Compilation of my landscape enhancements for users of Ultimate Terrain Canada/Alaska
File Name: ut_bc_hs.zip
Author: Holger Sandmann, hsandman@telus.net
Date of Release: June 2005
Version: 1.00
>>> THIS PACKAGE REQUIRES A LICENSED COPY OF ULTIMATE TERRAIN: CANADA/ALASKA <<<
>>> AVAILABLE AT http://www.flight1.com/products.asp?product=utcan <<<
This is a re-issue of my previously published landscape enhancement packages for parts of Southeast Alaska, British Columbia, Alberta, and Washington State. These files have been edited and adjusted to be fully compatible with FlightOne's "Ultimate Terrain: Canada/Alaska" product. Also, I have adjusted some of Ultimate Terrain's lake and river elevations to better fit new third-party add-on mesh files, such as the "Cordillera" mesh by FS Genesis and my freeware mesh files made for the individual coverage areas.
Sorry, this package is for FS2004 only.
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Features of this package:
"Ultimate Terrain: Canada/Alaska" provides accurate water bodies, road and railroad network, local landclass enhancements, custom 3D night lighting, etc. My files add to this base by providing even more details and landmarks in the four coverage areas. More information about each area can be found in the respective original read-me files (included).
Note: I have not made any changes to the placement or structures of the default airfields in the coverage area!
* detailed land class (the distribution of texture types and autogen structures across the landscape) and water class (base color of water bodies) files, hand-edited in Ground2K4 and EZ-Landclass based on Landsat 7 ETM satellite imagery
* autogen road and railroad bridges based on Ultimate Terrain's road and railroad network
* simple representations of the hydroelectric dams along the Columbia/Kootenay/Pend Oreille River system in southeastern British Columbia, and of the five dams on the Skagit/Baker River system in Washington State
* downhill ski areas at Revelstoke, Golden, Lake Louise, Banff, and Mount Baker
* mountain glaciers, particularly their front-end "snouts", added with Ground2K4 as ice-textured polygons
* accurate placement of many streams, based on the add-on terrain mesh
* additional small lakes that were missing in the Ultimate Terrain package
* adjustments to several Ultimate Terrain water files for a better fit of lake and river elevations with the add-on mesh
You will need to make sure that the previous versions of my landscape enhancements for these areas have been removed from or deactivated on your system. Specifically, the entries to be un-checked in your scenery library are:
"BC-AB scenery upgrades FS2004" --> source files bcmesh9d.zip, bcmesh9e.zip, bcmeshp2.zip, and/or bcablakefixv2.zip
"BC HS Bella Coola" --> source file bc_bella.zip
"US WA North Cascades scenery" --> source file us_wa_nc.zip
"Alaska Glacier Bay scenery and mesh" --> source files gl_bay_1.zip and gl_bay_2.zip
If you decide to delete those files rather than just unchecking them in the scenery library please DO NOT re-activate the disabled default files in FS9\Scenery\Namw; just leave them as they are (renamed to *.org or sitting in holding folders), otherwise they will conflict with Ultimate Terrain's landscape files.
If you don't have third-party high-resolution add-on mesh files (LOD9 or LOD10) for Southeast Alaska, western Canada, and Washington State, you may want to keep the mesh files I provided with the original landscape packages. These files are in the "scenery" subfolders of the four folders listed above (or in "\BC-AB LOD9 terrain mesh\scenery") and the mesh files all start with "mesh" and have a ".bgl" extension. Find those files then move them all into the "BC enhancements for UT - scenery\scenery" folder (see "Installation" below).
For southeastern B.C. and the Canadian Rockies I have uploaded a new terrain mesh package, made from the latest GeoBase Canada CDED1 0.75-arcsec (23-m resolution) data. File name is sebclod9.zip. It supersedes my mesh files from the bcmesh9d.zip and bcmesh9e.zip packages.
1) Extract "ut_bc_hs.zip" to a temporary directory, making sure that the "use folder names" option is enabled.
2) Move the two folders "BC enhancements for UT - landclass" and "BC enhancements for UT - scenery" into your "FS9\Addon Scenery" folder.
3) Move the "SEBChold" folder into your "FS9\Scenery\UTCanada" folder, then navigate to the "FS9\Scenery\UTCanada\SEBChold" folder and double-click the "Southeast BC install - backup of UT files.bat". Three HP9*.* files should appear with either .bgl or .xxx extension.
4) Start up FS2004 and add and activate those two folders with the Settings > Scenery Library > Add Area function. Make sure that both entries are *above* the two Ultimate Terrain entries and that "BC enhancements for UT - landclass" is placed *above* "BC enhancements for UT - scenery".
5) That's all! Check out the maps I included of the coverage areas and enjoy your flights in western North America!
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How to Uninstall:
1) In FS9, delete the reference to "BC enhancements for UT - landclass" and "BC enhancements for UT - scenery" in the Settings > Scenery Library window.
2) Delete the two folders "BC enhancements for UT - landclass" and "BC enhancements for UT - scenery" from your "FS9\Addon Scenery" folder.
3) Navigate to the "FS9\Scenery\UTCanada\SEBChold" folder and double-click the "Southeast BC uninstall - moving back UT files.bat". The three HP9*.* files with either .bgl or .xxx extension should disappear from that directory (if not, move them manually into "FS9\Scenery\UTCanada\scenery" folder). Delete the "SEBChold" folder.
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Additional add-ons I enjoy (available at Avsim and simviation, unless otherwise noted):
* BC airfields by Vern Opperman: Castlegar (cycg_v2.zip and af2_cycg.zip, at SurClaro) and Cranbrook (cyxc04.zip)
* Nelson airfield by Lars Hoyer: CZNL.zip available here: http://www.vanisleva.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1019&highlight=nelson+lars
* Northern Washington State airfields by Joe Watson: Lynden (38w-lynden.zip), Concrete (3w5_concrete.zip), and others
* North Cascades fictitious bush strips by James Belk: n_cascades.zip and n_cascades2.zip
* Some of Frank Bett's fictitious enhancements for small airfields (e.g., Revelstoke, Banff, Nakusp, and Bella Coola), available here: http://www.flightsimsetc.dhs.org/content.php?m=v&t=fs2004scenery
* Peter Vibe's fictitious airfields in the Canadian Rockies: cmpcanmtpks_v1.zip, cmpcanex_v2.zip and cmpevans_v3.zip
* For cloud and environment textures I use the wonderful FS Sky World available here: http://fsw.simflight.com/fsw2004.html
* For my choice of water textures see this thread: http://forums.simflight.com/viewtopic.php?t=36421
* I use FSGenesis mesh for the remaining "few" square miles not covered by my own mesh files ;-)
Landsat 7 satellite imagery data (30 and 15-m resolution); geocorrected bands are available for free download at http://glcf.umiacs.umd.edu/index.shtml (The Landsat data are referenced to the UTM projection and need to be re-projected to lat/long for use in FS).
As with my previous design projects, I found the following sources of information extremely useful:
1) Steve Greenwood's (Flight-Sim Traveler) web pages, which are full of excellent information, tips, his own add-on meshes, and links to other resources: http://www.fs-traveler.com/welcome.shtml
2) Discussions on Avsim's Scenery Design and Mesh Scenery Design conferences: http://forums.SurClaro.com/
3) John Childs' bottomless "Digital Terrain Modeling and Mapping Journal" web pages: http://www.terrainmap.com/
4) USGS online topographic maps and orthophotos available at http://terraserver-usa.com/
5) British Columbia's equivalent of the U.S. Terraserver, for online maps and orthophotos: http://webmap.em.gov.bc.ca/mapplace/minpot/general.cfm (requires free MapViewer browser plug-in)
6) Excellent and free preview oblique (side view) airphotos of many places in B.C. and other Canadian provinces: http://www.globalairphotos.com/
7) To navigate the vast areas of B.C., the following map book has been absolutely indispensable: British Columbia Recreational Atlas, 4th Edition, 1997. Published by Informap, Victoria, B.C., ISBN 0-9680772-1-8.
1) Ground2K4 V5.33, by Christian Fumey, for adding lakes, roads, railroads, bridges, hydro dams, as well as editing shoreline and landclass replacements. Available at SurClaro.com and other FS file servers.
2) DefArea V2.0, by Christian Fumey, for excluding incorrectly placed shorelines, roads, rivers, and bridges. Available at SurClaro.com and other FS file servers.
3) "Slartibartfast", by Jim Keir, for auto-generating land-water polygons, shorelines, etc. Not yet released, but see http://www.jimkeir.co.uk/FlightSim/index.html.
4) LWMViewer, by Jim Keir, for displaying FS default vector and polygon files and de-compiling them into editable ASM source code. Available at http://www.jimkeir.co.uk/FlightSim/LWMViewer.html.
5) BGLC.exe, by FS Development Team, for re-assembling the edited default vector and polygon files. Part of the FS2004 MS BGL Compiler Software Developer's Kit (SDK) http://www.microsoft.com/games/flightsimulator/fs2004_downloads_sdk.asp.
6) EZ-Landclass, by Russel Dirks, for editing land and water class files and determining the best choice of a class (with his excellent test area). Available at SurClaro.com and other FS file servers.
7) FSTflatten, by Steve Greenwood, for flatten switches for the bridge pylons. Available at http://www.fs-traveler.com/flatten.shtml.
8) Idrisi32, commercial Geographic Analysis and Image Processing software, for transferring the raw elevation data from NAD27 to WGS84, and for the classification of Landsat 7 imagery. Available at http://www.clarklabs.org.
9) MicroDEM 6.0 and 7.0.1 freeware Geographic Information System (GIS), by Professor Peter Guth (Oceanography Department, U.S. Naval Academy), for transferring the elevation data into .bsq format. Available at http://www.usna.edu/Users/oceano/pguth/website/microdem.htm.
10) Resample.exe and other freeware utilities of the MS FS2004 Custom Terrain Textures Software Developer's Kit (SDK), for compiling the pre-processed mesh data. Available at http://www.microsoft.com/games/flightsimulator/fs2004_downloads_sdk.asp.
11) MS TMFViewer utility, for testing and quality checking of terrain and polygon/vector data. Provided with the MS FS2004 Custom Terrain Textures SDK, available at http://www.microsoft.com/games/flightsimulator/fs2004_downloads_sdk.asp.
In addition, I used MS Wordpad for text editing, Photoshop 5 for image editing and FS Screen for in-flight screenshots.
Many thanks to Allen Kriesman, creator of Ultimate Terrain: Canada/Alaska, for his wonderful product and for letting me edit some of his compiled water files.
Many thanks also to my Beta testers Dexter Thomas, Paul van Harte, Jeff Williams, Frank Bergson, Bruce Thorson, and George "Geronimo" Jansen.
Obviously, any digital data would be useless for FS enthusiasts without the wonderful free software tools for putting them into Flight Simulator. I am very grateful to the authors of the software I used, particularly Jim Keir, Christian Fumey, Russel Dirks, Richard Ludowise, and Dr. Peter Guth. Also, many thanks to everyone in the active Flight Simulator community for providing such great and diverse freeware add-ons and active discussion forums. Finally, thanks to J for her blank but simpatico stare at my time-consuming 'hobby' ;-)
This scenery is released as Freeware. As an End User you can do whatever you want with these files. For redistribution on storage media or via the Internet (which I encourage), a number of conditions apply:
1) 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.
2) The inclusion of any individual file from this archive in another archive without my prior permission is prohibited.
3) 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.
4) I request a brief email notifying me of the website and/or procedure used for redistribution.
