Louisville, Kentucky Version 8.1
For use with FS2002
By: Jim Jones
Internet:70303.2016@compuserve.com
SECTIONS:
General Notes and Comments
Navigation/Communication
LOGO files
Installation
FS2002/Lou8 Scenery Anomolies
Compatibility
Future Releases
Acknowledgments
GENERAL NOTES AND COMMENTS:
This scenery is a detailed rendition of both the core of the city, Bowman Field, the Louisville International Airport, Clark County, Ind (JVY) airport, as well as some of the features of the surrounding area. Airport and SCASM were the scenery compilers used to generate this scenery.
This version is the first for FS2002, and is essentially a copy of LOU7 with some enhancements of photoreal textures for buildings (about 30) and night colors. Some buildings have been remodeled and some additions and deletions have been made to reflect real world changes to the Louisville skyline. The greatest nubmer of changes were to downtown Louisville, Bowman field and some of the significant outlying buildings.
This scenery is unique in that most of the buildings are custom created to give them an authentic appearance and thus allows the FS pilots to feel at home, rather than fly in another generic jungle of buildings. Some generic buildings were used however, since they do offer similar looks to the originals in some cases and when I was too lazy to generate a custom model. Each bridge, 6 in all, is also custom and bears resemblance to the original. Custom control towers were created to look similar to the originals and to resolve some of the seeing problems found in some sceneries. Glass panes and antenna lights were added for effect.
The Louisville Skyline is especially impressive at night, with its illuminated buildings, and the Belle of Louisville steaming up river, belching fire and smoke as it goes. Across the river in Indiana the Colgate Sign and Clock are rendered and glow brightly at night as well.
The Louisville International Airport displays the completed runway/taxiway system as depicted in the April 1998 issue of the U.S. terminal procedures. The agreement between this scenery and the charts is not total as some planned taxiways have been included in this scenery but not yet completed in reality. Also since 1998 UPS has expanded its building program which overlaps one of the old decommissioned runways. Very few changes to SDF scenery have been made since the LOU7 version.
Unique to this scenery is a custom terminal, UPS buildings which occupy much of the airport real estate, radar, hangars, lighting standards and two airways with a parallax alignment system. Just center the green line within the red indexed box as you approach the airway. These colored lines were designed to be seen through the airway so that they can help line up your aircraft when approaching from the opposite side of the airway from the colored lines. The fueling area is illuminated in light blue-green instead of the very intense yellow so as not to detract as much from the night illumination of the airport. A C-130 rests before the Air National Guard Hangar and two static airliners are included.
This scenery contains most of the major streets and highways in the area as a base for this and future scenery. An attempt has been made to accurately place the scenery with the use of various maps, primarily U.S. Geological Survey topographic maps and the U.S. Terminal procedure charts. As with any scenery, many compromises must be made to keep the scenery sizes and frame rates at acceptable levels. Streets are often depicted straight for many miles before any change of direction occurs. Thus, scenery placed along these roads will not be placed accurately in some instances.
All buildings and bridges do not contain crash detection as this increases the coding time significantly and probably impacts the frame rate and size of the scenery files to some extent.
This version supports scenery density selection. Very dense settings displays all the scenery, any other setting displays only the airport runways/taxiways, Ohio river, and major highways.
This scenery was designed for use with FS2002 only.
NAVIGATION/COMMUNICATION
ATIS (SDF) 118.15
ILS for SDF
Rwy 17R 108.35 (ISNU) 109.35 in real life.
Rwy 17L 111.95 (IPKI)
Rwy 29 109.10 (ILKS)\
Rwy 35R 110.55 (IJJM)
Rwy 35L 109.35 (IRLI)
AIRLOGO.R8 is used to display an airline logo at
the east concourse. The default is to display the TWA
logo. To display no logo, copy BLNKLOGO.R8 into the
AIRLOGO.R8 file. To display the Noble Air logo copy
NBLAIR.R8 into the AIRLOGO.R8 file.
INSTALLATION
This program is distributed in a zip file which when properly decompressed will generate the main folder for LOU8.1 and its subfolders for scenery and textures. A program such as WinZip which can accomplish this is required. Perform the following steps:
Unzip all files in the zip file into a temporary folder, creating the LOU8.1-R folder and scenery and texture subfolders.
Using Windows Explorer, copy the LOU8.1-R (Release) folder from the temporary folder to the directory where you store your scenery. This could be the fs2002 scenery directory or another directory you have created to store scenery files. The contained scenery and texture subfolders should also be created automatically as a result of the copy operation along with all the files stored in their proper folders. Once installation is completed, delete the temporary file.
Copy the two files, SDF35R.FLT and BWM24.FLT, from the root of the temporary file, to your FS2002\fights\myflts directory.
Start FS2002 and select the menu tree options:
World
Scenery Library
Press the ADD AREA button to add a new Scenery Area.
A "Select scenery directory" window will appear. Browse to find the location you stored the Lou8.1 main directory. As an example if you stored the Lou8.1-R main folder on drive d:, in a folder fs2k2scn, then browse until the directory box in the "Select scenery directory" window contains:
d:\fs2k2scn\lou8.1-R
Set the Scenery Area Title to: Louisville, Ky (LOU8.1-R) or whatever you prefer and press ok.
The new scenery will be set to the highest priority, priority 1. This can be changed later if desired.
Click the Enable box so an X appears, making the Louisville Scenery active.
Exit these screens using the green check mark option.
Exit FS2002. Using an editor copy the contents of the Flatten.txt file to the scenery.cfg file that follows the just added Louisville scenery. The Scenery.cfg file is located in the fs2002 main directory. At the end of this file you should find commands similar to:
[area.xxx]
Title=Louisville, KY (LOU8)
Local=..\LOU8\scenery
Active=True
Layer=xxx
The value of xxx will vary and is set automatically by FS2002.
Paste the contents from flatten.txt following the "Layer=" command such that the commands look similar to:
Save the modified scenery.cfg file and exit the editor.
Restart FS2002 and start either of the supplied .flt files or begin at one of the Airport selections for Bowman Field or Louisville International Airport. Set the scenery density to its maximum value to show the buildings and other details in the city and airports, otherwise only the airport runways will show.
The city of Louisville is West of Bowman and North of SDF where the significant buildings hug the south bank of the Ohio river.
FS2002/LOU8 SCENERY ANOMOLIES
There is a bothersome anomoly in FS2002 which causes flickering bleedthru of the terrain textures below the runways. Some airports have worse problems than others. The airports in the LOU8.1 package are particulary suceptable to this problem. To correct this, flatten switches and adjustments to altitudes set in the scenery were made. The result provides runways that do not flicker, but are higher than the surrounding terrain and taxiways by necessity. As a plane taxis onto or off of these runways there is a noticeable bump or screetch as the plane goes over the edge of the runway. All the default planes can manage this change except the 747 which will crash when getting off the runway.
To compound the problem there is still another FS2002 anomoly. As long as one initiates the start of a flight at one of the LOU8.1 airports and stays within the general area of the airports the flickering will continue to be suppressed. However, if Louisville is approached from a distant airport or if one flys beyond a certain distance after taking off from one of the Louisville airports and returns to one of them, this other anomoly kicks in resulting in flickering of the runways and the disappearance of some of the taxiways. This is most noticeable at SDF. To avoid this problem one can choose World\Scenery Library from the main menu when approaching the airport and choose OK when the airport is in sight. This interruption, which reloads the scenery, is the only known workound.
The layout of the airports in this scenery is different from and positioned differently than those supplied in the FS2002 program. Therefore the AI planes will not necessarily follow the taxiways or runways in LOU8.1. Some of the AI planes will be positioned, when parked, through the terminal buildings, an ugly sight.
COMPATIBILITY WITH OTHER SCENERIES
This scenery is only compatible with FS2002.
FUTURE RELEASES
Few or no changes have been made to SDf and JVY airports since LOU7. This has been a result of the many changes made to the real SDF, especially the UPS area that has been profuoundly changed, and also the events of 9/11/01. Security has become very strict and I have been chased away from fences where I might get photoreal pictures of buildings. There are still Louisville buildings where new textures and models will be done.
Also I had been contacted with John Grammer who has started an excellent version of JVY and who has expressed a desire to include his work with this scenery. Unfortunately John has disappeared from the scene and has not responded to recent communications. Perhaps John's work will appear later as an independent work or packaged with a new release of Louisville.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Microsoft and BAO for providing the flight simulator and their continuing improvement of the software.
The creators of SCASM and Airport for their interface to FS making custom scenery possible and textures and to the individuals that supplied the .api and .scm objects that may be included in the sceneries and their very helpful coding that served as a backbone for understanding the workings of scenery programming.
To Norman Campbell for his R8Paint program used to create some of
the texture files in the Louisville scenery and some of the Ohio river scenery.
To Luis Viera de Sa for his cessna and 737 api macros, and those persons who created the texture files.
To the many who have provided encouragement and input on improvements to the software, including: Neil Perrin, Robert Toole, Doug Horton, Frank McCabe, B&T(Bob..), John Whitler, Paul Wittke, Mark Volstad and Bill Leahy. (In order of their initial messages to me).
To Joe Brown, Flight Operations Manager of Aircraft Specialist, Inc., for his information about the JVY airfield.
To Robert C. Clement, Tom Stryker, Ron Hall and Laura Benson at Bowman Field for their list of Visual Reporting Points near Bowman. Also more thanks to Tom Stryker for flying me around Lousiville to compare this scenery with the real world.
To Ted Kessel, Roger Gaylor and Jim Rhoads for beta testing of earlier versions.
This is freeware and is not to be distributed for any monetary gain. Copyrights are those of this author.
The author of this scenery is not responsible for any problems you may encounter with your system or other files as a result of using the programs provided here.
