FlightGear World Scenery 2.0

Introduction

The FlightGear World Scenery 2.0 was released during FSweekend 2013. This new scenery reflects a major improvement over the existing default world scenery and has taken over five years to complete. A much higher level of detail and internal consistency characterizes this new release, in addition to the fact that it will serve as a stepping-stone for further incremental refinements.

Source data

This FlightGear World Scenery was compiled from:

• ViewFinderPanoramas elevation model by Jonathan de Ferranti (using 20m accuracy with terrafit.py -e 20),
• VMap0 Ed.5 Worldwide Land Cover
• CORINE Land Cover 2006v16 for Europe (Source : European Union, SOeS, CORINE Land Cover, 2006 - [1]). See here for the correspondance between CORINE and FG textures
• Several custom land cover enhancements (to be listed here...)
• The latest airports (2013.10), maintained by Robin Peel of X-Plane
• Road, rail and rivers courses line data by OpenStreetMap [2]

Distribution

World Scenery 2.0 is available through the usual channels:

• TerraSync (currently still under feeding)
• Torrent
• FlightGear main website

Side note

Note that all objects elevation were recomputed. Thus, if some objects were defined with a bad elevation or bad offset, they may have taken a bit of elevation. Use our webforms, if necessary, to fix this.

Known Bugs and Limitations

• clipping of OSM roads on water showing height glitches (due to bad coast/river lines definitions and bad clipping);
• some z-fighting (clipper is generating the correct number of contours, but the airport hole is wound as a boundary, not a hole) and/or triangles on airports (LFRH, EDWJ...);
• some troubles on very dense cities (such as Paris) leading to grey-white triangles on cities - see also yellow lines @LFPG;
• some line issues on small airfield with LTA specific runways (LEVT, LFNH, LFLI...) - the small centerlines on the runways are "floating" over the runway (20 cm to 1m), leading to some gear destructions ;-) (they didn't use lines, but surfaces that are defined as transparent and borders defined as the line type. This way you limit the number of "line features"). Probably "hot" = false would solve it. See 1 2 3 4 5. Thanks Clément for noticing;
• airport being located over two different tiles sometimes renders bad (LEJR...);
• glacier landcover is missing, leading to some holes in high moutains, as seen in Switzerland (SW LSMM) and Austria (south of LOWI);
• on sharp cliffs, water sometimes climb over the cliffs (see e000n40/e000n49/2958056 and this picture for instance). Thanks clm76 for reporting;
• terrain and ocean z-fighting such as east of EKCH. See tile 3155042 and EDWJ;
• clipping between river and terrain is somewhat strange, making the river "climb" over the terrain, noticeably under bridges - probably due to the presence of the roads. See this example;
• the Moss Landing airport (on the coast a little bit south of KSFO) is partly submerged into the water and the airport's north end is elevated above the terrain around it. There is an area on the coast just to the north of the Moss Landing airport that is above sea level if you are up above 1000ft but is covered in water is you are on the deck. When flying over this you can see trees sticking up out of the water so the code that is placing random trees thinks this is above sea level. The old scenery didn't have either of these problems. Also if you fly over this at just the right altitude you can see this area switching back and forth between being water and land (thanks hvengel);
• on many airports where the taxiway signs are now taken from the apt.dat and put in the Terrain folder, the old signs still remain in the Object folder. See EDDF, ELLX;
• on ELLX there are some problems with "holes" in the pavement that flicker between grass and tarmac. I saw this (if I remember correctly) with an older development version of terragear, but this was fixed some time ago.

Features enhancement

• enhance landcover data for the rest of the world (OSM?) and add more custom scenery and fixes;
• find a new svn hosting solution;
• compute the next with textures-lines option;
• add some more OSM data (secondary...);
• descent airports priority below roads, so roads and railroads can be shown over airports;
• retry multi-thread;
• enhance the "random" tree and builds placement to take OSM into account;
• .SPT file support - push Mathias' LOD ideas forward;
• landclass border blurring - Several ideas on this - It would be really nice to be able to do it;
• osm motorway_link (and the other _link) roads should probably have their own width. Perhaps grouped into a separate shapefile, or handled in ogr-decode - single lane is most likely;
• osm line data simplification / preprocessing. - We've done some experimenting, and the results are promising. This should reduce the number of triangles generated. It could create longer continuous roads, which allows better control of the generated texture coordinates - so we could, theoretically, populate the roads with traffic in the future.

Follow the dedicated thread on the forum: http://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=21294#p193822