Swedflight - FS2000

Updated: November 25, 2001

SWEDFLIGHT2000

In this page you will find all files and updates for the scenery SWEDFLIGHT2000 made for Flight Simulator 2000 from Microsoft. No landscape scenery for Sweden will be done by us because of technical reasons in the simulator itself. In stead we have concentrated our efforts to build the airports in the country. Now when we at last have found a useful technique we have tried to make the buildings and other objects as realistic as possible. The quality of these airports vary from much detailed ones to airports with only the most important objects placed. But the goal has been in both cases to make them with a high degree of realism.

All files for SWEDFLIGHT2000

All updates

Screen shots from the scenery

Bromma airport - one of the older in Sweden and still in use.
From our package with airports for FS2000.
Made by Bengt Larsson.

The FS2000 simulator was released by Microsoft in Nov -99. The expectations were enormous all over the world - a lot of them have been fulfilled, but at the same time many users have been very frustrated by the need for a real fast computer to run the scenery with an acceptable frame rate. The simulator represents partly a new method to build scenery, aircraft and panels. The program code is rewritten totally, not a single line is the same from the old versions. The world is now constructed with a three dimensional so called 'mesh' in the bottom of the scenery and which represents the hills and valleys of the landscape. On top of this mesh you put textures like before, but those are now in 256 color BMP format, in stead of the more limited R8 type used earlier. Also the 3D objects look much better with these new textures. Microsoft's technique to build this 3D scenery gives files that are not as big as those from some new competeting simulators - but apparantly to the price of a slower frame rate.

FS2K contains amazingly a 3D scenery that covers the whole world and with 33000 airports with taxiways and everything and that have the most important buildings on the right spot, but with a stereotypical look. Nevertheless, much need to be done in the scenery, especially if you want an even more exact one like SWEDFLIGHT - with roads in the right places and towns with their proper look and size and among all, with realistic buildings at the airports.

During the spring and summer 2000 Microsoft has released the long awaited SDK which among other things contains the explanation about how to make textures for the 3D scenery. Some weeks before the final document arrived, Lennart Arvidsson in our group managed to solve those tricky things all by himself and he could therefore at the same time publish a complete package (in beta version) of default textures covering the whole world. They are of a very high quality as everything from his production. Those new textures are now ready in their final version and can be downloaded from here, a job which we really can recommend - the look of the world in the simulator will be totally new.

The airports that we have already released for FS2000 will be updated and maintained, but all new airports from our group will primarily be made for the new FS2002 and only in the case they also are backward compatible without too much work, they will also be released in a FS2000 version.