Aleutian Islands Scenery Enhancement Part I
by Jorge 'eko' Salas
I have been recently flying through the Aleutian Islands and have been very impressed
with how beautiful this area is.
However, aside from the occasional airport or NDB, it is pretty barren. Not a
scenery building or autogen building to be found anywhere.
My WAC chart, however, has numerous markers for "cabins" or "buildings" and of course,
the occasional small town. (A small town being more than 3-5 people, I guess.)
Dave Erickson has a fantastic scenery add-on which adds some shipping, fishing yards,
and upgrades the airports of the Aleutians, but I wanted more.
I wanted to be able to look at my WAC, see a marking
for a cabin, look in the simulator, and there are a couple of cabins there.
So with this thought in mind, I downloaded FSSC (FS Scenery Creator) and procedeed to learn
how to make scenery. :-) I figured this would be a great way to learn, as cabins are simple objects,
there are really no texture issues to contend with, as I'm placing the cabins right on top
of the default textures, and I'm not planning on upgrading or doing any airports.
These are very simple sceneries and will not impact your frame rates at all.
I just want cabins and buildings where my chart says cabins and buildings should be!
After doing some preliminary learning of the program and how scenery creation works,
I scoured the flight sim libraries and ended up with over 20 decent rustic/log cabin API macros, ships, etc.
which I am going to be using.
So I started on my task. I have done every single island in the Aleutians which is marked on
WAC CE-12 and CE-13. The scenery extends from the west-most island of Attu, all the way to
Port Heyden in the East. (This was my arbitrary cutoff point. It extends a bit beyond
the "true" Aleutians into Alaska, but I thought it would be a good place to stop.)
The scenery is split into two parts. The first part extends from Attu to the Krenitzin Islands.
This covers all the "true" Aleutian Islands. The second part of the scenery covers from Krenitzin to
Port Heyden. This area is technically not part of the Aleutian Islands, but I wanted to cover it
anyway, because it is such beautiful scenery.
Unalaska has gotten a fair treatment, as this is one of the biggest "cities" in the Aleutians and
a very important port. It is the most complex portion of my entire scenery and based on an actual area map.
If you use Dave Ericksons' scenery, you should disable his treatment of this
area, which used a flatten area that was too big for my tastes, and it took away most of the mesh detail.
I also had extreme FPS slowdowns with his version. The filename to disable from his scenery is: PADUspb.bgl
You cannot have both versions of Unalaska running at the same time, either one or the other since they conflict.
Speaking of mesh, you should REALLY install Eddie Denny's FS2002 mesh for Alaska in 16 parts. It makes
the aleutians stunning. I created this scenery with his mesh installed, so it works perfectly. Also,
there seem to be no problems using default mesh as well.
I've added a small radio antenna at many spots, to make the cabins easier to find,
and thrown in a helipad here and there at the towns and
cabin places so you can go visit these fine folks that live at the end of the world.
Most, however, you will have to get to by floatplane.
The occasional tanker or fishing ship can also be seen.
Many of the cabins are nightlit, and the helipads are also lit at night. During the day,
they show up as a simple H on the ground texture.
I've included a couple of flight plans in MS Flight Planner format. There is one from Anchorage
to Unalaska to get you to the starting point of the Aleutians. This flight plan is a real-world
flight plan which Alaska Airlines does twice daily. The departure SID isn't done, but the arrival
STAR to Unalaska is accurate and should be followed. Unless you want to crash into the mountain
next to the runway. The flight plan follows the established Jetway for this trip.
The other three flight plans are VFR plans which will take you all the way to Attu, the western most
point of the Aleutians. Use them as a guide, and explore the region!
Thanks to all the creators of the API
macros which I have used in this project. This would not be possible without your work. I did not
create a single API for this project, they were all downloaded.
This project at heart is about getting the visual markers
from the WAC chart into the simulator. Nothing more.
To install:
-----Easy way-----
Unzip the distribution to a temp folder.
Open the Alaska Aleutian folder and move the contents of the Scenery folder (not the folder itself! the CONTENTS!) to your FS2002/addon scenery/scenery folder. Now move the contents of the Texture folder to
your FS2002/addon scenery/texture folder.
Thats it, you're done. In the airport and facilities directory, you can find the Helipads
in the older sceneries list under AK - * Island.
-----The Advanced Way------
If you do not already know how to add a scenery area from within the simulator,
or do not have addon sceneries already configured in this way... use the Easy way. Period.
I'm not going to explain it here, nor will I field any e-mail requests either. So there! :-)
Unzip the distribution to a temp folder.
Move the Alaska Aleutian folder to where you have all your other addon sceneries installed.
Make an entry in the scenery.cfg file for the Alaska Aleutian scenery.
I've included a simple map showing where I have added stuff with red dots, so you can easily find them.
If you have a WAC of this area, the cabins and towns should be exactly where the charts say
they should be.
There is a scenery listing with GPS coordinates at the end of this document. The numbers all match
the scenery BGL files as well, so you can enable/disable individual files if you wish, as they are easy
to find and match.