Howto:Install scenery

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Revision as of 06:19, 10 July 2013 by Quix0r (talk | contribs) (→‎Obtaining scenery: Added BitTorrent download as this could help people and is more comfortable.)
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FlightGear comes with a limited set of scenery. Apart from the Bay Area around San Francisco (including the default airport KSFO), additional scenery can be installed by the user. If you locate yourself at an airport and see nothing but water, you probably did not install that scenery area (correctly).

Obtaining scenery

High detail France scenery
High detail France scenery
High detail France scenery

You can download the official World Scenery terrain from the FlightGear website. Alternatively, custom scenery is available for certain specific areas. They are distributed separately due to their license, or because their level of detail is not suitable for low-end machines. See Suggested Airports/Scenery for a list of custom scenery projects.

There is also a 4 DVD set available for download via BitTorrent, which can be a higher performance option for those wanting to download the entire world. And, last but not least, it can be purchased as 3 DVD set from the official FlightGear website.

TerraSync

TerraSync is a very useful utility that automatically downloads and installs needed FlightGear scenery and keeps it up to date while the simulator is running.

TerraMaster

TerraMaster is a scenery manager that basically is a frontend for TerraSync but that also makes it easier to maintain and get a good overview of downloaded TerraSync scenery. It is a crossplatform graphical application written in Java.

Downloading from mirrors

A list of mirrors can be found here.

On most of the mirrors, the latest scenery can be found under Scenery-2.0.0/. Downloading from mirrors is often better than the official site, because mirrors are sometimes faster and have more user capacity. Use the graphical interface to find the appropriate chunk. Be careful about confusing N with S, and E with W!! Here is how to find an airport's co-ordinates:

  1. Go to the Wikipedia page for the airport in question (for example, PHNL for Honolulu)
  2. Find the co-ordinates (often at the top or right and side, marked with a small globe)
    • e.g. PHNL is in 21 N 157 W. If it's in the western hemisphere, you should round it up... so you should find the block with W160N20 If the co-ords were 21 N 157 E, you would round it down.. meaning that this location would be E150N20.

Downloading with BitTorrent

There is a torrent file hosted on http://www.terasaur.org which you can find here. There is also an alternative torrent (only added a new announcement URL) with a strong seed available.

Installing scenery

You can optionally use a GUI installer, called FGAdmin, to (un)install scenery.

GNU/Linux

If you are under a Linux operation system and you are not using a graphical interface to extract the tar archive, you can use one of the two following set of commands in a shell terminal.

cd SceneryDirectory
tar -xvzf input_file.tgz

or

tar -xvzf 'input_file.tgz' -C SceneryDirectory

In the above two examples, it is supposed that SceneryDirectory is set to a directory, outside $FG_ROOT (see #Technical for the reasoning behind this). Additionally, input_file.tgz should be substituted with the filename of the archive to be extracted (the filename should be completed with the full pathname or any other valid method so that the shell could find the correct archive).

Windows

Simply unpack the downloaded scenery into a directory of choice, outside the $FG_ROOT directory (see #Technical for the reasoning behind this), using software like Winzip or 7-zip. Once done, append this directory to $FG_SCENERY. When using the FlightGear Wizard, you can do so on the first page (previous from aircraft selection). Do not forget to press the "Refresh" button on the airport selection page, when using the wizard.

Note: More recent Windows versions (e.g. XP, Vista, Win7) tinkering a lot with user rights on access level. Therefore it is a bad idea to install and run FlightGear (scenery) to and from C:\Program Files. Find another drive/folder where you, as logged in user, have all neccesary right to read, write and execute the files you installed. Additionally there's a space / blank in folder's name which could cause weird behaviour. Using C:\FlightGear is a nice option.

Macintosh

Unpack the tgz file either by double-clicking it and moving the resulting wXXXnXXX folder to the Scenery folder described in the next line, or on the command line:

tar -xvzf 'input_file.tgz' -C /Applications/FlightGear.app/Contents/Resources/data/Scenery

Technical

Scenery for FlightGear is determined by looking at the environment variable $FG SCENERY. Should the paths in $FG_SCENERY not be valid, FlightGear falls back to $FG ROOT/Scenery.

Mixing scenery types is almost universally a bad idea, and is unsupported. In this connection you should note that the scenery packaged with the base package/windows installer may not be the latest scenery.

For this reason it's probably better to extract scenery files you've downloaded into a new folder, which we'll call, for the sake of this exercise, $FOOBAR/Scenery. In this directory, create two subdirectories: /Objects and /Terrain. You should untar individual files into the /Terrain folder.

Then you should set up $FG_SCENERY to use the new path:

  • On POSIX Clients
    set FG_SCENERY="$FOOBAR/Scenery" + FG_SCENERY
  • On Windows (FGRun)
    Go back to the first page of fgrun, and add the $FOOBAR/Scenery folder to the list.

Terrain

The Scenery directory will show the following (scenery is shown for completeness and for easy reference to above):

  • Scenery/
    • Terrain/
      • w130n30/
    • Objects/
      • w130n30/

If you download a scenery module called w90n40.tgz from flightgear.org and extract it in Scenery, the result will resemble something like the following:

  • Scenery/
    • Terrain/
      • w09n40/
      • w130n30/
    • Objects/
      • w09n40/
      • w130n30/

Note that the directory structure is already present in the tar archive, starting from the Scenery directory. Note that you have to extract the tar archive in the Scenery directory, not in the FG_ROOT directory, because the Scenery directory is not present in the archive.

Objects

Objects and models can be found at the FlightGear Scenery Objects Database.

These objects are included in each scenery release, but as the object database is more frequently updated than the terrain, one may want to occasionally update the Object subdirectory from the FlightGear Scenery Objects Database between scenery releases. Another option is to download or update the scenery on-demand by using the terrasync program described below.

Objects are really part of the scenery and can be found in the Scenery directory under $FG ROOT.

  • Scenery/
    • Objects/
      • w130n30/

Any objects should be installed under the Scenery/Objects directory.

Models

Replaces the former $FG_ROOT/Models; stores all the shared objects.

  • Scenery/
    • Models/
      • Airport/

Airports

1rightarrow.png See About Scenery/Airports for the main article about this subject.

As of FlightGear 2.4.0, this directory is used to extract airport data (like runway usage and parking spots) from.

The directory tree might look somewhat overwhelming, but it simply follows the Airports/[I]/[C]/[A]/ code (see ICAO-code).

  • Scenery/
    • Airports/
      • K/
        • S/
          • F/

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