for MS Flight Simulator 2004

This is Chopper Friendly scenery, folks. It wasn't designed to be flown over at 10,000 feet - although, if you like to fly heavy iron into the major New York/New Jersey airports, you'll notice that it replaces the terrain elevation of Northern New Jersey with all the hills and valleys that the default scenery left out. No, this is interactive scenery. Built to be explored low and slow. Want to perfect your landing skills in a huge playground of rooftops, irregular terrain, and tight spaces? This is the place. You won't find any unlandable surfaces or false crashes here - just hundreds of places to touch down ranging from beginner, through expert, to downright sick!

The main feature here is the town of North Haledon (pronounced hayl - din), or, more precisely, part of North Haledon and the neighboring towns of Haledon and Wayne - in New Jersey, USA. There's a police station with landable helipad, four schools, ballfields, an optional forest fire (with a scenic lake nearby for refilling), too many highly detailed houses and buildings to count, and much more. It's about 17 nm from New York City, in case you want to make a side trip.

Installation

1. Unzip the file to a folder outside of the Flight Sim installation
   
   
2. In the Flight Sim installation, make a folder called North Haledon, wherever you keep your addon scenery (normally, in the Addon Scenery folder).
   
   
3. Copy the Scenery and Texture folders into the new North Haledon folder
   
   
4. Copy the contents of the Effects folder into your Flight Sim installation's main Effects folder
   
   
5. Copy the contents of the TreesNH folder into your Flight Sim installation's main Texture folder
   
   
6. Open your fs9.cfg file. If you don't know where it is:
   
   -Choose Start > Search > All files & folders
   
   -Enter fs9.cfg in the top field
   
   -Click the More Advanced Options dropdown, and check Search hidden files and folders
   
   -Click Search
   
   
   
7. Find the TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL setting, and edit it to read:
   
   TERRAIN_MAX_VERTEX_LEVEL=19
   
   Save the file.
   
   NOTE: If this value is set to a number other than 19, some objects won't be situated correctly on the terrain, and you'll get sunken parking lots and other weird things. If you've got Holger Sandmann's Hood River scenery installed, you might have it set to 20 or 21, but in tests I've done with that scenery 19 seems to work fine.
   
   
8. Launch Flight Simulator and go through the usual shtick to add the scenery:
   
   -Choose Settings > Scenery > Scenery Library

   -Click Add Area

   -Navigate to the North Haledon folder

   -Click OK to save the changes

   -Restart Flight Simulator
   

9. Turn off ground shadows (Settings > Display > Scenery - then un-check Ground scenery casts shadows). Ground shadows will not only kill your frame rates, but it was impossible to get them to display correctly due to the irregular sloping terrain and the objects that precisely conform to it. Turn them off. They're evil.

Finding the place

North Haledon is a fairly quick trip by chopper from the major New York/New Jersey airports, as well as the Manhattan heliports. The nearest airport is Essex County Airport (KCDW). Take off from Essex County and fly 054 for about 3 minutes - when you see the William Paterson University water tower, North Haledon is just over the hill. Or, use one of the flight plans that are included; see Using the Flight Plans for more info.

Frame rates

I used every trick in the book to keep the frame rate impact to a minimum. That said, this is a highly detailed environment and is infinitely more pleasurable on a high octane machine. I did a lot of experimenting with Flight Sim's display settings and found that, other than turning off ground shadows, they have very little impact on frame rates. I suspect that on a low end machine that might not be the case, though, so experiment. If your graphics card is using antialiasing, you can definitely get a frame rate boost by turning it off.

Placement of traffic lights, streetlights, and road signs

This project was designed to look correct when USA Roads is installed (see Links to other useful files). While that addon isn't required for this scenery to work correctly, without it you'll be missing most of the roads in the area - and there'll be traffic lights, streetlights, and signs in seemingly weird places. If you're not using USA Roads, you can hide these objects by moving the file lights_signs_placement.bgl out of the Scenery folder and into a backup folder.

The forest fire

The forest fire is inactive by default. To turn it on, move the 6 files that start with "Fire_" out of Scenery\Forest Fire, into Scenery. To turn off the fire, move them back. You should also turn off cloud display completely when using the fire (Create a Flight > User-defined Weather > Change > Weather Themes > Clear Skies), since the Sim has a drawing order bug when displaying clouds and the fire simultaneously.

The fire is up in the woods near High Mountain...you can make firefighting runs from Oldham Pond. There are some good freeware firefighting helicopters out there - including the Aircrane and Firehawk at Hovercontrol (under File Downloads > HC Helicopters).

Using the flight plans

• Copy the .PLN files from the Flight Plans folder to the folder where MS Flight Sim keeps your Flight Plan files - It's normally a folder called Flight Simulator Files - the path usually looks something like this:
  
  C:\Documents and Settings\YourName\My Documents\Flight Simulator Files
  
  
  
• If you already have Flight Sim open with a flight loaded, hit Alt key, then choose Flights > Flight Planner.
  
  Otherwise, launch Flight Sim, and...
  
  - Choose Create a Flight
  
  - Select your aircraft and time/season
  
  - Choose Flight Planner
  
  
  
• Click Load, then choose a flight plan
  
  
• Click the OK button at the extreme lower right of the screen. When asked if you want Flight Sim to put your aircraft at the departure airport, answer Yes.
  
  
• Click Fly Now
  
  
• Bring up your GPS (the small "satellite dish" icon on the chopper's control panel)
  
  
• The magenta line on the GPS shows the way into town
  
  
• If you don't like the starting position or orientation of your aircraft, you can move it - then save everything as a Flight file (Alt key > Flight > Save Flight). This will save your location, aircraft, weather, flight plan, and GPS entries.

Compatibility with terrain addons

This scenery has been tested both with and without FS Terrain. The terrain elevation data contained here has a higher resolution than FS Terrain and the default scenery, even when set to their highest values, and will override it.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to...

• Phil Cruikshank - for the Northern New Jersey terrain elevation data
  
  
• Zdenek Kussior - for help with accurate crash detection
  
  
• Arno Gerretsen - for expert advice from the man behind the ultimate scenery creation web site: www.scenerydesign.org

Programs used

• 3DS Max - 3D modeling
  
• Gmax - 3D modeling
  
• Photoshop - Texturing
• Sbuilder - Terrain, lake, and landclass editing
• Object Placer - Placement
• FSBox - Crash Detection
  
• DXTBmp - Image conversion
  

Links to other useful files

USA Roads (payware) - Has all the major roads in the U.S., in their real world locations

Trees_FS2004_v1 (freeware) - These are the tree textures used in the screenshots on this page. They'll add variety and realism to all your existing trees, in all seasons, all parts of the world.

Metro Helicopters New York City area scenery (freeware) - Lots of free metropolitan area scenery - including the New York City heliports

New York Area helicopter route charts - Fly the real world New York/New Jersey helicopter routes

By Mick Posch
New Jersey, USA

Email:

Web:
www.mickposch.com/Flight_Sim
Check here every once in a while for minor updates, which I might not post to the big flight sim sites

Legal

This scenery is freeware, and is the property of the author. It cannot be sold or packaged with any product for sale, without the express written permission of the author. It cannot be uploaded to the Internet without the express written permission of the author. If it is uploaded to the Internet, it must be accompanied by this text file. The user assumes all risk of use; the author is not liable for any problems you may incur as a result of its use.

This scenery may not be reverse-compiled or otherwise re-used, and its texture files may not be used for other projects, whether freeware or payware.*

*NOTE: At some point in the future I'll probably release some of these materials as library objects and freeware textures, but for now I'm trying to keep the look and feel of this area unique.

©2006 Mick Posch
All rights reserved