A week ago the NL2000 Scenery Design Team officially released version 2.9 of their Netherlands 2000 scenery for FS2002 and FS2004 at a ceremony at Hilversum Airport while simultaneously making the scenery available for download worldwide. Now the team offers a report on the current version and announces plans for future versions. Click on Read More for full story.
The NL2000 Scenery Design Team looks back at a successful release of version 2.9 and forward to 3.0.
Last Saturday, April 10, 2004, in a cold hangar at Hilversum Airport (EHHV), the NL2000 Scenery Design Team hosted their release event for version 2.9 of their freeware scenery for The Netherlands. Some 150-200 fans gathered to see for themselves what a huge improvement this is over 2.1, and what to expect in the coming version 3.0.
Features of 2.9:
- Compatible with Microsoft Flight Simulator 2002 and 2004
- Complete and up to date coverage of the Netherlands - all rivers, roads, cities, airports and many other objects
- Several new and lots of revamped fields
- Landable water everywhere
- Seamless textures for all seasons, and a choice of white or green winter textures
- Photoreal airports
- A Feature Panel to tweak the scenery and PC performance according to your wishes
- Optimised for flyable frame rates, by using Gmax where possible
- Easy install and uninstall procedure
- Integration with AI
- Thermals scattered across NL, easy cross-country gliding
This was the result of many man-hours of work, midnight oil and many lines of code, many CPU cycles of compilation of all BGL's. For instance, to be able to support landable water, we had to write a program to cut through the texture layer along the contours of all water areas. There is a lot of water in the Netherlands, so every compilation run would take a heavy machine close to a week. This is one of the reasons why it took so long to finalize the release.
Future:
At the release party, some of the features of the next version were also shown. The next release will be a full photoreal scenery based on aerial photos. There are some very large obstacles to overcome, but the demonstration showed that the photo scenery will even be faster than the current one. While we were able to show the alpha version at the release party, we would like to warn you that a lot of work still needs to be done, like clearing some mismatches on the edge of every photo, matching colors, erasing static cars, aircraft on runways, the image of 3D objects and matching and positioning 3D objects, to name a few.
We also announced the cooperation agreement with the National Aerospace Laboratory (www.nlr.nl), which resulted in the following initiatives:
- Conversion of NL2000 to support their full motion simulators
- Handover of the old NLR simulator platform to joint ownership between NL2000 and Aviodrome. This is very exciting because the simulator will move to the new Aviodrome venue and will be converted to MSFS with NL2000 v2.9 / v3.0.
In the mean time, the team is working on a service pack to correct some errors, which have been reported on version 2.9. This patch will not contain new features, but will merely fix things, which have been overlooked. To stay informed and read more background articles, do visit the forums at www.nl-2000.com.
Happy landings!
