Photo by Mainville
"Ottawa Macdonald Cartier Intl.
Winter 1995"

Scenery Designs

When the first designer came out for Microsoft's Flight Simulator®, it allowed the freeware world to mushroom and each version has compounded the growth. I simply did not know just how much of my time I actually would be spending devoted to all of the hobbies opportunities that were now available to me. Although it seems like a never ending battle to keep up with the hardware and software its definitely been worth it.

Since that day I have moved from designing geographical features and airports, to macro building and virtual airline flying and managing. I've learned to manipulate DOS commands and navigate different versions of Windows to webpage design.

Each new version seems to take me into further exploration of the capabilities of the program and the imagination of some very gifted individuals I have met on the information highway.

Flight Simulator History and Background

It all started with version 2 on an Apple IIe. The flight model was a Piper Cherokee Six and I must have flown Boston to New York a million times. I greased that Cherokee between those white lines with a green background, blue sky, magenta water and green runways.

This was state of the art for 1984, but unfortunately you were confined to the limited world in the program, until Sublogic came out with some great add-ons of scenery disks. They never were able to complete the twelve areas they had planned but they sure expanded the world to most of us.

Flight simulator 3 was probably influential for most of us to move to the 286 PC. We boasted about having 1 to 2 megs of RAM. There still was no designer but with a little tweaking of your config.sys and autoexec.bat Flight Simulator became what we believed to be more realistic. I remember those square patterns of dots resembling towns when you flew around at night. Looked great on the old Goldstar monitor anyway and you had a few more models to fly.

The real breakthrough came with version 4 for two reasons. 1) There was an add-on scenery and aircraft designer and 2) the internet began exploding and freeware became readily available along with shared knowledge of just how to do things. After a few visits to some forums you were off an running.

With version 4, I was able to get most of the northeast United States in and then Version 5.1 came out and the learning process started all over. Paul Meziat came out with his great freeware program Airport which allowed designers to finally create scenery and workable airports in real world co-ordinates. I got pretty handy with it and was able to recreate all of my earlier projects with updated scenery.

I later began using the Apollo Scenery and Object Designer and I got back to the same point as I was with version 4. But of course by this time new freeware and shareware products outclassed the older programs I was using to create photorealistic scenery. Great payware products also evolved during this period sending me back to the drawing board.

When FS98 came out I started working with Airport 2.10 in conjuction with the Apollo program and now have since upgraded to Airport 2.60. This of course allows me to convert some of the scenery to FS2K standards but with FS2002 on the horizon this fall, I will tough it out and wait and see what happens in that territory. This means that my primary focus will remain on upgrading my FS98 scenery, with the occasional dabble into new areas.

As of late I have been converting these sceneries and areas to FS2K standards. It means converting macros and textures and my concentration thus far has been on Detroit Metropolitan. It is the only Beta available so far.

All of the sceneries here, unless noted are in Beta stages of design, some further along than others, and are not to be used commercially or packaged on any other site without the authors consent. They are considered freeware in the strictest sense and I trust that everyone will use them honestly. If you feel you cannot adhere to this simple principle then hit your back button and surf to a new location.

"Rideau Locks" Ottawa
Photo by Mainville

Special thanks to Tom Hiscox and his crew for the new version of Airport. Its allowed me to progress with my designing for FS2K which I understand will be compatible with FS2K2. There is a beta version of KDTW on the Detroit Page. Unfortunately this has meant that I have abandoned the FS98 projects completely and although I will leave them here for a while eventually they will fade away.