23 What add-ons are available for FS5?
Description
This article is from the Flight Simulators FAQ, by with numerous contributions by Bob Wittick rwittick@msu.edu others.
23 What add-ons are available for FS5?
There are several sets of scenery disks that have been published
by BAO or Microsoft. The scenery sets that have been released
so far include: San Francisco, New York, Paris, Washington DC, Japan,
Caribbean, Europe I, Las Vegas, and Hawaii. Some of these sets are very
graphic intensive, and have been known to give frame rates in the 1-2 fps
range with all scenery options turned on. This has been a particular
problem using the photo-realistic scenery sets. San Francisco, Washington
DC, and Las Vegas were photo-realistic scenery sets distributed by BAO.
This type of scenery requires a lot of hard disk space (around 17mb for
each) and looks very blurry from low altitudes, but from high altitudes
it is much more realistic than the synthetic scenery (all the others),
which require much less hard disk space (between 3 to 6 Mb per set) and
offers better resolution at low altitudes.
A new version of the Aircraft and Scenery Designer has been
expected for some time, but no formal announcement of the
product's release has ever been made. Several freeware scenery
compilers are presently available. They include: BGLGEN,
BGLTOOLS, SCASM, AIRPORT, and FSASM. They are available at
ftp.iup.edu. They are not as easy to use as the A&SD for FS4, but
I have used BGLGEN, BGLTOOLS, and SCASM in designing my Hong
Kong, Scotland, and Michigan scenery for FS5, and they do work
well, once you get used to the
edit-compile-test-edit-compile... cycle that is needed to use
them.
BAO's Flight Shop has also been released. This product is described in
section C10.
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