FSX Power Project

Power Project v3.0 scenery. Consists of four parts: 1) partial model of UK national electricity grid, 2) wind farms and power stations throughout the world, 3) cooling tower steam effects applied to default power stations in the USA, 4) radomes and satellite earth stations in England and North America. By Ray Porter.

DESCRIPTION:

This scenery is for the MicroSoft FSX simulator only (does not work in FS9 or earlier versions).

The UK & European coastal scenery is seen at its best with Ultimate TerrainX Europe and/or photo-real ground textures.

Basically, it consists of four sections:

1: A partial model of the UK national electricity grid with 28,000+ electrical pylons, hundreds of wind turbines, electrical sub-stations, cooling towers and chimney stacks positioned to align with Horizon's Generation X England & Wales photo scenery. Coordinates of scenery in Scotland & Northern Ireland were obtained via Google Earth, restricting coverage to cloud-free, hi-res areas. Optional chimney stack smoke & cooling tower steam effects are included.

2: Many wind farms & power stations (including steam & smoke effects) are represented & positioned (using Google Earth) in East/West Europe, Africa, Canada, India, Australia, New Zealand and USA (including the huge Horse Hollow wind farm in Texas).

3: Cooling tower steam effects applied to 19 FSX default power stations in the USA (including 3-mile Island).

4: Some radomes & satellite earth stations positioned in England, North America and one in Puerto Rico (this section added v2.0).

If you have previously installed an earlier version FSX Power Project, delete it from the Addon Scenery folder before installing this version. The effects files, texture files and FSXPower Project models file can be ignored, as they will be safely overwritten.

Version 3.0 is a major upgrade - many objects have been re-sized to match real world heights agl and the models re-designed to improve frame rates.

An additional folder - 'FSX_UK_default_scenery shifter' - is now included, which aligns/re-sizes many UK FSX/Accelerator scenery objects to Horizon's GenX England photo-scenery. If you do not have Ultimate TerrainX Europe (which also re-aligns scenery), load this folder into your SCENERY LIBRARY. Note that this scenery shifter includes a lot of 'exclude' files and should be placed low down in your scenery library to prevent clashes with any other ADDON scenery (e.g. Aerosoft's London X scenery).

The UK electricity pylons have now been separated from 'FSXPower Project_objects' and placed in the folder 'FSXPower Project_pylons'.

INSTALLATION:

1: UNZIP and open FSX Power Project v3.0 to reveal this readme file, the Locations of Scenery file & the folder 'Microsoft Flight Simulator X'. Drag & drop this 'Microsoft Flight Simulator X' folder onto the folder* containing your Microsoft Flight Simulator X folder and answer YES to any overwrite prompts. (* In a default installation this would be the Microsoft Games folder).

2: This will place the FSXPower Project v3.0 into your Addon Scenery folder; 15 effects files into the Effects folder; the FSXPower Project models.BGL file into the Scenery/Global/scenery folder and 11 texture files into the Scenery/Global/texture folder.

3: Run FSX; click SETTINGS; click Scenery Library; click Add Area.

4: Double click Addon Scenery; Double click FSXPower Project V3_0; Click FSXPower Project_objects; Click OK.

5: FSXPower Project_objects should now be seen at the top of the SCENERY LIBRARY.

6: Click Add Area; Double click Addon Scenery; Double click FSX Power Project v3_0; CLICK FSXPower Project_pylons; click OK.

7: Click Add Area; Double click Addon Scenery; Double Click FSX Power Project v3_0

8: Click FSXPower Project_effects; Click OK.

9: FSXPower Project_effects should now be seen at the top of the SCENERY LIBRARY, above the FSXPower Project_objects. (Note that FSXPower_effects MUST be above FSXPower_objects in the SCENERY LIBRARY, otherwise some effects may not be visible).

10: Click OK; FSX should now build a database of the new scenery files & when finished, installation is completed.

An optional change to the effects configuration file is recommended, which will extend the distance at which the steam & smoke effects can be seen by over 2.5 times (up to 20 miles), allowing the effects to be visible up to the point at which the cooling towers or chimney stacks disappear. This will also increase the distance at which any default or third party effects can be seen & may adversely affect frame rates if it results in more effects visible at one time. Before you do this, MAKE A BACKUP COPY of the effects.CFG file!!!

To implement this change, open the effects.CFG file (found in the Effects folder) with a text editor, e.g. notepad, & edit the 'Very Far' setting in the [Emitter Detail Distance] section from 15000 to 40000 as follows:

Default:
[Emitter Detail Distance]
Medium=5000
Far=10000
Very Far=15000

Change to:
[Emitter Detail Distance]
Medium=5000
Far=10000
Very Far=40000

Save modified file, then exit FSX (if still running) and re-start FSX.

The objects scenery folder contains a folder called 'demolished' which in turn contains CalderHall_nuclear, Drakelow & Tinsely_power cooling tower bgls - these were demolished shortly after this project was started. The effects scenery folder contains a folder called 'decommissioned_demolished', which contains the steam.bgl file for the demolished Drakelow power station. If a 'real world' power station should be demolished, the relevant .bgl file can be moved into the demolished folder, preventing it from being seen within the FSX scenery. Its effect .bgl file must also be deactivated - by moving it into the decommissioned_demolished folder (failure to do this would result in steam/smoke appearing out of thin air where the demolished power station had been located)! If a power station is deactivated but not demolished, its effect .bgl file can also be moved into the decommissioned_demolished folder.

SYSTEM PERFORMANCE/FRAME-RATES:

If you have any performance issues, try reducing the Special effects detail slider to Low (in the Settings display: scenery window), which will reduce the amount of steam emitted, and/or change your scenery complexity setting to anything less than 'extremely dense' - this will disable the steam effect on about 25-33% of the cooling towers.

If performance is still too poor, then you have the option of switching the steam & smoke effects off - by unticking FSXPower Project Effects in the scenery library.

CONFLICTS WITH 3rd-party SCENERY:

Known conflicts with 'AlfsUK airfields' & 'German Landmarks' can be minimised by ensuring that FSXpower Project is above them in the SCENERY LIBRARY list.

The majority of power stations & wind farms have their own .BGL file, which does result in a lot of files, but allows modification of FSX Power Project if a particular piece of scenery clashes with any of your favourite scenery. To assist identification of a particular .BGL, the file names have been prefixed by the name or abbreviation of the country they relate to. Abbreviated country names are:

CzechRep = Czech Republic
NZ = New Zealand
Oz = Australia
SAfrica = South Africa
Switz = Switzerland
UK = United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland & Northern Ireland)
USA = United States of America

DESIGN NOTES:

Since FSX Power Project v2.0 was published I have upgraded my computer to a quad processor/6-gigabyte RAM/64-bit Vista system.

I now find that FSX/SDK & Google Earth can be run simultaneously on 2 monitors without crashing and photo-real terrain textures snap into focus almost immediately, resulting in much faster scenery placement. (In my 2-gB XP & 3-gB 32-bit Vista systems I had to record coordinates with pen & paper, unload Google Earth, then load FSX/SDK.)

Real World scenery data is not always fully available - the height of the taller smoke stacks is usually published, but for smaller stacks and wind turbines, data is very sketchy. Some wind turbines have agl hub-heights documented, others have turbine blade diameters or turbine model types or max power output published (most don't have any data).

Where known, I have sized the scenery models to their real-world heights - the wind turbines are sized to their hub axis height agl. Oherwise, objects are sized using clues from terrestrial/aerial photographs such as shadows relative to nearby objects with known heights. Without data or scaling clues, wind turbines have been sized to a hub height of 40 metres (the unity model size).

Most FSXPP scenery models are aligned to Google Earth. In England & Wales, objects are aligned to scenery visible in Horizon GenerationX photo-real terrain texture. In practice this is within Google Earth coordinate tolerances.

(Look at the Google Earth image(s) of the Skopies wind farm in Greece [N38 20 57, E24 12 17] - its western half was photographed Nov 9 2003 & eastern half photographed earlier on Oct 27 2003 and you will notice that wind direction had shifted on the 2nd image resulting in its turbines rotated horizontally almost 180 degrees. Looking more closely, there appears to be approximately 1.5 seconds of arc/30 metres discrepancy in the alignment of the 2 images - resulting in one of the turbines showing twice! Unless an earthquake occurred during the few days between the image dates, this is a graphic example of an error in image mapping.)

FSXPP wind turbine alignment is rounded to nearest tenth of a second of lat/lon (less than the diameter of the supporting tower) - this normally ensures that the geometry of the wind farms matches their real world equivalents, but, as the Skopies wind farm shows, scenery object position accuracy may be >1 second arc.

Many wind turbines are located along mountain ridges, notably in Morocco, New Zealand, Portugal and Spain, where they take advantage of higher wind speeds and updraughts. Unfortunately, some of these ridges, although very long, are narrower than most terrain mesh resolutions, resulting in two turbines in New Zealand, despite accurately positioned (to the real world) did not appear on the ridge, but hundreds of feet below it. Moving them a just a few metres horizontally placed them on the ridge. Therefore you may see similar anomolies if using different terrain mesh scenery.

Custom model data names [all designed with Gmax]:

3-blade/sail wind turbines - (re-designed for v3.00 - reducing polygon count from 356 down to 102)
6771652649688C31CBCAF58ECB3A8DD0
7399C95E425F78AB98C5DCA1E5C51168 - hub rotated +40 degrees
C7174792466A46F33156DF92DF7E1DDA - hub rotated +80 degrees

2-blade/sail wind turbines -
6E1F498044DCF95ACFF9C494E1CA1431
C5BE53CE4CAA57DD5A2CBD8E94DC54E0 - hub rotated +60 degrees
E5F353DD42879E28DEE012BA5F37B96A - hub rotated +120 degrees

cooling tower -
E9AEA4FA4F5449FA0FBB2F81ACFD077C (converted to LOD model v3.0)

smoke stacks -
6BA3483B4148B7E3DABF28AC71B12D62 (converted to LOD model v3.0)
8A96C3D04BD135908A65E6A1C06BC0F0 (added v3.0)
968F81D1421FD759FA625096B42DC024
A09971334071CAE4283E8D942524A150
E37DB0484EFAC40F78E49385C5EC2697

radome -
78628B0C40361B6414028389CDC97E7D (added v2.0) (converted to LOD model v3.0)

gasometer almost empty - [LOD model]
3649BA324292061D7B177782CE685085 (added v3.0)

gasometer nearly full - [LOD model]
39A4C20A426E8AFAC5B729BB2C23A915 (added v3.0)

Goole water tower - [LOD model]
9AA2091F4AA40E104548BA88A59B533D (added v3.0)

Claxby radar tower [LOD model] -
0CC9B634421DEFC8DF338BB2C325661F (added v3.0)

Satellite earth station [10m dish] - [LOD model]
A19117D242A8A8870988DBAD99F14F29 (added v3.0)

Electricity pylons, buildings, storage tanks, and electrical substations/transformers are FSX default models. Some hangars/warehouses are FSX Accelerator models.

This software is freeware and can be used without payment. On no account should it be sold, uploaded to any paysite or used for commercial gain without my permission.

Regards,

Ray Porter

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