will be
considerably easier to use than the SDKs provided by Microsoft. This coupled
with the extensive scenery work that is being done in house at Horizon by Darren
Vincent, one of the best designers in the business, means that the work I did in the park needs
to be updated to blend in with the Horizon releases. Using a combination of Horizon tree sets and one or two
of my own, this work is on-going.
With millions of trees populating the virtual park, the lake district should look better and more realistic that it has ever
done before. In fact when making comparisons between real photographs of the park and screenshots of
the simulated version quite recently, the similarities were striking.
The first stage in a series of releases of the Lake District Tree Set for FSX will be announced soon. In the meantime if you don't have or are not concerned about the Horizon demos and want to download and install the current beta version of the Lake District Autogen tree Set for FSX, click the link below.
FSX BETA LAKE DISTRICT TREE SET FOR VFR GENERATION X.
OLDER FS9 Scenery for the Lake District National Park.
LAKES MODIFICATIONS RELEASE FOR VFR PHOTOGRAPHIC SCENERY