This scenery adds a new more realistic primitive style terminal, a new hangar area, and adds a dock and terminal for sea planes at the Raiatea airport. Raiatea is one of the major airports of French Polynesia, and is located in the Society Islands where most of the population and tourist industry exist. It has one of the longest runways of the outer islands at 5,400 feet. The other part of this island named Tahaa can be seen sitting out across the beautiful coral bay.
1. Extract the file directly into your scenedb folder of your main FS2002 program, or extract it into a temporary folder and move the folder within named Raiatea to your main FS2002 scenedb folder, which ever method you prefer.
2. Start up FS2002 then go to the WORLD tab and click, then move down to SCENERY LIBRARY, and click on it, then click on ADD AREA. Find the scenedb folder and open it, then find the Raiatea folder and click on it. The name Raiatea should now appear in the title window, then click OK. Now the name Raiatea should appear at the top of your SCENERY LIBRARY list, click the OK tab, and the scenery will begin to install.
3. Once it has installed, exit FS2002 and find your main FS2002 folder and open it and scroll about half way down till you come to some notebook icons, the one named scenery is the main scenery config. file, click on it to open, then scroll all the way to the bottom where you will find the Raiatea section. Then simply copy, and paste the following lines directly below the last line of the Raiatea section. That's it! go fly in paradise.
I have found an excellent terrain mesh for French Polynesia, which makes the exotic volcanic jagged mountains of these islands appear much more realistic than the default FS scenery. You can see an example in the enclosed screen shots of the Island of Tahaa in the background. Although the mesh was created for CombatFS2, I have had no problems using it in FS2002, and it shows up beautifully. The mesh file name is FrenchPolynesia.zip, and as far as I know is available only on Simviation.com. It was created by Rolf Keibel, and John Applegate.
Suggested Water Texture:
If you don't have oceanstx.zip installed in your FS2002, you don't know what you are missing, when it comes to realistic looking water. This is the only water upgrade which really is a water upgrade, and is a must if you are flying in tropical waters world wide. The coral reefs below the surface show up in detail, and the liquid effect is like watching real water. This is probably the greatest effects you can add on to FS2002, and it is created by Ed Truthan.
You will encounter some bouncing of aircraft on areas off the main runway, as in most of the airports I have done thus far in French Polynesia. I have tried everything to correct this in the scenery design, but I believe it to be a problem inherent to FS2002 in certain areas. Just don't skew outside your cockpit, and it won't be as noticeable.
I'd like to thank Rafael Garcia Sanchez and his great Nova program for the beautiful realistic hangars, and also for the sail boats, and airport vehicles.
John de Langristin for all the scenery macros he creates for scenery designers like myself. Without these details our scenery would not be as interesting, and he is one of the few people out there that take his time to make these great objects for us to use. Examples in this scenery are the parked cars, and bamboo piers at the sea plane dock.
Gerd Winterfeld for the fantasic, and only really useable coconut palm collection, I don't know what I would have done without them in my Hawaiian, and now French Polynesian scenery areas.
Richard Powell for the small, but otherwise impossible to find collection of tropical trees, including one of my favorites, the banana.
Finally, Marco Kavcic who was doing the graphics end of packaging my scenery add ons, and taking care of the web site displaying my scenery add ons. It just got to be a bit much work for him, so the web site is now closed, and I will no longer have those slick buttons to use as thumbnails on the download sites. Now I will have to go back to struggling with those GIF format thumbnails which are required by Avsim! Thanks Marco for all the hard work you put in on your own time.
This scenery is freeware, and may not be distributed in whole or part for profit. If you wish to use it on your site, you have my blessings, but let me know so I can ear mark your site, after all you can never have too many FS sites, and I am getting a collection from all over the world. I may not be able to read them, but they are very interesting to see.
If you need to contact me for any reason, complaints, problems, compliments, resources, offering me a job to do FS scenery add ons (hint, Bill Gates), or just want to chat, feel free to contact me. Please no virus infected E-mail, I just had a two long day struggle clearing my computer of a virus infection, it had even attacked my anti-virus program. What fun that was!
Bill Melichar
bilboyz@aol.com
Mission Viejo, California
U.S.A.
