Simming La Vida Loca

A guided tour of Vancouver Plus FSX by Jon Patch and Holger Sandmann.

When I contacted Holger Sandmann for an interview, he told me Robert Ferraro had got to him first, and so the August issue of Computer Pilot tells everything you wanted to know about him (Holger, not Robert). What to do? Recently FS-Addon (Holger’s publishing brand) has released Vancouver Plus FSX, a title ported from FS9 and enourmously improved for FSX. So I asked Holger to give us the guided tour and, you know, highlight spots of interest. He accepted, and also told me this product is actually the brainchild of his associate, Jon Patch, who’s been active for some time in the FS-scenery arena, releasing both free and payware titles (the free, excellent Victoria Plus for example). So here it is: a guided tour by the artisans themselves (photos courtesy of Yours Truly, of course) of a product which has renovated my faith in FSX so, that I just upgraded my Dual Cores again. That good.

Let Jon kick-off:

Pitt Meadows (CYPK) - N49° 12.97′ W122° 42.60′
The inclusion of this field was requested by pilot and scenery user Emmett McRobie. He was willing to develop a relationship with the Airport’s management people, and to take the thousands of photos required to model it. The District of Pitt Meadows kindly agreed to provide a 30cm resolution airphoto that we could use to accurately position features. Later in the FSX version we used this airphoto data to create photoscenery for the area adjacent to the airport. The airport authorities were also able to confirm technical details, like the fact the field does not have ILS, contrary to the FS9 default (in FS9 it was not possible to delete ILS systems, so we placed it somewhere near the North Pole, as I recall!).

The challenge in recreating the forty or so buildings this field has was to balance accurate representation with good performance in the simulator. I decided on a certain number of pixels per metre that I’d use for most buildings, with a higher value for buildings close to where users would likely taxi; thus we controlled the size and number of texture files used. Certain buildings, like the control tower, have a much larger polygon count budget than most, but the overall count for polygons (surfaces) has been kept low.

Another fun feature is the adjacent floatplane base (CAJ8). A ramp was created that allows amphibious aircraft to touchdown in the water, and then taxi up onto land to park.

Langley Regional Airport (CYNJ) - N49* 06.05′ W122* 37.85′
Langley is located a few kilometers south of CYPK, complete with all the photorealistic buildings and textures, AI traffic, and a lot more.

Downtown Vancouver - N49° 17.65′ W123° 07.00′
How to recreate the illusion of a two-million-people city? We focused on recreating accurately features which are most familiar to visitors, while representing generically the rest of the scenery. The City of Vancouver kindly allowed access to limited airphoto data to snapshot the roofs of buildings for models, and bridge surfaces. We used their online Geographic Information System to accurately place and measure features. Photographer Nigel Grant (of CYVR fame) was kept busy taking hundreds of photographs. It helped that I lived there for twelve years as well! Also considering that a significant feature for most flyers is bridges, I requested and received Engineering drawings of all major bridges from various government authorities. These were traced in our modelling program to create highly accurate representations. The FS9 version uses the MS default Lion’s Gate and Burrard bridges, but the FSX version features our custom-made Lion’s Gate.

Further airphoto data were purchased for a large part of the area from a commercial supplier. We selected a few dozen major buildings for accurate modelling, then placed thousands more, approximating the heights and footprints of their real counterparts. The illusion was further enhanced by providing an active waterfront: AI cruise ships, pilot boats, small vessels; floatplane, helicopter and GA traffic buzzing about downtown and the area. Holger added hundreds of maritime lights with effects, which adds to the immersion factor.

The FSX version furthers immersion by including specific features: a highly detailed model of Canada Place and a detailed harbourfront object, a majestic view of the North Shore mountains from downtown Vancouver (FSX uses mesh at a higher resolution at a distance, meaning the contour of important features like the mountain peak called The Lions can be appreciated), and also two important aspects which surprised me with their contribution to immersion: moving vehicles and sound effects. Throughout Vancouver and the coverage area, Holger added extensive traffic vectors and the marine sounds to the harbour (gulls, bells, etc.), traffic noise to bridges, and waterfall sounds!

On to Holger:

Hope - N49° 21.66′ W121° 26.41′
This neat little town on the Fraser River was the first location I worked on for the project that eventually turned into Vancouver+. About four years ago I had made plans with another developer to work on southwestern B.C. He would do the lower Fraser Valley between Vancouver and Hope, and I would do the Fraser Canyon and adjacent areas. We lost contact after a while and I ended up doing the North Cascades freeware project instead; however, some of the “old” files I did of the Hope area later made it into the Vancouver+ project initiated by Jon Patch in June of 2005.

Hope sits at the southern end of the Fraser Canyon, a great valley to fly through in Vancouver+ because of its amazing scenery and the many road and railroad bridges one can fly under. Something else to look out for is the, um, abundance of forestry clearcuts. One of my pet peeves with the FS series is that it depicts areas outside of towns and farmland as “pristine” (something that is definitely not the case in many areas of B.C.). Thus, I’ve included custom seasonal textures that represent forestry operations, and also added many hundreds of kilometers of forestry roads.

Lytton - N50° 12.70′ W121° 34.23′
While Hope is part of the coastal rainforest zone, Lytton (just 100km to the north) is one of the hottest (40+ degrees C in the summer!) and driest spots in Canada. Accordingly, the dry forests and grasslands look quite different from the other parts of Vancouver+ and we’ve tried to find suitable textures to represent those differences.

I used to do forest research in the Stein Valley Wilderness area opposite of Lytton on the west side of the Fraser River. My 2003 bcmesh9a.zip package for FS2002 contains a comparison between a real-world Stein River image, the FS2002 default landscape, and my add-on. I’d like to believe Vancouver+ FSX further improves on realism in that area. Again, there are a bunch of very tempting bridges (modeled by Jon) along the Fraser River near Lytton.

Pemberton - N50° 18.35′ W122° 46.54′
I used to drive frequently between Vancouver and Cache Creek, and the Pemberton Valley was always a highlight of those trips. It seems odd to have this broad, flat, fertile valley sitting in the midst of seemingly endless mountain ranges. Regarding FS depiction, it’s a neat example of how well the slope-dependent placement of ground textures works: the FS graphic engine automatically switches from farmland textures to forest textures wherever the terrain slope reaches a certain threshold. If it didn’t do that automatically we’d have to manually trace the valley’s bottom to prevent farmland (or settlements) from creeping up the mountainside.

An aspect of FSX’s terrain depiction that bothered me from the beginning is the odd “shotgun” approach of blending adjacent textures, like forest and meadows. Instead of well defined transitions, FSX uses a blending “mask” that displays scattered “dots” of one or the other class. This looks okay from close up, but very unrealistic from farther away. The “Optimized Default Textures” option in the Vancouver+ FSX configurator menu includes our own versions of these blending masks.

Pemberton (CYPS) is great airfield to begin exploring the surrounding areas. The beautiful Lillooet River valley runs more than 50km to the northwest. To the southeast pilots will quickly spot the turquoise waters of Lillooet Lake. There is also an unlisted airstrip at the south end of the lake (N50*8′ W122*31′), featured in the introductory story of the VanPlus manual.

Whistler - N50° 8.57′ W123° 0.14′
I used to “test” my representations of ski runs in FS2002 and 2004 with Bill Lyons’ animated skier (I should really check whether that skier works in FSX; it would be a blast gliding down the maze of ski runs on either Whistler or Blackcomb mountain!).

I used a high-res airphoto and official maps of the ski areas to accurately “draw” the ski slopes. Maybe in FSXI we’ll get to add moving ski lifts without killing too many fps). Jon placed a couple of lodges and there are also several helipads in and around the area. In fact, Whistler is a great spot for helicopter flying; there are lots of tight spots and landmarks to check out (for example Brandywine Falls to the south - N50° 2.07′ W123° 7.17′). The Whistler area also gets visited by some of our AI choppers.

Last but not least, the Whistler to Squamish corridor also nicely highlights the different water colors we provide with Vancouver+: turquise glacial lakes and rivers, dark blue lakes, silty rivers, and the sediment fan of the Squamish River in Howe Sound inlet (set FSX Water slider to Low 1.x to see the right colors).

- - -

JON PATCH
Jon lives in Victoria (B.C.) on Vancouver Island, off the West Coast of Canada. Born on the other side of the country (in Montréal, Québec) he attended the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, where he earned a B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering. He’s had a varied career, including operational management in industries such as image-processing systems and satellite ground stations, mushroom (legal!) exporting, tourism, hosting his own radio show, and writing a newspaper column on social issues. Prior to mucking about with the flightsim world Jon was COO for a music technology company. In addition to flightsim work he currently provides consulting and coaching services to individuals and businesses.

HOLGER SANDMANN
Of German origin, Holger fell in love with the Pacific Northwest while on a University exchange. He is periodically in the wilderness, involved in research projects aimed at improving forest management by understanding how fire, insects, and diseases shape forested areas (if there are no helicopters to fly him in, he’s got to hike). A respected name within the FS world, Holger is the man behind exquisite payware titles such as Mysty Fjörds, Tongass Fjörds and Vancouver Plus, but also the freeware Glacier Bay, Bella Coola, Columbia River Gorge, and Victoria Falls among others. He has released lots of high-quality mesh compiled by himself, and has provided valued contributions to many other free add-on packages. He currently lives in British Columbia.