World Wide Guide to FS Scenery Design

Experiments in photorealistic scenery

Just thought I'd share a glimpse of some of my ongoing experiments with photorealistic scenery for Perth, Western Australia. The shot below was taken in FS 5.1.

That's the great Swan River winding through Perth heading toward Fremantle and the Indian Ocean, with the Bankwest Tower and QV1 in the distance. Belmont Racecourse appears near the front right-hand side of the scene. Heirisson Island and the Causeway are at the left side.

I use Konstantin Kukushkin's great Airphoto utility to break up a single 3570-by-4080-pixel bitmap into FS-size texture files. Unfortunately, the bgl files aren't in any shape yet to distribute, and I need to investigate some other legal issues associated with the photographs. And of course, there's a file size issue. That bitmap covers the 30 x 20 km area of metropolitan Perth, and the resulting texture files occupy about 16 megs of disk space. If I hadn't reduced the resolution of the source bitmap, the number would be much larger!  I've enhanced the river -- think I've gone a bit too blue! You can't see it in this small shot, but I've also overlaid FS roads on top of the major highways throughout the metropolitan Perth area, and manually beefed up the smaller arteries so they display more clearly in FS. I'm not actually a real pilot, so I don't get up in the air very often to actually compare this with the real thing. I'm always open to free offers... - Gene Kraybill