World Wide Guide | Choosing a Compiler | Scenery and Object Designer

A Review of Scenery and Object Designer

by Justin Tyme [e-mail: jtyme@sgi.net]
Indiana, Pennsylvania USA
October 1996

Apollo's Scenery and Object Designer is an easy program to use once you get your feet wet. I, personally, found the manual pretty well-written and easy to understand once you dive in and work with it. It may be a little hard to understand if you just try to read it, but if you follow along with the program open and actually work with it as you're reading, it's not that bad.

"AS&OD deserves a place in every scenery designer's toolbox, along with Schiratti Commander/Scenery Maker and ScBuild"

It's fairly versatile and comes with a library of objects. The advertised 750 might be a little hypy, since most of the 750 are merely different versions of the basic "thingys." For instance, for each type of hangar, there are twelve different configurations, i.e., with door lights/without, door open/door closed; door automatically opens; with anti-collision lights/without; etc. There are two different types of "forest," which is a bunch of trees. There are fir forests and tropical forests: four different types of each--lots of trees, not quite as many trees, less trees, and few trees. There are hedges that are 100m, 200m, 300m, and 400m long. There are about 15-20 different kinds of single trees. There are 4 different types of lighthouses (beacons), each with different colors of lights, for instance each type has a beacon with a green light, a red light, a yellow light, and a white light, one blinks every five seconds, one every ten seconds, one twice quickly every ten seconds, etc. In all, though I've not counted them, there are probably *really* about 60-70 objects and ten or twelve different versions of each.

Polygons are easily drawn with "point and click." They can be colored or textured. They can also be rotated about three different axis, elevated, and the textures stretched or compressed. There are two different types of polygons, one type for areas larger than 5 km, the other for smaller areas. You have a choice between making taxiways from polygons or as taxi-lines. Distance measuring is a snap. You can define a point with a right-click, and the distance and bearing is read out in a box at the bottom of screen. This allows for precision placement of points and objects. Objects, as well, can be rotated along three axis as well as elevated. Zooming in and out is a matter of clicking the mouse on little up and down arrows and moving around your work area is easy and painless.

Runways are placed, again, with a click of the mouse. Runway characteristics are easily defined by checking boxes. REIL and threshold lights can be checked and 8 different approach lighting configurations. You also have an auto-VASI feature or manual placement.

ILS's are placed, again again, with the click of the mouse. A dialog box allows the easy entry of frequency info, range, DME, localizer, and glide slope info. Same for NDB's and VOR's.

Lighting is drawn with a "line" feature. You can specify how many lights per line, what color, four different blinking sequences.

Also, range and density of all objects are easily defined, textures can be made "transparent," rotated, sharply or coarsely defined. You can easily make "Chicago" type building with the default textures or with custom textures. Scale of objects is easily altered.

The following individual editors comprise the core of the program:

Synthetic, VOR, ILS, NDB, ATIS, Marker, Runway, Airport, Object, Building, Taxiway, Road, Light, Mountain, and Polygon. With these 15 different tools it's fairly quick and easy to do a small airport.

I've been doing two or three a day at about an hour or so each, complete with runways, taxiways, hangars, buildings, objects, trees-- the whole works. Switching back and forth between AS&OD and MS Flight Simulator is quick and painless.

The only drawback I've found is that it cannot see existing scenery, which necessitates much switching back and forth between programs at times for proper placement of objects. Although Schiratti Commander (SC) eliminates this need to switch back and forth in most cases, it also requires manual tinkering in source files in order to fully reveal its capabilities. There is no source file to be tinkered with in AS&OD, which could be good or bad, depending on how you feel about such things. You make all your changes in the graphical editor and it goes directly to .bgl compilation.

There are a few little idiosyncracies in AS&OD, which I found out about the hard way. For instance, when creating taxiways with the polygon function, make sure to save it as a taxiway and not as a polygon. Else, it will give you a GPF (General Protection Fault). Also, I've not found a way to make my taxiways "smooth." The program wants to make them "rough," which makes your plane seem to be going over bumpy ground.  

This only seems to affect the props, though. Taxiing with a jet is smooth. Go figure. Maybe there's a way to fix this but I haven't found it yet. I've not used the mountain editor, since SC seems to be better for this, especially when fitting mountains between ScBuild features. This could be nightmare with any method but SC.

Along with the package comes an updated version of the Visual Skunk works which attaches itself to Flight Shop and allows you to create custom, static objects in muvch the same way that planes are designed.

I've not taken the time to explore this feature yet, but a quick browse through the program reveals an extensive on-line tutorial. I would suppose three or four hours worth of tinkering would go a long way towards mastering the program. Any Flight Shop plane can easily be turned into a static object in your scenery. Visual Skunk Works is a Windows program. Scenery Designer is a DOS-based graphical program.

Overall, I am quite pleased with AS&OD and highly recommend it to anyone, especially those just starting out in scenery design. There's no programming syntax to learn and for this reason it is easily accessible to anyone who can point a mouse and click. AS&OD deserves a place in every scenery designer's toolbox, along with Schiratti Commander/Scenery Maker and ScBuild.