RONALD REAGAN WASHINGTON NATIONAL AIRPORT (KDCA)
version 3.0 for FS2002 only.
TURN ON WORD WRAP
This is a brand new version and a complete remake of my previous DCA scenery for FS98 and FS2000. With the introduction of GMAX to FS2002 design my self and my fellow scenery creators have all decided to migrate to this new medium to create scenery and it only made sense to create DCA in GMAX. I have also included for the first time a photorealistic ground to make it more realistic.
THE AIRPORT
I lived in Washington DC for three years and have fond memories of this busy airport. Due to it's city center location I remember many a time going over to this airport with my father and park at the wildlife conservatory at the threshold of Runway 19 (18 at that time), to watch planes making the river approaches with the airplanes buzzing down to land on Runway 19 after making a sharp right turn past the G Mason Memorial Bridge on 2 mile finals ! Great sight to see ! and amazingly they all seemed to get it right first time !
The airfield went through a tough period in 2001 after the tragedy of 11 Sep when it was shut down for a prolonged period due to the security concerns because of it's proximity to the White House and other key areas. It has still not fully recovered, and General Aviation and Business Flights are still restricted.
Of course that was before the complete remake of the airport in 1997. This brought in virtually a brand new airport with a new terminal building to the north of the old rather antiquated one. It also brought in extra parking spaces for aircraft which was a much needed requirement unfulfilled for almost thirty years. Additionally the new terminal also eliminated the other significant shortfall of the old one in providing super metro connections to the city on the doorsteps of the terminal (no more walking 20 mins to the station in pouring rain!). Now if only they could increase the runway length...
All the navaids for the scenery are included including the LDA for Runway 19 (108.50), however due to scenery conflicts I have not included the Rosslyn LDA Runway 19.
THE SCENERY
This scenery design encompasses all the features of the present airport and includes both the new terminal and what is left of the old one, the Metro Station and even the Abingdon Memorial. This version includes night lighting which should nicely illuminate the whole area after dusk and up until dawn. It is also setup to exhibit the colours of autumn and winter.
Static aircraft are not included this time and I am working with another significant contributor to FS to produce GMAX static aircraft which hopefully will not hit performance as the previous versions did.
I have also not made a new AFCAD file and am leaving this task to anyone of the exellent freeware artist who are experts at making a decent track system for DCA.
As part of the overall upgrade taxiway and runway signs are now included. This time around I also included all kinds of ramp vehicles (thanks to Microsoft).
One of the best things this time around is the inclusion of Gerrish's tree macros which are magnificent and also very well coded to not cause too much of a performance hit.
I hope you like it!
The scenery is set to five levels in the interest of frame rate improvement.
Very Sparse Ground scenery only, taxiway signs
Sparse Adds the main terminals, tower, certain trees
Normal Adds hangars, parking lot, misc buildings, minimum number of jetways, more trees
Dense Adds more jetways, all ramp vehicles, road ramp, more trees
Very Dense All scenery. Adds the metro station, all trees
INSTALLATION:
As normal, unzip the file DCA2002.zip. The unzipped file should create the following directory,
DCA2002 ( with two subdirectories \scenery and \texture )
TREES
TREEbgl
Just move the DCA2002 folder intact to the FS2002\scenedb\ directory. Start FS2002 and thru the scenery library add the above scenery folder as DCA2002. Make sure that the DCA2002 folder is on a scenery level higher (i.e. lower scenery layer number) than the default US Northeast and any terrain mesh add-on scenery folders. Remember that this DCA scenery and the default US Northeast default sceneries have to be active at the same time to use this scenery. You will also need to activate the Washington DC city from the scenery library.
Also ensure that within the Scenery Library the vehicles library are active.
There are no Exclude and Flatten switches to be installed.
My first recommendation would be for you to install Gerrish Gray's tree macros. They are available at AVSIM and SurClaro. If not then read on...
Open the TREES folder and MOVE all the contents in the folder to the main FS2002\texture directory. If you already have Gerrish's trees installed then you do not need to do anything with the trees.
Open the TREEbgl folder and MOVE the contents in the folder to the main FS2002\scenery directory. If you already have Gerrish's trees installed then you do not need to do anything with the trees.
Although I have included all required textures, just to be careful you may want to download the Airport 2.60 textures in the FS2002\texture directory.
FRAME RATES
Details mean severe usage of computer horsepower! Although I used GMAX for this scenery it is still very heavy on performance if all the details are maxed out (for reference with max on all parameters I get 10-11 fps on the ramp - AMD XP1900 RAM512MB GF3Ti200) . Additionally it also suffers from having a very dense surrounding scenery of the default Washington DC area. There are three options to improve frame rates,
1) reduce scenery density levels (see above for details)
2) remove the car ramp and metro by moving the file DCAramptr.bgl from the DCA\scenery folder to the main DCA folder (or any other backup folder) for future use
3) remove the trees by moving the file DCAtrees.bgl from the DCA\scenery folder to the main DCA folder (or any other backup folder) for future use
4) remove the fences by moving the file DCAfence.bgl and 1fenclib.bgl from the DCA\scenery folder to the main DCA folder (or any other backup folder) for future use
5) remove the taxiway signs by moving the file DCAtaxisigns.bgl and DCAtsignlib.bgl from the DCA\scenery folder to the main DCA folder (or any other backup folder) for future use
Hope it all works!
Credits:
Pascal Meziat, B McWilliams & and especially T Hiscox (Airport 2.60)
Gerrish Gray (trees)
Andrew Heath (Beta tester)
Discreet (GMAX)
Arno Gerretsen (Bumpy)
and of course...MICROSOFT.
THIS SCENERY IS FREEWARE AND MAY NOT BE USED FOR COMMERCIAL PURPOSES WITHOUT PRIOR PERMISSION OF THE AUTHOR. HOWEVER, IF YOU WRITE TO ME THIS AND MY PREVIOUS SCENERIES MAY BE ALLOWED TO BE UPLOADED TO OTHER SITES WITH MY PERMISSION.
