What geographical areas are covered?

By the end of 2023, all of the Americas including Greenland, together with Hawaii and Iceland (see the download map for current availability). The scenery also overlaps very slightly into Siberia (as far west as the antimeridian, 180W).

How do I get FlightGear to use the scenery?

If you are starting from the commandline, add the option --fg-scenery=PATH/fgfs-canada-us-scenery/, replacing PATH with the actual path to the location where you installed the scenery (you can put the option in your $HOME/.fgfsrc file to use it every time). If you are using the launcher, select the Add-ons tab and put the path (without the --fg-scenery= prefix) in the Additional scenery folders section.

Why don't I see airport buildings, osm2city details, etc?

In Unix-like operating systems (Linux, MacOS), you need to run the script gen-symlinks.sh to create symbolic links to your TerraSync scenery. You also need to have TerraSync enabled. In Windows, or if you have your .fgfs/ directory in a non-standard location, you will need to create the links manually. There is a .bat script for Windows, but it is not tested.

Why do roads and railroads stop at rivers?

Originally, the scenery carried roads and railroads across rivers so that the crossings would be visible for users who haven't enabled osm2city, but that creates strange artifacts for people using more-detailed scenery, so I am gradually rebuilding the scenery to exclude any OSM road/railroad segments with bridge=yes. Some may still appear, when the OSM source is not correctly tagged.

What are the long, wide grassy areas?

Those are rights of way for high-voltage powerlines. In real life flying, unless you are very low, you usually won't see the towers or lines, but you will see the cleared areas. If you enable osm2city, the lines and towers will usually be added.

What data sources did you use?

See the Download page.

Why not use a higher-resolution landcover raster?

I'm using a 500m global landcover raster mainly for background, with OpenStreetMap data filling in the details. Because I'm converting to vector data, processing a 10m landcover raster exceeded my resources for such large areas, and the resulting scenery would probably have had too many triangles for most users' graphics cards. To see a more-detailed raster (but less-detailed rivers and other water features), try the new WS3.0 scenery under development.

Why does the download map use a Mercator projection? It makes arctic landmasses look huge!

So far, I haven't found any free OpenStreetMap map tile sets for alternative projections like Winkel Tripel (which would be much better for showing the relative sizes of land masses). If you find one, please let me know by creating an issue (see Bugs).

Who are you?

I am David Megginson, a former real-life aircraft owner and early contributor to FlightGear. Starting in the late 1990s, among other features I created the FlightGear Property system, added support for multi-engine and tailwheel, aircraft, and added the first TerraGear support for line features like roads and railroads. I also created the earliest models of the Piper PA-28-161, Piper Cub, DC-3, Cessna 172, and Cessna 310 (all of which have since been improved or replaced by more-talented aircraft designers). The main goal of my early contributions was to make it possible for people to contribute without writing C++ code, and I'm happy to see a thriving community today. I also maintain the open-data OurAirports site.