Americas scenery for FlightGear

(2024-01-06) The scenery directory has changed from fgfs-canada-us-scenery/ to fgfs-americas-scenery/ because of its increased coverage. Please update your scenery paths.

(2023-12-23) A few scenery areas (e.g. Bermuda, eastern Brazil) sometimes crash due to a SimGear bug triggered by a specific regional texture. The bug is fixed in the latest source-code commits, and will work its way into the 3.x and 4.x releases soon.

Improved default Americas scenery for the open-source FlightGear flight simulator (also includes Iceland, Hawaii, the Galapagos, Easter Island, and the Falklands/Malvinas).

Map not available.

Up-to-date scenery buckets are highlighted in green; buckets from older builds are highlighted in yellow, and might not match up at boundaries. Mouse over to see the bucket name, and click on a bucket to download. If you have trouble using the map, try the direct download links.

Note: after downloading, run the gen-symlinks.sh script (Linux, MacOS) or gen-symlinks.bat script (Windows; not tested) to include buildings, osm2city objects, etc.

Batch download

If you want to download all of the scenery files at once, you can download the file download-links.txt, which includes a single URL on each line, then use it with wget or curl. Note that you will be downloading over 33 GB of data (as of 2023-08-05). 

          $ wget -i download-links.txt

…or… 

          $ xargs -n 1 curl -O < download-links.txt

Data sources

Start of current build cycle:

Elevations
1-arcsec (30m) FABDEM — Copernicus GLO DEM, with forests and buildings removed [FABDEM download], supplemented by 3-arcsec (100m) SRTM-3 DEM where Copernicus is unavailable, e.g. north of 80N latitude, or buggy [Graphical SRTM-3 download].
Background landcover
Global Land Cover by National Mapping Organizations (GLCNMO) at 15 arcsec (nominally 250m) resolution, which provides background landcover to fill in any gaps in more-detailed OSM data. [GLCNMO download]
Airports
The community X-Plane Scenery Gateway, via the Airports/apt.dat.ws3 extract in the FlightGear v4 base package.
Landmass outline, detailed landcover, roads, railroads, powerline rights-of-way, and inland water
OpenStreetMap [Global land polygons download], [planet.osm.pbf].

Major changes

2024-08-26

  • Starting adding grass easements around highways and railways to keep the trees from hiding them.
  • Switched to Gravel cover for dams and piers.

Version 1.0 release (2024-01-12)

  • Completed internally-consistent build of the Americas integrating the fixes below (beaches, water, etc), and releasing as 1.0.
  • Version 2.0 will use a higher-resolution raster for background landcover (probably 30m) and may incorporate new features from OSM, but there will be no more configuration or feature changes for the version 1.0 stream, just bugfixes.

2024-01-08

  • Added missing water areas back in (from OSM natural=water).
  • Fix runway surface types (grass runways were showing up as paved).

2024-01-06

  • Renamed scenery directory root to fgfs-americas-scenery/
  • Added the South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands.
  • Fixed issue with elevations near 180W.
  • Fixed broken elevations in Midtown Manhattan.

2023-12-27

  • Added beaches back in (were accidently left out of the past few releases).
  • Distinguish sand from gravel beaches.

2023-12-17

  • Start building scenery south of the equator, and rebrand as "Americas scenery" in the HTML pages. The name of the actual scenery directory will change to fgfs-americas-scenery/ soon as well.
  • Tweak elevation and landcover extracts to use a 1 deg overlap on each side of a 10x10 deg bucket, to help avoid gullies and other discontinuities at the edges of buckets.
  • Remove leisure=nature-reserve from the OSM areas built, because sometimes the nature reserves are actually over water instead of land.

2023-11-29

  • Switch to ws3.0 airport source, with significantly more airports and airport detail
  • Fixed elevation issue with airports that caused them to appear above or below scenery (was picking up SRTM-3 even when the scenery was using FABDEM)
  • Tweak OSM filter to pick up smaller areas for piers, lock gates, and breakwaters (normal cutoff is about 100x100m)
  • Add tertiary roads back into the scenery

2023-11-16

  • Add significantly-improved urban detail, including parks, recreation areas, educational areas, urban forests, etc (BuiltUpArea had previously had too high a priority)

2023-11-11

  • Major revamp for OSM areas.

2023-10-27

  • Remove OSM airfield areas (civilian and military), because they don't always correspond to cleared space (especially concerned about water aerodromes).
  • Some tweaks for elevation data.
  • Correct some materials for roads.
  • Switch to OSM Planet for all scenery building, so that we can do any global scenery.

2023-10-13

  • Added Greenland
  • Added Bermuda
  • Added the Caribbean and West Indies

(I may try to reconstruct earlier changes later)