FSX Coffs Harbour Scenery

Coffs Harbour (YSCH), Australia. Completely reworked in XML to maximize frame rates, but is still very dense. The harbor and town have been changed to a more detailed reproduction of Mutton Bird Island and the southern headland. Also includes shopping center, road syste, reworked coastlines and much more. By John Ross.

This is an ongoing project but this release makes several changes to the original FS9 version. The scenery has been completely reworked in XML to try to minimise frame rate hits but nevertheless do not expect more than 8 to 14 fps on a medium system (non dual core) and a low end video card). The harbour and town has been changed to be a more detailed reproduction of Mutton Bird Island and the southern headland - virtually photorealistic. In addition, the very visible shopping centre has been reproduced from photo textures and other shops such as the Sawtell shopping centre. The road system has been made more accurate as well as the river. The coastline has been reworked to include beaches from Sawtell up to Woolgoogla. Other landclass changes have placed the population centres more accurately. The big banana is of course there but not the windmill as yet (frame rates becoming a problem).

There will be changes in future releases and if anyone has any particular requests, I will try to include those.

Coming shortly will be Gold Coast (YBCG) which has been completely revised and then Port Mac, Balina, Lismore and more changes to the coastline of northern NSW. Hopefully I can completely change the coastline between Coolangatta and Port Mac but that will take some time.

As an aside the Landclass from Cloud 9 really improves the scenery in the Summer view. Why Msoft believes the coast has a debilitating drought, with totally arid conditions all summer, is beyond me but it makes the simulation very unsatisfactory. The 12 bucks spent at Cloud 9 for a 6 meg download appears money well spent.

Installation:

Normal installation procures which are briefly unzip the folder and place the Coffs Harbour folder somewhere logical (in my case in the add on scenery folder). Select the folder from within the scenery library at start up of the simulation (settings then select scenery library and then add scenery) and place the scenery at a priority above any other landclass files etc. Open up a fly as normal selecting Coffs from the usual menu.

Alternatively unzip the file and copy the contents of the scenery folder to the scenery folder within the addon folder C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\Addon Scenery and the contents of the texture into the main texture folder of the simulation C:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Microsoft Flight Simulator X\Texture. The problem with this method is if you hate the airport you will have a problem in locating and deleting all of the files. The advantage is you do not have to add it to the scenery library.

As for computer settings, a medium amount of autogen is ok but the water effects is definitely not a good idea. Other settings are dictated by your own individual system so no comments.

I have made no changes to the actual airport layout or navigation aids. The airport layout is surprisingly accurate in FSX with the only small problem being the spacing on some of the GA hangars.

Acknowledgements:

FSX_KML was used extensively with Google to provide greater accuracy of shoreline, roads and rivers. Scenery Shortcut from Abacus made the creation of bgls a simple matter when placing GMAX and FSDS created models into the scenery via the inbuilt object placer within FSX.

Good flying.

John Ross

Leave a comment