Scenery 1.0.0

Hello everybody!

The Scenery build version 1.0.0 should be available on the download
servers now. It has taken some time, effort, several rebuilds and some
hints from Curt to get the world build correct and complete.

The scenery is based on the following data sources:

- landcover/landmass data provided from
http://mapserver.flightgear.org/, identical with VMAP0 data
- elevation data: SRTM3 version 2, SRTM30/GTOPO30 version 2 (both from
ftp://e0srp01u.ecs.nasa.gov/srtm/version2)
- airport data: apt.dat as released with the V1.0 base package
- Most objects and models from the Scenery Objects Database
  http://fgfsdb.stockill.org/

The main changes relative to the old world scenery are:

- points previously classified as "town", but not having much in common
with settlements at all, have been removed
- airport layouts updated
- objects from the Scenery Objects Database updated

In addition, the order of taxiways from the airport database is now used
as specified in the apt.dat-file - in contrast to being sorted by size
as in previous scenery builds. Many taxidraw users have been using the
sorting of the taxiways to achieve specific visual effects, which are
visible now in the scenery.

The KSFO part of the scenery now released also differs slightly from the
one in the base package V1.0.0 due to a glitch on my side, which led to
missing "ScrubCover" in the San Francisco area during the build of the
base package scenery. This glitch also lead to the bay area being
plastered with forests, which isn't compatible with reality. The fixed
scenery has already been committed to CVS by Martin Spott.

We had to apply some more modifications to TerraGear. These are not
visible in the scenery, but rather deal with the stability of TerraGear.
The changes - in addition to our extensions for new data sources - are
available from our git repository at http://mapserver.flightgear.org/git

I owe thanks to several people and I list them here in no particular
order and without pretending to be complete:

- Martin Spott, for organising the infrastructure, taking the burden of
data management and of large parts of the release process from my back,
and for his constant encouragement.

- Norman Vine, who helped us find the high-performance infrastructure
and established the links necessary to make use of it.

- John Graham of Telascience, who actually provided the hardware and
allowed us to use it. A very nice piece of hardware, I have to add!  ;-)

- Jon Stockill, for adjusting the elevations of the objects in the
objects DB, even multiple times on false "ready for release" alerts ;-)

- Olaf Flebbe for his support in checking the scenery for notable glitches.

- Our scenery testers, most notably Melchior Franz, who provided pretty
detailed feedback on his findings.

- Last, but definitely not least, Curt Olson for providing valuable
hints from his position as a long-time scenery builder and TerraGear
developer, and for his encouragement and support.

It has taken us longer than expected (we had to repeat the build several
times and the main phase of each build took about 29 hours), but we
think that we now have sufficient control over the process to get
through with it faster next time.

You won't be seeing regular monthly rebuilds too soon, but we hope that
we can support around 3-4 rebuilds a year for the time being. As our
schedules are pretty unpredictable, we cannot guarantee this frequency,
but we will do our best to automate the process as far as possible to
allow automated build without much intervention from our side. The
experience we made on this build will probably help us a lot for that task.

'nuff said. Have fun!

Ralf
-- 
Ralf Gerlich              | World Custom Scenery Project
Computer Scientist        | http://www.custom-scenery.org/



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