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The “X-Plane 10 tree lines and farms V2” scenery is completely free to download and free to use. I call it Donationware because if you like the scenery, you are invited to donate for it:
UPDATE
Nov 7, 2016
Statement about the compatibility with X-Plane 11. X-Plane 10 Tree Lines and Farms V2 will be fully compatible with X-plane 11 and can simply be moved from the old X-Plane 10 “Custom Scenery” environment to the new X-Plane 11 “Custom Scenery” environment. You only need to make sure, that in the new X-Plane 11 scnery_packs.ini the ordering remains correct (as recommended in the installation instructions).
Introduction
The “X-Plane 10 tree lines and farms V2” scenery is the second version of an overlay add-on for X-Plane 10. It tries to add “visual clutter” (tree lines and farms) to the usually relatively dull landscape of agricultural areas and grassy areas. Like in real life, with this add on, tree lines will follow – randomly – many of the roads, railroads, and the coastline of lakes or riverbanks. Every now or then, you will also find farms standing around. All in all, this gives a much more “lively” feel to the default scenery and it is best used together with HD Mesh Scenery V2!
Version 2 has coverage for:
- Europe
- North America (up to 60N)
- Japan (no farms, only tree lines!!)
It is completely heuristically derived from OpenStreetmap (OSM) data, and thus you will NOT find real counterparts of the depicted tree lines and farms! It is based on two algorithms, which were at work here (more or less completely implemented and executed in PostGIS):
- The first algorithm picks out roads of a given type (well, most “normal” roads, which are not motorways or highways etc.), railways and all water features (other than coastlines at sea shores) and places tree lines of random length parallel (with a slight offset) to the them. But this doesn’t happens everywhere, as it is filtered by the same landclass data which is used for the XP10 Global Scenery. So, tree lines will usually only appear on agriculture, grassland, pastures and sparse vegetation. Additionally, the algorithm tries to clear crossing, overpasses, or airport areas.
- The second algorithm is responsible for spreading the farms. The idea here was, to put them usually at the open end of cul-de-sacs (blind alleys) … Again, filtered by landclass (here, agriculture, grassland and pastures) and excluded from airports (as far as possible).
Then, after the scenery data was created, I needed – of course – artwork (otherwise you wouldn’t see it). Here – again – I followed two different approaches:
- Tree lines were quite easy. I have categorized them by the same climate rules, which I also applied to the XP10 Global Scenery, so I could simply map the XP10 forests (/Resources/default scenery/1000 forests/) to them. Not much magic here as you can see.
- Farms were a bit more problematic as there was no prior art to use here (well, now V2 is using the same farms from V1!). They have been modeled in Blender which tends to have quite good support for X-Plane object format via the XPlane2Blender plugin. After a lot of modeling and some texture work (some is from XP10 artwork … which is NOT allowed to be used by others … I received a special permission of course) there are now 4 types for North America, and 8 types for Europe (so yes, they look different on the two continents).
And Finally you can download the result for free (and might consider a donation – see the link on the right) and enjoy it!
Screenshots
Of course, there are lots of screenshots to enjoy! Either by going to the Gallery on the menu, or just follow these links:
Installation
To use this scenery, you simply have to unzip it, and put the resulting folder in the “Custom Scenery” folder of you X-Plane 10 installation. Those folders should be:
- “/zzz_Treelines_Farms_Europe_v2” for Europe
- “/zzz_Treelines_Farms_North_America_v2” for North America
- “/zzz_Treelines_Japan_v2” for Japan
- You have to use Custom Scenery/scenery_packs.ini to make sure, the tree lines and farms show up in your landscape:
- In the scenery_packs.ini any new folder in “Custom Scenery” will be put automatically on the TOP (beginning) of scenery_packs.ini (which puts your new scenery folder at the highest level)!
- You can always manually sort / organize the scenery_packs.ini, as X-Plane only rewrites it when you delete it (and as told in the previous point, new folders are added at the beginning of the file)
- For X-Plane 10 Tree Lines and Farms V2 to work correctly with other Scenery Packages, its best to put the folders close to the bottom of scenery_packs.ini BUT above the HD Mesh Scenery V2 folder (or ANY other base mesh package, like photoscenery from Simheaven.de)!
Legal Notice
This scenery and parts of the artwork (the farm objects, and most of the farm textures) are created by Andras Fabian (thats me). Some of the farm textures are also owned by Laminar Research (www.x-plane.com). I was granted a special permission to use them for my farms, but any other 3rd party use of them is not permitted! This means, you are not allowed to reuse my farm objects too (as they use in parts those textures).
All data is freeware (donation ware) in the sense that you are free to download, copy and redistribute them for personal and non-commerical purposes, provided that the copyright notice is retained in the copy. You are not allowed to charge a fee for these files without the consent of the author other than that to cover the cost of the distribution. If a fee is charged it must be made clear to the purchaser that these files are freeware and that the fee is to cover the distributors costs of providing the files. You are not allowed to use these files or parts thereof in a commercial product. If in doubt, please contact me!
Download
Point at the region you would like to download. The links will take you to the appropriate download location (for each region, the alternatives are listed). There you can start the download itself.
The ISDG mirror is available now too.
Europe
- Treelines_Farms_Europe_v2.zip (313,9 MByte) at flightsim.com
- Treelines_Farms_Europe_v2.zip (313,9 MByte) at ISDG.com.au
USA
- Treelines_Farms_North_America_v2.zip (235,1 MByte) at flightsim.com
- Treelines_Farms_North_America_v2.zip (235,1 MByte) at ISDG.com.au
Japan
Via X-Plane.org
Final word: all the farms have walls 🙂
(I needed to add this line because of my daughter … one day, while modeling the farms, I had bad luck … some farms became transparent, and you could partly look trough their walls … only after hours I realized, that i forgot to copy over the latest texture version, from which my objects referenced some new patches via UV mapping … But at least my daughter had a very good time, and was laughing a lot. Since then, we almost always mention this story when we see a real farm somewhere in the wild, and she points out how nice the walls of those farms are …).