FS Terrain

The default scenery in Flight Simulator looks gorgeous but because its reference points across the Earth’s surface are a whopping 1.22km apart in most places, the topography is only an approximation of real life. Many mountains and valleys are simply lost and even lowland areas don’t look as they should. At last there’s an answer to this problem in the shape of FS Terrain, which uses Space Shuttle data to dramatically increase the surface detail by up to 16 times with reference points between 76 and 38 metres! Featureless areas are transformed; mountains soar and valleys plunge. You can really see the difference!

The visual scenery you see when flying in Flight Simulator is all built upon a basic framework that represents the height of the ground at any point in the world. This provides the 3-dimensional relief model of hills, mountains, valleys, cliffs, depressions, plateaux and so forth upon which all other scenery objects and ground textures are placed. The vast majority of the area of the default relief model in flight simulator is set at 1.22 kilometres (1,223 metres) between each reference point so this means that there is no relief detail changes under 1.22 kilometres. The FS Terrain relief model is set at a high resolution of 76.4 metres between each reference point – a massive 16 times higher resolution than the default!

The lower resolution of the default relief model means that many mountains, valleys and hills have a very ‘soft’ view and lack the sharpness and detail that they have in the real world. In fact prominent land features even get missed out entirely if they fall between the default data points! FS Terrain provides replacement Terrain data for Europe and the USA at a level of detail 16 times higher than the existing terrain. This results in landscapes that are very much closer to the appearance of the real-world counterparts. Accurate display of valleys, hills, cliffs and mountains can now be seen wherever they occur. FS Terrain covers all 50 states of the USA, fully covers 33 European countries and partially covers four more.

As higher detail needs more work for Flight Simulator to display, FS Terrain provides the option to switch between up to 4 levels of detail in individual areas so that users can tailor the terrain detail to best match the performance of their computer. This way you can obtain the best compromise between visual quality and performance.

Detailed features
FS Terrain covers the main area of Europe from the west of Ireland to the border areas of Russia. The data extends from North 34 to as far North as the 60th parallel and fully covers 33 countries and partially covers four more. It also covers all of the continental US and Hawaii.

Countries fully covered
Albania, Austria, Belgium, Bosnia, Bulgaria, Crete, Croatia, Czech Republic, Denmark, Eire, Estonia, France (including Corsica), Germany, Greece, Herzegovina, Hungary, Italy (including Sicily and Sardinia,) Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Macedonia, Malta, Montenegro, Netherlands, Portugal, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Switzerland, Spain (including the Balearic Islands), United Kingdom and United States.

Countries partially covered
Belarus, Norway, Sweden and Ukraine.

Other features
The terrain is divided into three main areas
- Europe
· - USA (except Alaska)
· - Alaska

You can select to install all the terrain or just the areas that interest them. You can also select to install just the highest detail version or also include the lower detail options so that individual parts can be set to different detail levels. The options can be changed at any time after initial installation by using the Windows “Add/Remove Programs” function.

Each main area is divided up into smaller areas that can be individually set to different levels of terrain detail if that option has been installed. When the variable detail options have been installed FS Terrain comes with programs to allow the user to select individual areas visually and adjust the level of terrain detail to display in Flight Simulator.

These resolutions are: 76.4 Metres (“Maximum”) 152.9 Metres (“High”) 305.8 Metres (“Medium”) 611.5 Metres (“Low”)

Each of the supplied smaller areas can have a custom level of terrain detail. This allows users to set the appropriate level of FS Terrain detail to match their computers capabilities. Even the lowest resolution provided by FS Terrain will show a noticeable improvement over the standard Flight Simulator terrain in most areas.

Because of the large amount of high resolution data FS Terrain comes on four CDs.

System requirements:
- Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004/2002
- PC 1GHz
- Windows 98 or better
- 256MB RAM
- 64MB graphic card
- DirectX 8.1
- 2.4Gb of free Hard Drive space for a complete install
For partial installs (Single-Detail/Multi-Detail):
- 920 Mb/1.2 Gb for USA (excluding Alaska)
- 220 Mb/320 Mb for Alaska
- 510 Mb/700 Mb for Europe