FSX Castlegar Airport Scenery

Castlegar Airport (CYCG), British Columbia, Canada. A patch for Vern Opperman's FS2004 Cranbrook Airport scenery (CYCG_V2.ZIP) to make it work in FSX. By P. Nigel Grant/Vern Opperman.

Converting Vern Opperman’s FS2004 Castlegar Airport (CYCG) to FSX.

Living in Vancouver, I am very prejudiced towards flying in British Columbia and in FS2004 we had many magnificent sceneries in the province. Vern Opperman’s scenery for Castlegar Airport (CYCG) in the West Kootenays, on the banks of the Columbia River, is a beautiful flight from Vancouver or Cranbrook, particularly in a Dash8 or Boeing737.

Castlegar is notorious for its landing difficulty where the north approach requires an approach from the Arrow Lakes to the west inside the Columbia River valley with a sharp turn to the right just before meeting the runway. Or alternatively an approach from the east down the Kootenay River valley with a sharp turn to the left just before meeting the runway. I am told that pilots like landing here because of its challenges.

Imagine my disappointment when this scenery would not work properly in FSX – most of the buildings reproduced okay but some ground polygons were messed up.

For my own use, I have had a try at modifying CYCG to make it work in FSX, quite a lot of work to do this, using SBuilderX to resolve many ground issues and stop the adjacent highway looking like a roller-coaster, and converting an AFCAD file to FSX using ADE, a very intuitive program from “Scruffy Duck”.

Without going round the scenery inch by inch, most of the buildings seem to transfer without trouble, and look good.

The zip file “cycg_FSX”, of which this text is a part, provides the files and instructions to modify Vern Opperman’s FS2004 scenery of Castlegar Airport (cyxc04.zip) to allow it to function in FSX. Vern Opperman has kindly given consent for my uploading of this patch, and he also modified the main bgl file to get rid of a “flying” fence. I have replaced the fences using ADE.

To use this scenery in FSX you need to do the following three steps:

1. Remove the 2 bgl files from your CYXC scenery folder, as listed in the attached text file – “remove”. I suggest you create a folder called “removals” in this scenery folder and just move the two files into there.
2. Move the four bgl files in the attached “add_to_sceneryfolder” folder, into the CYXC scenery folder, and overwrite existing files where asked.
3. Move the one bmp file in the attached “add_to_texturefolder” folder, into the CYXC texture folder, and overwrite an existing file if asked.

Problems:

Sorry but you are on your own with this modification. Please do not contact me for problems in FSX, this was produced for my own use and it does the job for me (I have Ultimate TerrainX and FSGenesis mesh) – however I would like to share my efforts with you and if it works, that’s just great!

Please do not seek help from Vern Opperman for problems in FSX, this patch is not his work, and I appreciate his approval for allowing me to upload this conversion patch.

Credits:

Vern Opperman for the original magnificent scenery
Scruffy Duck for his Airport Design Editor program.
Luis Sa for his SBuilderX program.

By the way, I have created Vancouver International Airport for FSX, including a version compatible with the payware Vancouver+ created by Jon Patch and Holger Sandmann – if you want some very dramatic flying, this payware scenery of southwest British Columbia is well worth its cost.

And don’t forget the freeware Victoria+ (vicenh7a.zip and vicenh7b.zip) by Don Grovestine, Jon Patch and Holger Sandmann, to round out great flying in southwestern British Columbia in the Victoria area.

I hope you enjoy this little importation.

P Nigel Grant
Vancouver