FSX Vancouver International Airport Scenery

Vancouver International Airport (CYVR), British Columbia, Canada, v5. This is an upgrade to FSX from CYVR42 for FS2004 (20,000 downloads). The original CYVR3.1 for FS2002 won FlightSim Developer's Award in March 2003, (11,000 downloads). By P. Nigel Grant.

This Vancouver International Airport scenery started with my FS2002 version CYVR3.1, which won the FlightSim Developer’s Award in March 2003 at FlightSim. It had over 11,000 downloads at AVSIM. It graduated into a Version 4 series for FS2004 and its final edition, Version 4.2 has garnered over 20,000 downloads at various sites around the world. It was also modified into a version to make it compatible with that magnificent payware scenery, Vancouver+ .

When FSX was released, I was fully expecting this CYVR scenery to have run its gamut, and be put on the shelf. There were changes in scenery design techniques and if I loaded it into FSX with my old hardware (AMD64 3500+/ATI X800XL-256mb), there was a horrible drop in frame rates, and some weird effects with some of the textures.

Then I had a catastrophe - my motherboard failed and I could no longer obtain one with an AGP slot and an AMD939socket. This precipitated a new motherboard, CPU, video card and RAM ($1440Can). But to every cloud there is a silver lining.

To my surprise, the new hardware (Intel Core2 Duo E6400/Sapphire X1950XT-500mb) produced a substantial improvement in FSX performance, particularly with my own CYVR42 which now assumed frame rates essentially the same as the FSX default CYVR (which incidentally is a pretty good rendition). So this spurred resurrection of CYVR and the various scenery design issues have been resolved.

The new International Terminal expansion has been added, the main control tower has been rebuilt and the old control tower removed, since it has now been demolished; I have completely re-fenced the airport and put in a blast fence at the east end of the north apron utilizing the default FSX fencing; Replaced many objects with FSX default (a breeze to install with the new SDK Mission Object Placement Tool), including ships in English Bay, Caulfeild Cove and the Fraser River; the Point Atkinson Lighthouse with a revolving light beacon inserted inside; and some hangers; rebuilt the Iona Sewer Outfall and given it a new beacon; applied appropriate landclass to SwishSwash Island just south of the airport, and corrected the default land class along the north side of Sea Island.

I think it looks a lot better in FSX than in FS9, the textures all seem to be more solid and vivid.

I offer this updated airport as an alternative to the FSX default.

The History of the real CYVR:

It all started with a slight by one of history's greatest aviators, Charles Lindbergh. Following his solo, non-stop transatlantic flight in 1927, Lindbergh was invited to visit Vancouver as part of his triumphant tour of North American cities. He declined, saying - "There is no fit field to land on."

Lindbergh's comments helped spur local civic action to replace the grass airstrip at Minoru Park in Richmond and in 1929, still smarting from Lindbergh's rebuff, the City of Vancouver built a new airport on Sea Island. And so began the development of Vancouver International Airport.

In 2000, the airport's reputation as a world-class facility was established, when the International Air Transport Association's (IATA) survey of international passengers rated CYVR No. 1 in North America and No. 4 in the world. In 2003, CYVR was rated as the top airport in North America by passengers surveyed for the IATA annual global survey. Also in 2003, for the fifth consecutive year, CYVR was again chosen as one of the top ten airports in the world, the only Canadian airport to make the global top-ten list. Vancouver is also hosting the 2010 Winter Olympics.

CYVR is Canada's second busiest airport, with some 16.9 million passengers (including same plane transit), approximately 222,900 tonnes of cargo and 270,000 take-offs and landings in 2006. CYVR was the only North American stop for the Airbus380 in 2006 on a worldwide technical route proving series of flights. View photos of the
historic visit.

So this is a good airport, with its surrounding beauty, to sim from!

Installation:

It is difficult anticipating everyone’s installation needs. If very few addon sceneries are to be used, I think loading texture and bgl files into the Addon Scenery texture and scenery folders respectively would suffice, but I have never tried this approach since it means all the bgl files for various sceneries could be mixed together as would their textures, making it difficult to un-install any sceneries that you didn’t like.

If you have several addon sceneries as many do, my personal preference would be establish a separate filing\directory system and keep this away from the FSX folder, and preferably in another partition and\or drive, (mainly for security reasons).

When you unzip the download, you will find two folders – Vancouver and Trees (the latter includes a file "GGv3_XTrees_lib9_0.bgl"). (There might be several layers of folders here, I have found in the past that uploading zip files does strange things!)

The Vancouver folder should contain two folders –scenery and texture. Put this Vancouver folder as-is into your own addon scenery filing location. The AFCAD AF2 file is an integral part of my scenery, so remove any other AFCAD's for CYVR that you may have in FSX, otherwise you may experience computer crashes.

Go to avsim or flightsim and download Gerrish Gray's FS2000/2 TREES OBJECT LIBRARY Release 3 - Updated Version (file "trees_v3.zip"). Unzip " trees_v3.zip" and follow the enclosed FS2002 instructions to install his tree library – it does seem to work in FSX – I put the Trees_0.bgl file in the FSXroot\Scenery\World\Scenery folder and the textures in the FSXroot\texture folder. It is a bit complicated but worth the effort since this popular library is often required for other addon sceneries, and once installed does not need to be installed again. If you don't want to install this tree library, make sure you remove the three files - "treessth.bgl" and "treesnth.bgl" and “trees_iona.bgl” -from the Vancouver\scenery folder.

If you install Gerrish Gray's tree library, copy the file "GGv3_XTrees_lib9_0.bgl" into your FSXroot\Scenery\World\Scenery folder.

Import the Vancouver scenery into the scenery library of FSX as normal, and go flying!

Known Issues:

I hope frame rates do not become an issue for you. This is very early days of FSX, we are awaiting the release of SP1, and significant changes are taking place in hardware. But I re-emphasize the dramatic improvements I experienced from the upgrade noted above. The two biggest frame rate hogs are usually AI traffic density and the weather density, and you can cut these back. If frame rates are unacceptable, try selectively removing files (these have been given reasonably representative names) from your Vancouver\scenery folder, one at-a-time, and each time assess the change to your frame rate, until an acceptable level is achieved. (I suggest that you create a folder called "removals" inside your Vancouver\scenery folder and just move the subject files in and out of it.)

Unfortunately, in transferring the radar dome from FS9 to FSX, I have lost the red and white texturing of the tower, it is now black.

CYVR5 is not compatible with the FSX port of UT Canada/Alaska, I do not have Ultimate Terrain so I am unable to correct this. Apparently the file MISCBLDGS.bgl is the culprit, and this contains many of the building in the south terminal area.

The Fraser River has a major shoreline anomaly by the Iona Sewage Treatment Plant. This is in the FSX default scenery but I have been unable to correct it.

Credits:

* Engineering staff at Vancouver International Airport who over the years have provided me with much data; in July 2005, Jon Patch (fellow Canuck) and I had a tour "airside' of the airport for two hours with one of the managers – absolutely fascinating and some of the new buildings in the scenery reflect that experience
* Iain Gallagher's assistance in the early stages to clear my design road-blocks and providing the parking lot textures
* Manfred Moldenhauer for SCASM
* Pascal Meziat, Brian McWilliams and Tom Hiscox for AIRPORT 3.0, without which none of this would be possible, and for their constant stream of innovations over the years
* Rafael Garcia Sanchez for his innovative program NovaSim which creates all sorts of objects and macros
* Matthias Bruckner for Easy Object Designer which allowed me to create many of the buildings
* Arno Gerretsen for his ObjPlacer program and continuing dedicated advice on the forums
* Martin Wright for the Tview Image Manager which allowed me to view directories of thumbnail images including those in DXT format, as well as his bmp2000 and DXT programs which allowed me to manipulate the textures for my custom buildings.
* Lee Swordy, another fellow Canuck, for his brilliant AFCAD and Traffic Tools programs, probably the most important contribution for FS2k2/4 simmers.
* Lee Brompton, whose AFCAD file for CYVR I used as a seed
* Ian Thatcher for his AFCAD conversion program which converts FS9 AFCAD’s to FSX
* Gerrish Gray for his tree library
* George Davison for his TreePlanter Version 4.1
* David “Opa” Marshal for his rotating beacon
* Vladimer Svoboda for CreatSigns.
* Christian Fumey for Ground2K.
* Paavo Pihelgas for ExcBuilder.
* Luis Sa for SBuilderX
* Andrej Urosevic for his macros of communication towers, fuel carrier trucks and fire-fighting vehicles
* Jon Patch for his Gmax Objects library (security booths and floodlights)
* Don Grovestine, Jon Patch and Holger Sandmann for their ongoing advice and support.

I hope I have included all credits; any omissions are inadvertent and I trust you will accept my apologies.

Last but not least, thank you Microsoft for creating the base for this incredibly fascinating (and addictive!!) hobby and for the new tools they have given us in the FSX SDK. I must also thank and congratulate the ACE’S Team for their entry into active consultation with our community.

Copyright and Distribution:

This scenery is released as Freeware. As freeware you are permitted to distribute this archive subject to the following conditions. The archive must be distributed without modification to the contents of the archive. Redistributing this archive with any files added, removed or modified is prohibited. The inclusion of any individual file from this archive in another archive without the prior permission of the author is prohibited. The authors' rights and wishes concerning this archive must be respected.

P Nigel Grant
Vancouver

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