Airport And Scenery Designer 2.1

By Iair Arcavi (2 April 2001)

A map view of the default FS2000 scenery of part of the French Riviera, as seen using ASD. Nice International Airport is visible, although with the caption "No Name".

Introduction

Airport & Scenery Designer (ASD) is a program for making scenery for Microsoft's Flight Simulator. It's probably the most popular payware add-on of its type, and that's no surprise. ASD makes the scenery design process so easy, that it has now become accessible to everyone. Many new scenery additions, made by non-professional designers, have popped up all over the Internet thanks to this product (and others like it).

Its friendly "drag and drop" interface is probably its main appeal for non-expert scenery designers. You just click wherever you want your runway, road or house to be, and presto, it's there. I was surprised to find out how easy it was to make my own sceneries!

How It Works

The runway settings dialog box. Many approach light settings are available to choose from.

You start off by loading a map of the coasts and borders of the area you are about to make the scenery of. ASD includes many of these maps, but if one is not available for the area you need, you can easily use USGS maps off the Internet. In a few easy steps (guided by the manual), I managed to locate, download and import into ASD, a map of my country. This way you start off with a "clean canvas" without having to create the coastlines and borders yourself.

And so, once the map is loaded, airports, cities, roads and major landmarks have to be placed. You can use either their coordinates, or place them visually. A strange thing I noticed here is that there is no possibility of using a background map. This feature (which is available in the freeware Airport 2.x program, by the way) would be a great aid in positioning the major roads and landmarks of any scenery. I was told, through a correspondence with Abacus, that this feature might be added to a future version of the program.

Airports, mountains, coasts, macros, navaids and exclude areas can be placed at the click of a button. All of these are available under what is called "map mode". For a more detailed view of each airport, one can switch to "diagram mode". Here, placing runways, taxiways, ILSs, buildings, hangars, fuel boxes, beacons, signs, polygons, lines, wind cones and even heliports is just as easy.

However, another drawback I noticed, was the inability to create odd-shaped taxiways. Sure, you can create polygons of any shape you wish, and texture them with taxiway concrete, but I couldn't find the option to automatically add taxiway lighting to the edges of the polygon (like is available in Airport 2.x).

A diagram view of the default FS2000 scenery of JFK airport in New York, as seen using ASD.

Detailed properties can be set for nearly every item. For example, runways include many approach lighting possibilities, displaced threshholds options and other settings. This high customizability places ASD at a higher level, above its competitor programs.

Why ASD?

In my opinion, one of ASD's greatest advantages over similar freeware programs, is its ability to load FS2000 BGL files (those are the scenery files). I managed to load a certain airport, straight from the FS2000 CD, and to view it perfectly in ASD. Once this is done, it is possible to add roads, objects, buildings or almost anything else to it. By allowing the use of any existing scenery as a reference, ASD offers an easy alternative to creating sceneries from scratch. Additional FS2000 scenery options are also available in version 2.1, including elevated terrain!

The Airport Settings dialog box.

The program comes with a 200+ page, and quite informative, manual. Support is available through Abacus' home page. Questions can be posted there, and usually a reply from an experienced scenery designer is no more than 24 hours away! I found this very helpful, as they managed to answer several of my questions quickly and clearly.

Conclusion

If you're looking to add details to an already existing FS2000 default scenery, then there's no doubt about it, this is the program for you. It is the only program I have seen which correctly displays FS2000 default bgl files.

Of course, it is possible to build apon FS2000 default scenery without having to load the original BGL files first. To do this, you have to locate new objects at their correct coordinates and height. This can be done with Airport 2.xx as well, but it's much easier if you have a reference to work from (and that, as far as I know, only ASD can give you).

If, however, you are looking towards creating your own simple scenery from scratch, I'm not as convinced. At first glance, ASD is quite similar to the freeware Airport 2.x, and for first time scenery designers, who are not looking for fancy tools and sophisticated scenery making, Airport 2.x might be enough (especially since it has a great price tag: it's free). On the other hand, for scenery designers wanting more options and more detailed scenery creating, ASD might be a better choice.

Either way, Airport 2.x can be downloaded for free, so before reaching for your wallet, I suggest giving it a try. If you still feel like you want to make more complex scenery, then I definitely recommend ASD.

Iair Arcavi
arcavi@isdn.net.il

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