Airport & Scenery Designer




    Tech Support

    For more than two years, Airport & Scenery Designer has been the tool of choice for users who have wanted to make their own scenery for Microsoft Flight Simulator (and now Microsoft Combat Flight Simulator). Below are some of the common questions that F.A.Q.s that users have been asking.

    Please read through them to see if we aleady have the answer to your question. If your particular question is not answered, you can send us a Problem Report - see below.

    You can find additional information about ASD by reading The Airport & Scenery Designer Flyer. To read the ASD Flyer now, click here.


    Frequently Asked Questions

      General Questions:

    1. What's the history behind Airport & Scenery Designer?
    2. Who's involved with producing Airport & Scenery Designer?
    3. Can I sell scenery which I've created with ASD?
    4.  
    5. Specific Questions:
    6. While using an ASD compatible-map, I can see the outline of an island. How do I turn this into a real island?
    7. Can you explain how the ASD banding feature works?
    8. Where is the manual for SCASM?
    9. I seem to be missing two textures on one of the included macros with ASD 2.0. How can I get these textures?
    10. Page 26-29 of the ASD manual mentions files from the MAPTOOLS folder on the CD-ROM and I cannot locate the MAPTOOLS folder. Where are the files mentioned in the book?
    11. I've made several new sceneries using ASD V2.0 or V2.1 and want to make them available for download. However, including the standard ASD textures with each makes the files very large. Can non-ASD users get the standard set of ASD textures elsewhere?
    12.  

    Answers to your Frequently Asked Questions

    Question: What's the history behind Airport & Scenery Designer?

    Answer: Several years ago, several very talented programmers invented tools to build very detailed add-on scenery for Microsoft Flight Simulator. Among these tools were BGLCOMP, BGLGEN, SCASM and FSASM. These tools were at the same time both clever and complex. Clever in that they could exploit the rich graphics engine that Bruce Artwick and his FS crew molded into Microsoft Flight Simulator. Complex in that these tools required a deep understanding of the underlying structure of FS scenery and entering many exacting numerical parameters.

    Author Peter Jacobson wanted something easier to use. His concept was to build a more intuitive tool that could drastically cut down on the complexity and time-consuming coding required by these earlier tools. To this end, Peter wrote a freeware program named ScBuild.

    ScBuild is a visual "front-end" to one of the other tools - SCASM. Using ScBuild, a designer "draws" scenery elements on the screen. This visual approach to scenery design was quite innovative. With the entire scenery area laid out on the screen, the designer is able to view all elements in perspective - something that is not possible with other tools. When the designer is done, ScBuild automatically generates the required numeric parameters and codes needed by the SCASM tool to assemble the completed scenery files.

    Airport & Scenery Designer is the successor to the groundbreaking ScBuild.

    Question: Who's involved with producing Airport & Scenery Designer?

    Answer: Peter Jacobson is of course the architect and chief designer of Airport & Scenery Designer.

    Manfred Modenhauer is the author of SCASM and has created a special version of his well-know tool especially for us which enables ASD to automatically generate the scenery files in one step, saving time and adding convenience.

    Tim Dickens is the author of the 200+ objects. Using these macros, Tim lets you easily customize these 2D and 3D objects to your scenery using an enhanced ASD macro facility.

    There are also several other dedicated designers and testers who wish not to be named at this point.

    Question: Can I sell scenery which I've created with ASD?

    Answer: Yes.

    In the past, SCASM-generated scenery was restricted to non-commerical user only. Version 2.01 of SCASM no longer has the restricted distribtuion notice. If you look at the output of SCASM, you'll see the following:

    
Scenery Assembler Vers. 2.01 (32)
(c)1996 Manfred Moldenhauer, CompuServe: 100117,1465
This version is licensed for use with Airport & Scenery Designer

    Please keep in mind, that ASD is no different from other development tools. It lets you "design" scenery regardless of origin of the objects and information that goes into the your final BGLs. Hopefully, these are original ideas that have not been borrowed from other sceneries.

    Question: While using an ASD compatible-map, I can see the outline of an island. How do I turn this into a real island?

    Answer:

    1. Connect (if necessary) all of the line segments of the island. Use the join command if needed.
    2. Change the region type from None to Island.
    3. Set the texture, fallback color and RefPoint Scale.
    4. Load the FS booster tiles for the area. Cover up any land tiles that extend outside the island with water tiles.
    5. Coasts aren't necessary unless you want beaches.

    Question: Can you explain how the ASD banding feature works?

    Answer: Banding allows you to segment a single, large scenery area into several smaller BGLs. The goal of banding is to improve the performance of Flight Simulator.

    A typical banding strategy is to divide your large scenery area into several 'bands' - each covering 1 to 1.5 degrees of latitude. Dividing it into smaller BGLs increases the frame rate since a smaller BGL LatRange argument (matching the specified band) contains less data to be processed. When flying outside of that range, FS does not have to process the data in any of the other bands.

    On the other hand, if you put all of your scenery into a single BGL file (and therefore, one LatRange), FS must process the entire large BGL file - which requires more time and decreases the frame rate.

    Question: Where is the manual for SCASM?

    Answer: Yes. There are actually four 'documents' for SCASM. After installation, they are located in the ASDv2\Scasm folder. They are named:

    1. Scadoc.doc - Main Reference
    2. Scadyn.doc - Dynamic Scenery Reference
    3. scaseed.doc - Seed Textures
    4. SC-coding.doc - Coding Instructions

    Use wordpad.exe to read these documents which will retain the formatting. If you use Microsoft Word, the formatting is incorrect.

    Alternatively, these manuals are available as PDF formatted documents. To view the PDF formatted documents, you'll can download the free Acrobat Reader from Adobe. If you already have the Acrobat Reader, download the following SCASM PDF-formatted documents from our website:

    1. scadoc.pdf - Main Reference (102K)
    2. scadyn.pdf - Dynamic Scenery Reference (25K)
    3. scaseed.pdf - Seed Textures (5K)
    4. scacode.pdf - Coding Instructions (22K)

    After viewing these PDF documents, you can print them for your reference.

    Question: I seem to be missing two textures on one of the included macros with ASD 2.0. How can I get these textures?

    Answer: You can download them from here. The files were missed during the CD's production. Download these files and place them in FS's main Texture folder.

    It may be necessary to hold the Shift key down when you click these files to begin the download.

    • wall1.r8 (64K)
    • wall2.r8 (64K)

    Question: Page 26-29 of the ASD manual mentions files from the MAPTOOLS folder on the CD-ROM and I cannot locate the MAPTOOLS folder. Where are the files mentioned in the book?

    Answer: You can download them from here. The files were missed during the CD's production. Download these files and place them in the ASD's folder. You can create a seperate folder for them if you like.

    The file to download is called MAPTOOLS.ZIP. You'll need a zip utility such as WinZip to unzip the file.

    • maptools.zip (470K)

    Question: I've made several new sceneries using ASD V2.0 or V2.1 and want to make them available for download. However, including the standard ASD textures with each makes the files very large. Can non-ASD users get the standard set of ASD textures elsewhere?

    Answer: Yes. A non-ASD user can download and add these standard ASD textures his FS \texture folder. If he later uses your ASD generated scenery he'll have all of the textures that are included with ASD. The size of your scenery download files will shrink considerably.

    Download and unzip ASD21_TEXTURES.ZIP1 into your main FS \texture folder.

    • asdv21_textures.zip (1.1 MB)

    Send Problem Report to Tech Support

    If these F.A.Qs haven't answered your question, then you can click to send a Problem Report to our tech support staff.

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