How To...Use Different Landscape Texture Sets For Different Countries With FsLandclass

By Gerard Salden

Since the beginning of flight simulation a lot has changed. This is especially true of the landscape over which we are flying. Where in the past it was a more 'drawn' underground, today we fly over a photorealistic landscape. And with every new release of flight simulator we get more realistic.

To make the program as affordable as possible the landscape textures are used in a general way, meaning that a country is often simulated with a general landscape on which you can find the bigger cities and not the smaller ones. Because of that it is possible that when you look out the window of your home the landscape could be different. But in general Microsoft has done a good job.

To make countries more realistic Burkhard Renk has released FsLandclass. With that program you can rebuilt the landscape. You can put cities where cities really are, forests where they really are, etc.

Because not everyone wants to do all that him- or herself Burkhard also has released country scenery packs in which all the changes already are made. Just put a country scenery bgl in your main scenery folder and when you start Flight Simulator the landscape for that country will be displayed according to the data in that bgl file.

All the country scenery bgl files are made using digital maps. It's pretty realistic if you know the program and a large step forward in showing more reality. The only thing that limited the program's features was that you could only use the landscape textures from your scenery database.

Because of that, even when using FsLandclass, some areas in countries could not be shown as they really where. Just look at Europe in autumn and winter. It is shown brown instead of more green. The rocky parts of the Alps are not grey enough nor are the mountains of Scandinavia.

To change that for Northern Europe Lennart Arvidsson released a replacement texture set for Europe, to make Northern Europe more look like Northern Europe. The only drawback was that some other countries in the world would look more unrealistic.

But here is the good news: you now can attach different texture sets to different countries. Meaning Northern Europe with its own textures. The rest of Europe with its own textures. America with its own textures. All the countries in the world if necessary.

I will give you an example here in which we will attach the Europe textures to Europe.

I assume you have then downloaded already.

• Create a folder Landclass Europe in your main scenery folder
• Create two subfolders: scenery and texture
• Put the Landclass bgl files for Europe in the new scenery folder
• Copy (not move) all the textures from scenedb\world\texture into the new texture folder
• After that copy also the new Europe texture set into that folder

That is it! It is in the same way of installing new scenery. When you now enter Europe Flight Simulator automatically loads the new texture set. And when you fly outside of Europe it switches over to the default. In this way you can also create other folders for other parts in the world.

At the moment on my computers (I fly with a WidevieW set-up; see picture at right) I have two extra Landclass folders in my scenery folder: Landclass Scandinavia with Lennart Arvidsson's texture set and Landclass Europe with the new Europe texture set. For the rest of the world I use the default textures.

You can see that in this way there is a way now to make flight simulation even more realistic. And I can imagine myself that in the time coming there will be creative people making their own texture sets for other area, countries or continents.

Just keep in mind that every texture set will use an extra 134-145 MB extra space on your hard disk.

As you can see, combining FSLandclass with this method of using localized textures, Flight Simulator is getting an extra step to as real as it gets.

Happy flying.

Gerard Salden
gsalden@worldonline.nl

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