Riga Airport for FS9

Sections of this document.
	Preamble.
	The real airport - Overview.
	The scenery - Overview.
	What the BGLs do.
	BGLs to remove from Vyacheslav's scenery in order to remove his version of Riga Airport *only*.
	Uh, but what if I like the lights but I think they're too bright/dark/the wrong colour?
	Conclusion.
	Legalese.

Preamble
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You may not want to read all of this straight away, but I recommend keeping this file with the scenery if you encounter frame-rate problems with the extensive forests. This scenery was tested on a P4-2.66Ghz hyperthreading CPU, 1.5GB memory and an Nvidia FX5200 graphics card with 128MB memory. On this system I was getting between 15-24fps on final to the airport, and better once on the ground. I did the forests the way I have because I didn't want to get into the process of landclass-making. If someone wants to make a landclass, feel free, and then the forestation BGL may become obsolete.

It is IMPORTANT to note that the scenery comes in two basic flavours. As it comes "out of the box" it has full night texturing and the lighting poles create light "splashes" on the tarmac at night, as though they were really shining there. They don't illuminate planes, just the ground around them. The second flavour of the scenery does away with the lighting splashes. You may not like them, or you may experience a small frame-rate drop when you have them installed (lighting poles with light splashes are slightly more complex objects - but not much!). You can install either flavour by using the BGLs in the two subfolders below my scenery folder, one of which is called "With Splashes" and the other "Without splashes".

You SHOULD NOT have both options in the scenery folder at one time, they should work okay, but almost everything at the airport will be duplicated and your frame-rates will probably die.

To have "splashes" enabled - use the following BGLs
	Riga Southern Hangars With Splashes.bgl
	Riga Tower With Light Splashes.bgl

To have "splashes" disabled - use these BGLs instead
	Riga Southern Hangars.bgl
	Riga Tower.bgl

Remember, this is an either/or - use one pair of BGLs or the other according to your preference. By default I've set up the "with splashes" BGLs for you, if you like them, you don't need to do anything else to enjoy this scenery apart from add traffic. :-)

There is a downside to using the light splashes. Because these splashes are rendered on a flat base that sits at the foot of the tower, the lighting poles are made so that they don't cast shadows because otherwise the base also casts a shadow on the ground (even though it's at ground level) during daytime. Sure, I could put the base below ground level, but then at night the light splash is beneath the ground and can't be seen! I've set the "drawing priority" of the base to 1 (the MS default ground textures are priority 0) so that the textures take precedence over the ground when they're displayed. If two surfaces are completely aligned, the colours of each will create an interference pattern with the other (the infamous "flickering ground textures" problem) unless the drawing priorities are established.

The real airport - Overview
-----------------------------

The scenery recreates the terminal and hangars for Riga, Latvia. Riga is beginning to see an increase in traffic, primarily by low-cost carriers such as Ryanair, Easyjet and Aer Lingus (remember, they're re-inventing themselves as "low fares, way better"). The local airlines provide most of the action, Air Baltic, Aviavilsa, RAF-Avia, Concors, Lat Charter, Transeast (Yak 40), Latpass (although I thought they were out of business they're listed on the airport website), Inversija (they park across from the terminal in the trees to the west of the airport), VIP Aviation (BAe 125-700), Baltijas Ekspresa Linijas (Tu134 and 154) and the Rigas Aeroklub (An-24 and others). Many of the cargo carriers operate for the Air Rep organisation (based in Britain). There's also an old Tu-134 at the far northeastern corner of the cargo area that is in partial Aeroflot colours with the word "Training" in red along the side. I considered sourcing models to add as statics (for the derelicts that are at the airport, mainly at the "museum" - Tu-22 Backfire, Antonovs etc etc), but that way lies madness. They'd certainly add character to that characterless part of the airport, a small addon BGL might do the trick if someone else wants to give it a go.

Other international flights come from British Airways (A320), Lufthansa (mainline and Cityline), Austrian (CRJ200), CSA (737), Uzbekistan (a 767 stages through here on the way to New York), Estonian, Finnair (ATR) and Eurolot (Embraer 145 and 170). In general, the airport is pretty quiet.

The scenery - Overview
-------------------------

The airport has been done "by eye" from a variety of photographs. The heights and other dimensions of objects have been measured by estimation. I know how large a 737 is and, when I see one against an object, I can make some informed guesses as to that object's size. As a result the sizes look okay but might not be 100% accurate. I've taken considerable care not to base the size of an object on the size of a nearby object in my scenery (a guess based on another guess just increases the possibility of error). I think it looks okay, and I'm using it in my setup, so you might like it too.

Note that the scenery doesn't come with a large exclusion area to remove all default (or lower priority) objects. Any default stuff that got in the way has been removed by specific exclusions, some of the default stuff was actually useful so I left it in. If you get other weird objects appearing in the scenery (such as extra lighting gantries in strange places) you probably have a lower scenery for the airport that needs to be deactivated, because this scenery won't suppress it. The reason I did it this way was that I just wanted to replace a few default objects (eg the awful default terminal, as I did at Sharjah) without going too far, and then I changed the scope of the project to include the rest of the airport!

Like my scenery for Sharjah airport, released (escaped?) a couple of weeks ago, I have included some off-airport infrastructure in order to give more of a context for the airport. Too many airports in FS are "planted in the middle of nowhere".

Also similar to the Sharjah scenery is the modular aspect of the scenery components. Some parts can hit frame rates but are kept separate in order that you can exclude entire sections if you need to. The main one to watch for is the "Riga Forestation" BGL in your Riga/Scenery folder. This adds all the trees that are outside the airport boundary. The trees are Gerrish Gray's creations, and although these are well-coded in terms of frame-rate hits, if you put enough of them into a scenery then everything will slow to a crawl regardless. Gerrish put coding into the "tree group" objects that excludes parts of groupings (stands or lines of trees) progressively as you lower the scenery density slider, but lowering that slider probably also removes other objects from other parts of the scenery, so it isn't always ideal. Hence I've put the forestation into a separate file that you can copy to a subfolder ("swapped out" is my favourite name for such folders). Next time you fire up FS9 it'll notice that the BGL is now "missing" and will recreate the scenery indexes with no further work on your part. Note that the forest canopy is created with "unrealistic" trees, in that they're canopy conifers rather than columnar ones as in Riga's real-world woodland. I did this simply to cover more ground with fewer trees. The trees around the edges of woodland are columnar to preserve the illusion of dense growth. From a distance you get the impression of extensive forestation and that's what I wanted to achieve. If you fly up close and get picky, well, that's your choice! There is a clearing at each end of the runway at the real-world airport, this means that the trees are just far enough away from the users' aircraft in FS9 that they don't cause severe frame-rate drops. If you get very close to the trees the frame-rate will certainly be crippled, but at a certain distance they become comparatively frame-rate friendly.

The other BGL that could be moved aside is the Riga-Vehicles.bgl. This simply adds cars, trucks and sundry airside vehicles. If they hurt your frame-rates and you can live without them, you can remove the BGL or swap it out.

Trees close to the terminal will remain there because they're included with the terminal and hangar BGLs (it is easier to place trees around buildings when you can see both of them in the same graphical interface). Note that all the trees are coded with season band=4, what this means for the user is that the trees will exhibit seasonal variations consistent with the harder winters of northern latitudes. certainly from what I've seen of the pictures that I used to develop this scenery, Latvia gets some rather industrial-strength winters. Whether Latvia is season band 3 or 4 is an open question. Technically it is probably borderline, although it has coast it doesn't have anything helpful such as the Gulf Stream which helps to keep the British Isles as mild as they are (although with climate change slowing down the Gulf Stream by reducing the warm/cold water differential that makes it function, that might not last forever!). Since the Baltic is pretty deep, it is also pretty cold, immersion survival is probably like that of the North Sea, measurable in seconds.

But enough of this ...

There are other frame-eating constructions here (simple fences can do this because they're repeated often - lots of repetitions of small sections). With fences and walls I've made them visible only from within 1000 metres. This means that an aircraft landing won't see the fences because the runway is just over 1000 metres/1km from the landside areas (which are fenced off from airside, obviously) and won't suddenly be affected by new objects popping into view at a crucial moment. When you're taxying in, however, the fences should be visible almost on leaving the runway. 1000 metres seemed to be a reasonable compromise distance. I'm not keen on fences appearing section-by-section like Wallace & Gromit's railway track.

What the BGLs do.
-------------------

The various BGLs add their own set of objects, some of which aren't immediately obvious. Note that I've created the scenery using very few bitmaps (3 day bmps at 1024x1024 and three night lightmaps).

Riga Tower.bgl adds the control tower and the infrastructure to the north of the terminal building. It also adds all the ramp light poles (red & white skeletal and columns, and the grey column lights close to the pier) and also the trees in this area, the building across the car park from the terminal (and the Lukoil hoarding on its roof) oh, and the blast fence to the west side of the north apron.

Riga Terminal.bgl adds the terminal building. That's all.

Riga South Hangars.bgl adds all the southern hangars (no, really?) and also the trees, fences and walls in this area. It also adds the off-airport infrastructure that sits landside from the hangars. Since this consists of only about a dozen objects, I figured that it wouldn't be worth splitting out from the hangars BGL. This BGL contains a lot of detail in any case, and a dozen more simple buildings wouldn't make a lot of difference. I believe that the large hangar hasn't yet been completed (in the real world). In the airliners.net photos I used for reference it appears several times as a weird large rusty trelliswork. I thought at first that it was some Russian relic being pulled down! It is however destined to be the MRO centre for CSA, and is being constructed in collaboration with Concors (an airline based at Riga) in order to handle the maintenance for CSA's fleet of 737s and ATRs (and later, the A320). I expect that Concors will have their Yak-42 and LET410s in there from time to time. It is based on an artist's impression on the Concors website (that helpfully provided the dimensions of the hanger section).

These three BGLs add all of the main objects at the airport. You need all three for the scenery to work as a cohesive whole. The only ones you can do without are the forestation (but once you've used it you're likely to miss it if you swap it out into a subfolder) and the vehicles. The airport also depends upon the AFCAD that is also included. The dimensions of this Afcad layout are based on aerial photographs that indicated major inaccuracies in the Microsoft default layout for Riga. For example, the cargo area (nominally, the north-eastern corner of the airport) is too far from the runway in FS9. Find an aerial photo on Airliners.net and you'll see for yourself. The taxiways and aprons are all accounted for, but they're stretched too far to the east and I've corrected that as far as I'm able. As a result I had to make new buildings for this area (not too hard, there aren't too many buildings there). I also used the Afcad to create the roads amongst the buildings by the southern hangars. The apron near the new Concors hangar has been extended so that the hanger can be used, I put a parking spot in the hangar, if you don't like it, simply use Lee Swordy's AFCAD program to pull it into line with the other parking spots to each side. I'm assuming that the apron just to the south of there will remain the same size as it is now, since to extend it seems to involve removing what appears to be a graveyard.

It was only late in this mini-project that I discovered that another author, Vyacheslav Kirilus, had created a light scenery for Riga and its Airport in FS9. This other scenery is available on Avsim.ru and it uses default objects and addon jetways for the airport itself, but adds other objects that are landmarks in the area. You can still use these landmarks (and terrain) without that other airport, and use my version of the airport instead. Since this version has objects that I created myself (using EOD to build and FSSC to place them) the overall effect has been improved. If you decide to use both sceneries, remember to include this one at a higher priority in the library, and remove the airport-specific BGLs from the other scenery (I'll give a list below this section). You can find VK's scenery on Avsim.ru simply by searching for "Riga". It is about a 5.6MB download.

BGLs to remove from Vyacheslav's scenery in order to remove his version of Riga Airport *only*.
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you want to use this airport in conjunction with Vyacheslav's scenery objects, you need to remove these BGLs from his scenery (probably by swapping them out, if you want to keep them close to hand).
1/ Install VK's scenery for Riga - The folder will be called Riga (which is why I named mine "Riga Airport").
2/ Navigate to the scenery folder for this scenery.
3/ Create a subfolder called "Swapped out" (or your own language's equivalent) in this folder.
4/ Move the following files from VK's scenery folder into "Swapped out". I've given an idea of what they're supposed to do.
	EVRA_2004_Exclude.bgl	- Blanket exclude area
	EVRA_2004.xcl
	EVRA_2004.bgl		- VK's airport scenery.
	PR.bgl			- This puts the Riga sign on the terminal roof (but we already have one ...)
	AF2-EVRA.bgl		- VK's AFCAD layout. This will be incompatible with the scenery and will duplicate my AFCAD creating a likelihood of crashes.
	Gateslibg.bgl		- The library that VK uses to create his default gates.

Activate VK's scenery in the FS scenery manager. THEN activate my scenery and keep it one priority level above VK's at all times. You'll have VK's Riga City objects and my airport.

Uh, but what if I like the lights but I think they're too bright/dark/the wrong colour?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

You'll need to be conversant with DXTBMP (Martin Wright's excellent graphics converter) and a "paint program" such as Paintshop Pro, Adobe Photoshop, CorelPaint or whatever your favourite is. Try to avoid using MSPaint, *please* - the idea of tweaking is to make things look better, not worse!

You can change the intensity of the lighting on the ground by adjusting the brightness of these bitmaps :
	Lightsplashbig_LM.bmp
	Lightsplashbig2_LM.bmp

Why two lightmaps? Well, if you haven't noticed, there are two types of light cluster used in the scenery, a 3-light one that looks three ways, and a two-light one where the two lights face the same direction. They create different patterns on the ground and these bitmaps handle each different lightspill pattern. I've had to make their dimensions less extensive than I'd like (this is hardcoded into the light-pole object) because if the splashes of light overlap, they cause display problems with each other (two surfaces with the same drawing priority). The way around that would be to make lots of lightpoles with differing display priorities for the bases, but it would have been a complication too far.

You *don't* adjust the daytime bitmaps, Lightsplashbig.bmp and Lightsplashbig2.bmp - these have an alpha channel set to pure black so that they don't appear during daytime. A black alpha channel makes textures completely transparent, so they could have a picture of Mickey Mouse (TM) on them and it wouldn't show up. With the base being transparent in daytime the lights just look like normal lights.

So, what to do?

If you've not used DXTBMP before, you'll need to tell it what your paint program is (using the "Prefs|Select Editor" menu item) and, while you're in the "Prefs" zone, also select "Display Alpha Channel" and you'll see it on the right hand side of the program's display area. In this area there's also an option "Save Mipmaps" - De-select this, there's little point in using MIPs for most of the time. This scenery doesn't use them anywhere.

If you can see the alpha channel and the main image you'll notice two things. The image is a rather boring overall grey colour, and the alpha channel looks like the light spill pattern. I see many sceneries where some poor soul has sweated blood to make the light spillage pattern look great in the main image, but try changing the intensity of a subtly-graded image and you run into countless problems getting it to look right ever again! If for example you just asked the paint program to decrease the brightness overall, the outer parts of the spill pattern would shrink inwards a little because they'd dim to black, and the light spill would become dimmer, but also smaller in size. Well, I decided that changing the intensity should be easy and it should be possible to alter it without the need to tinker with the spillage pattern at all. Thus I separated the two aspects of the lighting, the intensity is in the main image and the pattern is held in the Alpha Channel. So, what I'm working towards is this ...

In order to change the intensity of the lights, all you need to do is alter the grey level of the main image (leave the Alpha Channel alone unless you really want to change the shape of the spillage pattern). The Alpha Channel is just a gradated window through which this base colour shows. The grey is completely uniform and can be changed to white, for example, if you want a really washed-out look, or a slightly darker grey if you want to have dimmer lighting overall. As it is set by me, the lighting is just about bright enough to see taxiway lines but without being too dark to qualify as light spillage. If you want to change the colour of the lights you can tint the main image to suit, perhaps the blue of tungsten, or the oranges and ivories that are also sometimes seen.

Note that these lightmaps are saved as 32-bit images and are therefore both quite large (you'll notice the daytime ones are a lot smaller, but then they're invisible, so quality isn't an issue). If you save the lightmaps as DXT3 for example, you'll get a noticeable degradation of quality because the subtle gradations won't be reproduced faithfully in a less-detailed format. You can try, but I'm certain you'd be disappointed.

In DXTBMP you select the option "File|Save As ...|Extended Bitmap" and choose the format "Extended 32-bit 888-8".

If your system is struggling with large bitmap files such as these lightmaps, by all means experiment with the textures for your own amusement, getting them down to a size that works for you. If you cannot get a compromise that you like, you'll probably have to contemplate using the version of the scenery that doesn't use the light spillage effect.

Conclusion
-----------

I hope I've not confused you with options, but I wanted you to have as much control over your use of the scenery as possible, without writing some clunky little configuration program to do it for you. Remember the following ...

You can opt for light splashes or otherwise by the use of alternate sets of BGLs.
You can reduce the frame-rate hit by removing a couple of BGLs for forestation and vehicles.
Life is much better when you treat people with respect and think beautiful thoughts.

Enjoy the scenery!

Matthew Ministry, August 2005
Currently in the UK.
Preferably in Italy.

Legalese.
---------
This scenery and archive are copyright property from the moment they were created. Since it is available for free there is no sensible reason for wanting to do anything other than use it. Don't repackage it or redistribute it or, worst of all, try to pass it off as your own work. There are quite enough pathetic no-life's in the world without adding to the pathetic no-life population. If you want to have people believe you've made a scenery of your own, better to have made one for real rather than live your life as a shallow pretender and no-hoper. :-) Besides, there are much better sceneries out there to plagiarise than this one!

This archive can be hosted on Flightsim.com, FSNordic.net, Avsim.com and Avsim.ru. No other site can host this file without permission.
This archive or any of its contents may not under any circumstances be distributed for profit on any media whatsoever. It may not be used to promote or support any for-profit venture. It cannot be dissassembled or distributed in this, or any changed form.

The trademarks and other devices of the companies whose logos are recreated in the scenery are the properties of their respective owners. This scenery isn't affiliated or endorsed by these companies and isn't intended to be an endorsement of them in return!

This scenery will only be updated if I find anything wrong with it. Comments regarding its suitability for your setup should be addressed to your deity of choice. If you don't like it, feel free not to use it.

I occasionally write on the Project AI boards and, although I can't promise I'll get to see a message, I may! If you've not been there before, try lurking and you'll find a generally welcoming and helpful community.