FScene.02

By Andrew Herd (27 March 2002)

light Simulator has made enormous strides forward over the years, but one of the most curious things about it is that the landscape textures have always seemed to lag behind the development of the rest of the program. This isn't to say that they haven't improved - FS2002 is streets ahead of anything that was available even in FSFW95 and thankfully the wire frame days are long forgotten, but the overall impression of the default textures remains that of a grungy world which could do with a good clean up. This probably sounds odd coming from someone who is well known for liking aircraft sims to have well-used looking panels, but the default textures have never looked real to my eyes.

Microsoft haven't stood still and one of FS2002's hidden features is that there is a greater selection of textures than there has ever been before - enough to make them continent specific to at least some degree. This means that at long last we don't have to fly over landscapes that look identical regardless of whether we are over North Dakota or central France - after all, one of the appeals of flight simulation is the opportunity to "go" and fly somewhere new and exotic. If everywhere looks the same, why bother leaving home? The new textures are particularly welcome to European simmers, because in the past we had to put up with textures which made our home look more like the prairie than the patchwork agriculture we know so well.

The appearance of FS2000 was the catalyst for a number of major texture projects, two of which will be well known to FlightSim.Com readers. One set was from Lennart Arvidsson, the other from Ruud Faber, whose textures are featured here. Ruud's work originally saw the light of day in the form of the extremely popular PH_WORLD and EU_WORLD freeware collections.

But, as I touched on earlier, there was a problem with replacing FS2000 texture sets, and it was a big one. FS2K used a limited set of textures to skin its simulated world; which was why everywhere looked vaguely the same. Fields in Ohio were shown using the same textures as fields in India, leaving users with a terrible sense of deja vu. It was, in a way, the great disappointment of that version of Flight Simulator, because the new mesh that promised so much delivered less than we expected, because of those endlessly repeating textures. I guess it wasn't surprising that many people wanted to see the back of them and Ruud and Lennart's sets were hugely popular.

But the trouble with replacing texture sets in FS2000 was that the effect was world-wide - there was only one field texture and if you replaced it with something different, sure you had a better texture to look at, but it appeared everywhere you went, just like the one it replaced. So you were back to a variant of the original problem; everywhere you went looked the same, but now it looked the same with spiffy new graphics. It was hardly an ideal solution, but it was better than putting up with the Microsoft's default vision for the world; given that many users only fly from a single continent, it worked after a fashion. The most important thing was that it showed what could be done, and it highlighted an issue for the team developing FS2002.

The most recent version of Flight Simulator has a vastly greater range of textures than its predecessor, which means that for the first time, there is variation between landscapes on different continents. This is a gross simplification of the lengths that the development team have gone to in order to create a more realistic world and it is worth spending a little time understanding how it all works before we look at Ruud's textures.

In Flight Simulator, the surface of the world is represented by a mesh, divided into squares approximately one kilometre square for the purposes of texture coverage. Each square has four properties:

1. A texture with which it would be covered if it were a lowland plain.
2. A texture to be used if the slope of the square exceeds a certain angle (this accounts for why sloping lakes don't occur on the default mesh).
3. The Autogen type to be used, chosen from around a dozen different possibilities. Incidentally, Autogen in FS2002 is in more or less the same state of development in FS2002 as textures were in FS2000, which is why Autogen looks the same the world over. Guess what, we are already seeing replacements for Autogen scenery.
4. The Autogen to be used if the slope of the square exceeds a certain angle.

According to Burkhard Renk, the creator of FSLandClass, there are about 112 different texture types in FS2002, many of which are quite similar, but one of the reasons for this appears to be that the redundant textures are there to allow variation between landscapes in different continents. Enter Ruud Faber and FScene.02.

Ruud's package is meant to be a replacement of the standard FS2002 world scenery textures for the European countries and it is a development from his previous work. The new version is considerably upgraded and features even better cities, villages, farms and night scenery than before. In addition, the new textures span all four seasons, with improved winter compared to the originals. The overall effect is to banish what Ruud describes as the "typical USA" effect which still dominates Europe in FS2002 despite Microsoft's best efforts. The textures have been designed to look best at 4000 to 5000 feet, and are intended to improve the VFR experience in the sim.

FScene.02 is available as a 13 Mb download and it costs $34.00. Installation is extremely simple, involving the ubiquitous Clickteam program; as the routine points out, this installs the textures into a folder on your hard disk, rather than into FS2002, so you can't just run the install routine, start Flight Simulator and enjoy the result - there is an extra step. I had one problem with the installation, which was that it defaulted to a hard disk drive at D:, but overtyping this in the dialog resulted in the rest of the installation proceeding normally, although I had to kill an intermediate dialog three times to get to that point. After the files had been decompressed, I investigated the new folder, which was full of textures - and a readme file buried among them with instructions on how to proceed.

Installing the new textures into FS2002 requires a certain amount of knowledge of Windows file management, so I am going to briefly describe what has to be done, so you can judge for yourself whether you can cope with it. The textures need to be copied into the \FS2002\Scenedb\World\Texture folder while FS2002 is shut down and Ruud advises making a backup of the original textures before doing this. Most people should breeze through this, but if you are new to Windows, it may be a obstacle that you don't want to cross - it would be nice to see an automatic procedure built into the package to get around this problem.

What are the textures like? I guess by now you have all worked out that Ruud's artwork is shown in the top window of the paired screenshots and the default textures are below. I have taken four representative views, starting with winter and ending with fall, using an area just north of Teesside in England. The results are seriously impressive, as I am sure you will agree.

One of the most striking things about Ruud's textures is the 3D effect he has built into many of the textures. It works best on the winter and spring scenery and unless you are relatively low down, it genuinely does give the appearance of real hedges and farmhouses. The textures blend in very well with Autogen, although they have been designed to work without it, and features like rivers and roads fit in without any obvious problems.

One improvement I would like to see is some slightly less strong winter effects as an option. Right now northern Europe is going through a succession of relatively mild winters and countries with maritime climates are lucky to see more than a light dusting of snow, rather than the heavier cover Ruud has come up with. Another problem is that in areas where there is continuous coverage with a single tile type, the FScene textures sometimes line up to present a pattern which repeats endlessly into the distance, but I have only seen this very occasionally. If you combine the FScene textures with the appropriate country pack from FSLandClass, you won't see repeats at all, because the woods and villages FSLandClass brings break up the plains and prevent them happening.

Examining the screen shots above, I can't help but wonder why it is that with so many gifted artists around on the flight simulation scene, Microsoft didn't just go out and hire some talent to do the FS2002 textures for them. Look at the default textures (bottom pane of each shot) - are they boring, or what? In FS2002 we have an outstanding product, yet the face it presents to its users is uninspiring where surface textures are concerned. Microsoft bashing is very easy, but if I had to come up with an explanation, I guess it is bound up in the fact that the sim is developed by a much smaller team than most people realise. However, it would be good to think that the scenery texture issue will be addressed in FS2004, because there is no doubt that Ruud, recently retired from a management position in a Dutch publishing company, father of four, grandfather of seven, owner of two gold fish and a thousand cc BMW bike, has done something that the combined talent of Microsoft could not, and has made FS2002's Europe landscape look real to my eyes.