Updated: July 23,  2001

SWEDFLIGHT - version 4.1 for FS98

SWEDFLIGHT is a scenery for Microsoft Flight Simulator, covering the whole country of Sweden. With thousands of mountains, lakes, rivers, islands, roads and with all 176 airports. Complete, detailed coastline. Freeware for Microsoft Flight Simulator 98 and Combat Flight Simulator. 

This page has the following sections:

All files for SWEDFLIGHT 4.1
All updates
Screen shots from the scenery
How to install the scenery
Data for  all airports in Sweden
Frequently asked questions
The history of the scenery
Thoughts about scenery designing

What is ready of the now abandoned project 'Sweden2000' is released as version 4 of SWEDFLIGHT. 

You will find the following new features:

• A totally new series of textures (twice as many as in version 3) made by our graphics wizard Lennart Arvidsson. These new textures are optimized for use in the existing scenery but will also be used in future projects. In the waiting for this you will get a more uniform look already in the scenery of today. They all work very well also in Combat as you can see below and on the Screen Shot page.

 
• The area made with the new technique covers the scenery partly up to a line from south of Stockholm in the east to Karlstad in the west. 'Partly' means that there are still big spots with the old look. The northern part is not covered at all but also this part (made with the old technique) will look much better than before with the sole use of the new textures. 

 
• Many additions are done at a lot of the airports which are now much more realistic - but there are still many without any buildings at all, mostly at the very small ones and on those in the north where we still have no data of the buildings. 

 
• Corrections to a lot of the faults found in version 3.

NOTE: All that have version 2.2 or older of SWEDFLIGHT must delete all those files and download the whole scenery again. So much is now changed and added since version 1 that this is a good time to start all over again. Otherwise we can not guarantee the proper operation of the scenery.

The future of SWEDFLIGHT

View from the coast of  Skåne at Landskrona (seen with Combat)

The SWEDFLIGHT project is now four years old. During this time a lot of exciting things have happened in the flight sim world. We have seen five versions of the Flight Simulator (including the new FS2000), but among all an unbelievable development of the hardware. Few could 2-3 years ago dream of owning a 550Mhz PentiumIII with a gigantic hard drive and plenty of memory. And all that for a reasonable price.

This allows a scenery maker to do even more advanced and detailed sceneries and some are already on the market, both paywares and freewares.  We will try to follow this development very closely and we are already in full swing with the next version of SWEDFLIGHT. The development of SWEDFLIGHT looks like this in the past and in the future:

February -99: Version 3 of SWEDFLIGHT is released where new technique is demonstrated in a limited area of the scenery.

Spring and summer -99: The new technique that has been developed by Bengt Larsson and Lennart Arvidsson is further enhanced - in order to make certain details in the scenery more realistic, especially all sorts of beaches and the borders between the textures and of course also the textures themselves. This technique is shown partly in the existing scenery. Plans were now made to go on and make most parts of the Swedish scenery like that. The technique as such was built around the old one with flat tiles and polygon mountains and partly repeating textures but a lot of new handling of certain details was added.

Oct-99: What is ready of the now abandoned project 'Sweden2000' is released in stead as version 4 of SWEDFLIGHT - the final version of the scenery in this form. 

2000 - :  In November -99 the new simulator FS2000 was released by Microsoft. The two biggest new features are a threedimensional Mesh terrain, covering the whole world, and a new type of textures that now are of normal BMP type with broader color range than the more resticted R8 type that we have lived with for so long time. Most of the scenery therefore looks quite realistic with fairly accurate height differences in the terrain with all the hills and valleys. But in spite of that, a lot of details in the new scenery are not so good. Important  features like roads, rivers and coast lines are not drawn as accurately as before in sceneries like SWEDFLIGHT. The same applies to the cities that mostly cover a much too big area. Therefore we feel that there still is a need for a new swedish scenery where the mentioned features are made with more precision. The old SWEDFLIGHT scenery doesn't work in FS2000, like most of this type of sceneries. 

During the spring and summer Microsoft released the long awaited explanation for the constuction of the new type of textures that are needed in FS2000. About the same time Lennart Arvidsson in our group managed to solve all those problems by himself and therefore he could very quickly release the first package of totally new textures for the whole world. They have a considerably higher quality compared to the original ones and we really recommend all of you to download them. The simulator will be like a totally new one!

The rest of the group (Bengt and Bo) spend all their spare time constructing buildings at as many airports as possible - making them with textures taken from real photos from those airports. We have found a technique that gives a high quality of the result and that is quite effective. More of this you can read about in the special FS2000 section at the left.

What will happen to the existing SWEDFLIGHT?

A lot of users have asked us what will happen to the 'old' scenery now when a new one is planned. We think that quite many of you will not buy FS2000 directly for different reasons and therefore we will keep SWEDFLIGHT in its existing look also in the future. Corrections of the bigger faults found will be made when time permits..

You can download this patch from Microsoft or from several other sites. See one adress on our download page.