In Weather, owners of newer computers can enable Advanced weather modeling. We ordered a summer afternoon in the Environment section below Time & Date (Time of day: Afternoon, Season: Summer). You can choose the weather in FlightGear. This runway points, as its name indicates, in the direction of 320 degrees (northwest) that is straight to the Blue Ridge Mountains. ICAO stands for The International Civil Aviation Organization, which вЂ“ among other things вЂ“ assigns globally unique codes to airports. How about an afternoon flight over the beautiful scenery of the Blue Ridge Mountains in South Carolina? Enter ICAO Identifier 33A in the Location category and select the picturesque Fairview airfield. From a normal overflight altitude of about 6,000 to 7,000 feet, the city views generated from OpenStreetMap data look at least halfway realistic.ДЇigure 8: The -launcher start option opens a convenient wizard that lets you select the airport, aircraft, and many other FlightGear settings. While landscapes automatically generated from elevation data look quite realistic, the scenery developers have to design recognizable buildings by hand. For example, in Nuremberg, Germany, the castle looks a bit different in reality than on the screen ( Figure 5), which is only to be expected. Compared to the brilliant nature scenes, low overflights over cities are somewhat disappointing. In addition, around 180 contributors have designed local features, such as airports or cities.ДЇlightGear renders landscapes around the world with natural-looking vegetation, including impressive mountain scenes from the North American Blue Ridge Mountains to the Himalayas ( Figure 4). It is based on a model of the entire Earth's surface that processes data from the space shuttle program, the global coastline database GSHHG, and data from the European Environment Agency and OpenStreetMap. A huge amount of work was also put into representing the landscape. This means that the aircraft appear realistic from different angles and in different lighting conditions.

Without 3D clouds, the FlightGear world appears far less vivid, but it is often sufficient to just reduce the density of the clouds or the distance at which they become visible.ДЇlightGear features numerous aircraft types whose cockpits and exterior views the program renders as 3D models.

Experience shows that the 3D clouds option consumes the most graphics capacity. You would normally see a simple slide control here, but if the Custom Settings option is enabled, then the Shader options button opens a dialog for detailed settings ( Figure 3) that govern the rendering quality of scenery display.

The Shader Effects have a noticeable influence on the frame rate.

The Region-specific option for Terrain Textures colors the terrain and vegetation to match the region, for example, the Blue Ridge Mountains actually look blue instead of green. You can also choose the vegetation density, and decide whether or not trees and bushes should throw shadows. The dialog warns you about the memory consumption, which can climb to 8GB. In the Scenery Layers section you can decide whether FlightGear shows you Pylons and Power lines and objects such as barns ( Scenery Objects), based on a database, and also adds Random Scenery Objects to the landscape. Figure 2: The Rendering Options allow you to adapt FlightGear's resource consumption to an acceptable frame rate on your system.

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