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Introduction
Introduction
New Zealand is a country of diverse land use and geography: from the bustling metropolis of Auckland city in the North Island to the small farming communities scattered around the Waikato region; from the rugged coastal environment to majestic inland mountains; from high country sheep stations in the South Island to massive commercial pine tree plantations in the North Island. It is a country that has inspired generations of tourists, explorers, poets and artists.....and now, with the addition of Vector Land Class, it will be a country that inspires the best virtual pilots from around the world.
What makes VLC special? In a word, accuracy. The extensive use of vector polygons to define different land types means VLC can get around the 1.2km pixel limit of the FSX scenery engine and represent New Zealand as it was meant to be.
What does VLC Include?
What does VLC Include?
LandClass
LandClass
The raison d'etre for the VLC project was the Landclass....but this just isn't any old landclass! Where other landclass products are limited to an accuracy of over 1 kilometer, our innovative Vector Land Class system is accurate to within about 50m, or 20 times the accuracy of default methods! Beaches (Black or tan sand), Mud, Golf courses, mangroves, quarries and landfills, native bush, scattered scrub, thick scrub, Pine forest, Harvested pine forest, Other plantation forest (including major shelter-belts), Rock, Moraine and shingle, Horse tracks, Ice and Snow, Vineyards and Orchards as well as urban and suburban areas all meticulously displayed in FSX. Not only that but we separate productive land into different textures based on slope and type and include the thousands of small rural airstrips scattered around the country.
Terrain mesh
Terrain mesh
VLC is draped over a custom made mesh interpolated from 20m contour information, spot heights and other height information such as airport boundaries tagged with AIP elevation values. This 20m (0.00016 decimal degree) mesh, as well as being far more accurate than default 76m SRTM mesh, overcomes a lot of the problems of the default data which was remotely sensed (Radar) and has errant height values in steep country or in areas covered by cloud.
textures
textures
To really bring out the best in the underlying VLC data, we replace key ground texture sets lovingly created from New Zealand sourced aerial ortho-photography including plantation pine, plantation pine cutover and New Zealand native bush. We further tweak these textures with updated autogen placement files and and autogen textures made from photos of good ol' New Zealand native bush. VLC ground textures also feature innovative LOD Blue-shift Post-processing so that the appearance of scattered blue light at large distances is accurately replicated in FSX.
Night Lighting effects
Using GIS technology, we have placed two classes of light effects along major roads: Very bright lights along major highways, and smaller lights along major urban roads. These lights will turn on at dusk and burn through the night until dawn. The number of lights is scalable in two ways: Using the VLC Scenery Configuration Tool to decide which lights you want to see (All, Freeway Only or none) and then using the FSX scenery density slider (Note: Lights are known to be heavy on frame rates)
Ocean, Lakes, Ponds, Rivers, Canals, Streams
The coastal environment is very important for New Zealanders (both the general public and pilots alike) and so a lot of time was spent upgrading this area- All water features have been upgraded (including nearly 3/4s of a million streams!) to ensure the utmost accuracy. The coastline has been correctly classified depending on the geomorphological environment: Surf beach's will appear sandy and have breaking waves whereas sheltered inlets will appear calm with narrow beaches.
Roads, Rails, Tracks and Freeways
We sourced the best replacement transport vectors such as roads, railways and freeways...but then didn't stop there! These have all been edited significantly to work within FSX as well as adding new roads/subdivisions and tracks (including tramping tracks). These have been correctly classed (so a dirt road will appear as a dirt road unlike default FSX data) and railways have been updated (for example, removing rail tunnels from the raw data). They have also been split into two separate groups in order to customise your FSX experience.
Other Objects
As well as the Landclass data representing the natural environment, VLC provides placement of man made features including tramping huts and antenna with more to be added. We also include a type of building which are found in no other country in the world: Marae. Some of these objects are simply placed from the default library, some of them are custom built for VLC, but all are in their actual locations around New Zealand.
Airfields and object library
Airfields and object library
Available separately and also for free, VectorLandClass includes a raft of updated airfields which make use of custom models of typical New Zealand hangers, buildings, vegetation and objects. What’s more, these objects are available to use in your own scenery projects.
Landclass tech
Landclass tech
The ‘default’ method of presenting changes in landcover in Flightsim is to use a simple raster/pixel image where each pixel represents a different type of vegetation or land cover. Using this method, the maximum accuracy that can be achieved in the simulator is over 1.2km meaning that boundaries of forests and towns blend into each other over large distances. The real world is not like that. Forests stop at the boundary of the property. Farms stop at the edge of a road.
We have managed to compile the data in a way that gets around this limtation and maintains the full spatial accuracy of the data resulting in over 20 times better accuracy. Every boundary, road and object in our addon should be closer than 50 metres of its actual location.
If a forest stops at the boundary of a road in real life, it will do the same in FSX.
If a town boundary is stopped by a river or stream, it will do the same in FSX.
Beaches will be accurately placed in the many small bays around the country and the water class around these areas will reflect this
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