Swedflight - CFS2

Updated: December 15, 2000

SWEDFLIGHT2000 adapted for Combat 2

Mountain view from CFS2 with replacement textures
made by Lennart Arvidsson

All the actual files
Look at screen shots

Combat FlightSimulator 2 was released by Microsoft in October 2000. Exactly like when version 1 arrived this was preceded by a lot of discussions if it would be possible or not to use sceneries and aircraft/panels from older simulators, in this case FS2000. That simulator, in spite of its many advantages, has been plagued by very hard demands from the hardware to get an acceptable framerate. Many of us have therefore guessed that CFS2 would be some type of an update on the road to a new FS2000 later on. We in the Swedflight group have after the release tried to get a quick look of what is possible to do with this new and interesting piece of software. Lennart Arvidsson in our group has also worked very fast to modify his new summer textures for FS2000 so that they will better match the different color scheme that is used in CFS2. The result of that you can study in the two pictures above (and download further down).

The basic scenery in CFS2 is the action area in the Pacific during the WWII. The rest of the world is not covered in the scenery - but the delivered mesh file actually cover the whole world and is also of much better quality than in FS2000. The roads in the scenery are no longer those straight lines that still are used in FS2000 on top of the mesh, now they in stead run very smoothly in the scenery like the natural ones. The same applies to all the rivers. Another new feature is that all beaches have got a separate texture that gives a very realistic look to them.

What is then possible to import from FS2000? At a quick test we saw that you can try most of the sceneries and aircraft/panels that are specially made for FS2000. Of course, the roads and rivers etc from FS2000 does not get the new look but a faint, thin coastline is possible to see between land and water(!). Now when the mesh has another and better look than in FS2000 that causes small problems here and there where the roads and rivers don't follow the new 3D surface and therefore disappear now and then.

Most of the aircraft made for FS2000 seem to be possible to import, even if they behave different sometimes. Maybe that has to do with the new type of Air file in CFS2 that contains more parameters than in FS2000. A new graphical format is also introduced for the aircraft textures. But mostly the old aircraft seem to work quite well. No GPS can be activated though as far as we could see.

What happened with the much discussed frame rate then?? The new graphical engine in CFS2 may be less demanding than in FS2000 because you can often see much higher figures here - almost the double now and then, at least when running the specific sceneries from CFS2. When using FS2000 sceneries this behaviour was not always that pronounced for some reason. Anyhow, maybe CFS2 is one step on the road to a new, better and faster FS2002, here it seems to be possible too (for the first time) to make your own sceneries without using the default textures from CFS2 or FS2000 - a feature very longed for. So something essential is changed in the graphical engine to make that possible. We are also grateful for the backward compatibility that is very useful in the waiting for the next FS version and that makes this type of experimenting possible.