World Scenery 3.0

World Scenery 3.0 is a project to replace the tiled single-mesh World Scenery 2.0 with an LoD-based approach using a regular elevation mesh, landclass texture and vector line features.

This leverages OSG's Virtual Planet Builder and OpenStreetmap APIs.

Currently Available Scenery

Terrain

Scenery is currently not distributed using the official Terrasync, Nia provides a terrasync compatible download, point your terrasync client to https://de1mirror.flightgear.org/ws3/ to make use of it. As of writing (2024-01-15) it contains all of the sceneries below (duplicates removed) and will get updated when a new Airports package is made and when Wayne provides her with new US scenery. If you don't wanna deal with changing your terrasync settings, you can always download sections of scenery via the links individually and added to your scenery path. If you set these in your scenery path ahead of any other scenery, it will pick up osm2city, scenery objects etc. from the underlying scenery as well.

Currently Available World Scenery 3.0

Scenery	Area	Size	Bottom Left	Top Right	Area (degrees^2)	Landclass Source	Landclass Resolution (m)	Comments	Osm2city Scenery
WS30_UK	Most of the UK	1GB	-11,49	1,61	121	CORINE	30	DDS
NL	Amsterdam and Lelystad	716MB (ca. 8GB uncompressed)	2,50	10,53	24	CORINE	10	PNG; Includes high resolution water raster from OpenStreetMap. Check out the canals!
WS_Alps		49MB	6,45	8,47	4	CORINE	25	DDS
WS30_CA	Northern California	350MB	-124,34	-119,39	25	NLCD	30	DDS
WS30_CA2	Northern California, PNG	454MB	-124,34	-119,40	30	NLCD	30	PNG; for most pilots this is the only scenery that works without troubles.	osm2city buildings, trees, maritime, pylons etc. (ca. 230 MB) - San Francisco Bay and San Pablo Bay
WS30_MTQ	Martinique	7MB	-62,14	-60,15	2	CORINE	10	PNG; Small French Caribbean island. One airport (TFFF)	osm2city buildings, trees, maritime, pylons etc. (ca. 40 MB).
WS30_MTQ_25m	Martinique	7MB	-62,14	-60,15	2	CORINE	25	PNG; Small French Caribbean island. One airport (TFFF)	(see above)
WS_MTQ_5m	Martinique	8MB	-62,14	-60,15	2	CORINE	5	PNG; Includes high resolution water raster from OpenStreetMap. Small French Caribbean island. One airport (TFFF)	(see above)
Switzerland_5m	Switzerland plus small border	1.4 GB (ca. 7 GB unzipped)	5.75,45.75	10.75,48	10	CORINE	5	PNG; By mistake taken default airports. If you are using Nia's updated airports, then it will most often work fine, but there might be residuals (e.g. tree on APRON).	included
WS3.0 USA	USA	200 to 400 KB (zipped)	125,48	81,24		NLCD, Tree Canopy Data	30	by state
Poland	Poland	1.2GiB

Airports

In addition to the selected areas above, global up-to-date WS3.0 airports have been built. You can find them here

Scenery Files Placement

Uncompress the downloaded scenery files into a folder of your choice, such as E:\MySceneryFolder. To be recognized by FlightGear, the selected scenery (from the table above) must be located in a folder with a "vpb" subfolder, such as (EX: C:\mysceneryfolder\hawaii\vpb). The scenery files above are compressed and include the "vpb" folder.

Installing

Using the FlightGear FlightGear_Qt_launcher both the terrain and the airport are "installed" by going to tab "Add-ons" and then add the respective folders to "Additional scenery folders". When adding an additional scenery folder, you need to point to the folder immediately above the "vpb" subfolder.

If you add the airports the first time you might have to close the launcher and reopen it again to get the navigation data loaded properly into the session.

Running World Scenery 3.0

To run WS3.0 you need to set the /scenery/use-vpb property to true at startup. Either set --prop:/scenery/use-vpb=true on your command-line, or in the Additional Settings part of the Settings pane of the launcher.

WS3.0 can use a lot of memory - significantly more than WS2.0. You can control the memory usage with the following properties:

• /sim/rendering/max-paged-lod controls the minimum number of objects that will be kept in memory. The default setting is 200.
• /sim/rendering/plod-minimum-expiry-time-secs controls how long objects remain loaded for after they are no-longer in view. The default value is 180 (3 minutes).

Reducing these properties will reduce the memory footprint of WS3.0.

If you have lots of spare cores, you can run multiple threads to load scenery by setting /sim/rendering/database-pager/threads to a number greater than 4 on startup. E.g. --prop:/sim/rendering/database-pager/threads=8.

WS 2.0 scenery might still be needed

To have airports displayed plus some of the default scenery objects, you might still want to have the WS 2.0 scenery for the same area installed.

However, if you want updated airports, checkout the global WS3.0 airports above. To avoid collisions you need to not have any WS2.0 airports enabled if you use these.

Using osm2city

WS3.0 has built-in support for OpenStreetMap roads, so you should not have it enabled in rendering settings.

You have 2 options:

• If you have WS2.0 world scenery, then it already contains osm2city buildings etc. You can just use these and live with slight elevation offsets.
• The other option is to use the provided osm2city scenery in the table above instead. If doing so you need to makes sure that WS2.0 osm2city has not been downloaded (or delete the folders manually). E.g. if you are using TerraMaster then you can remove the ticks in Settings for "Buildings", "Pylons" and "Roads".

Using the explicitly provided osm2city scenery gives you trees in gardens/parks and some improvements only available on NEXT.