I recently downloaded two Spitfires from simviation.com, SP3506.zip and SPMKII.zip, both by S. Lucariny, and noticed that they looked almost identical except for the squadron letters. Well, one thing led to another and I finished up by making a situation that has both of them doing touch-and-gos at an all grass airfield. It was good fun watching them and trying to formate on them in flight so I decided to upload it. I hope you enjoy it.
Unzipping the spits.zip file will give two folders named GA-AI SPMKII and GA-AI SPMKV. These are the two aircraft optimised for AI use, so they have no panels, frame-rate friendly textures and will not appear in the Aircraft menu. The sound files are aliased to the default DeHavilland Comet. If one of your other aircraft has a better Merlin sound go into the sound.cfg file in each Spitfire's /sound directory and change the alias to point to your preferred aircraft.
INSTALLATION
Move the GA-AI SPMKII and GA-AI SPMKV directories into your Flight Simulator 9/Aircraft directory.
Move AF2_EGWE.bgl to Flight Simulator 9/Addon Scenery/Scenery.
Move Traffic_Spitfire.bgl to Flight Simulator 9/Scenery/World/Scenery.
And you are done! Start the sim, select your favourite WW2 fighter plane, go to any parking spot at Henlow (EGWE) and you should see two parked Spitfires. Depending on the time of day either one or more usually both of them will start up, taxi to the hold point in the approved weaving fashion (because the pilots cannot see forwards over the nose) and they will take off and fly circuits. Occasionaly they will land, park and wait a little before starting off again.
RANDOM JOTTINGS
The field is an all-over grass airfield so you can actually take off and land anywhere you please. The field has no buildings and is almost impossible to see if you are more than a couple of miles away. After you take off do a 180 degree turn and try to keep the field in sight. Keep an eye on the compass and you will soon be able to keep a mental picture of where the field should be. The situation works best with no wind. It looks best if you start the flight at parking space three or four instead of going straight to the active runway. You will get the best view of the action then.
The AI aircraft seem to be crash transparent and you will occasionaly see them taxi through each other! Also, if you manage to fly in formation with an AI aircraft on downwind he will often just keep on flying over the horizon and not turn to land. I have no real idea of why they should do this.
For myself, I have set up a flight that has me parked at parking spot three at 08:45 AM in another of Mr Lucariny's Spitfires. I have not included this flight in this upload as it will give an error if you do not have the same aircraft installed on your machine. I suggest that you set up a similar flight with your most appropriate aircraft and save it.
The file AF2_EGWE.bgl is an AFCAD file that closes all the airfield's runways except for the longest East-West runway. It has four parking spots that have zig-zag taxiways to make the AI aircraft weave in the approved manner. The file also puts the tower view near the take off point as if you were standing next to the runway. There are 'ground' and 'tower' radio frequencies so you can hear the AI aircraft talking.
The file Traffic_Spitfire.bgl has the flightplans in it. If you have TrafficTools you will be able to decompile this file and alter it.
THINGS I WOULD LIKE TO SEE DONE BETTER
I must investigate adding a flashing green and white beacon to the field to make it easier to see. Any scenery designers out there with any ideas feel free to drop me a line. I have FSSC and have a vague idea of how to create scenery.
I would like to be able to turn off the beacon lights on the aircraft. Spitfires do not look right with flashing lights. This seems to be controlled deep in the sim and I have no idea of how to fix it.
I hope that a future release of the sim has aircraft flying circuits that are appropriate to the size and speed of the aircraft and not have everything doing very long downwinds and Big Boeing Bus type approaches.
CREDITS
S. Lucariny for the original aircraft.
Markus Brunner for GA-Traffic, that I used to create the AI versions of the aircraft.
Lee Swordy for AFCAD and TrafficTools.
Grant Maclean for the screenshot and the beta testing.
LEGAL STUFF
All the usual stuff.
Copyright and Distribution
--------------------------
This scenery is released as Freeware. Copyright Nigel Mason. As freeware you are permitted to distribute this
archive subject to the following conditions,
- The archive must be distributed without modification to the contents of the archive. Redistributing this archive with any files added, removed or modified is prohibited.
- The inclusion of any individual file from this archive in another archive without the prior permission of the author is prohibited. This means, for example, that you may not upload an archive that uses any part of this scenery without first obtaining the authors' permission.
- No charge may be made for this archive other than that to cover the cost of its distribution. If a fee is charged it must be made clear to the purchaser that the archive is freeware and that the fee is to cover the distributor's costs of providing the archive.
- The authors' rights and wishes concerning this archive must be respected.
Copyright 2004 by Nigel Mason. All Rights Reserved.
