FSX Power Project

[flybytes 34]

Brett, Hi.

FSXPP is essentially split between England/Wales and the rest of the world.

The England/Wales scenery is aligned to Horizon Generation X photo land textures. As these textures remove all auto-gen scenery, the auto-gen electricity pylons have been replaced with manually positioned ones. In this case, if using default scenery, the auto-gen pylons can be 'switched off by lowering the auto-gen scenery slider or the the manual pylons can be switched off by unticking them in the Scenery Library list.

For the rest of the world only the the default auto-gen pylons are used.

In the USA, where FSX has many default power stations, the steam effects are aligned to them. The wind turbines do match local terrain features quite well - those placed along narrow mountain ridges do fit well with the default terrain mesh and also with Global addon hi-res' terrain mesh. The one area where it occasionally encounters problems is around some default coastal areas, but Ultimate TerrainX usually fixes those problems (in USA, Canada & Europe) as it is more closely aligned to coordinates taken from Google Earth, which is what the FSXPP scenery objects are aligned to.

FSXPP was designed to be very flexible - for example each wind farm or power plant has its own .bgl file - so if it conflicts with any other 3rd-party scenery, the relevant bgl can be removed. All .bgl file names are prefixed with their country location and end with scenery type, e.g. wingen, power, effect, radiotelescope, etc. The scenery location documentation is very extensive (about 40 A4 pages when printed out).

The project can also be used as a scenery library source - where you cherry pick only the scenery .bgls that take your fancy. All scenery object models are located in a model library placed into FSX scenery/global folder. This considerably reduces the size of the project - less than 6MBytes disk space or about 1.6MBytes zipped.

I do have an interest in scenery in your part of the world - spent quite a lot of time in Dayton, OH; Pittsburgh, PA; Houston, TX & Binghamton, NY.

Cheers, Ray.

[brett 2,316]

Great Ray, thanks or clarifying that. I downloaded it but the explanation in the readme made it sound (at least to this dimwit) that it was made to work with just the Horizon scenery so I didn't chance it and gave it the boot. It sounds very well made and thought out and I will give it another visit. It's folks like you that keep this sim humming.

[flybytes 34]

An update to my reply to Kevin Firth's query about pylon alignment in Scotland.

I have now bought a copy of VFR GenX v.8 (Scotland South) and note that the enhanced 0.6-metre resolution does have its drawbacks - it highlights any positional errors of the scenery objects, not helped by the very distinct ground shadows - funny, it always seemed to be cloudy and rainy on my visits to Scotland!

I am now updating FSX Power Project for Southern Scotland and the revised/expanded version should be available in a few weeks time.

Regards,

Ray.

[ddavid 149]

Thanks, Ray - I'm considering South Scotland, with Treescapes, and the correct positioning of your objects will make it so much more realistic.

Cheers - Dai.

[flybytes 34]

Dai,

the VFR GenX Scotland South scenery package is quite impressive - 7 DVDs - just make sure you have 54 Gigabytes spare disk space and a couple of hours to load it. One thing that is noticable is that its colour saturation is a lot less than my GenX vol.3 (North England). I have an early version of vol.3, perhaps the current version 3 is a closer match.

Cheers,

Ray.

[flybytes 34]

FSX Power Project v4.1 released - see members scenery files upload section here.

All electricity pylons & wind turbines in the Horizon GenerationX vol.8 - Scotland South should now be exactly aligned to its photo terrain textures.

Thanks to our dire June weather I've done the upgrade much more quickly than expected.

Cheers,

Ray.

[mutley 4,498]

Thanks Ray,

Something good has come out of our summer!