Frequently Asked Questions

Winter scenery in the autumn or spring?

 Answer: In the border area between autumn/winter and winter/spring you may experience that the scenery is snowy winter and the outside default FS9 area is autumn or spring (green).

This is not an scenery error, but a discrepancy between FS9 default and the scenery "seasons" that unfortunately has no fix other than changing the "sim date" a couple of weeks back or forward.
 

Erratic Photo scenery at ESSA or in Stockholm City?

Answer: All Photo scenery must reside in FS9 Scenery Manager before any related terrain or land class files covering the same area.

Example for Stockholm Area:

ESSB
ESSA
SthlmClass
SthlmTerrain or R&R Europe add-on or Scandinavian Water add-on

Please observe that you should not have any SwedflightPro xxxxTerrain files active if the R&R Europe add-on or Scandinavian Water add-on are installed.

Question: Why are there no dynamic objects like moving gates, cars, hangar doors etc in the scenery?

Answer: Our policy is to make the airports as close to reality as possible but also with as good frame rates as possible. The sceneries will all be designed with the aim to be flyable on an average PC game system. Thus we refrain from known "frame rate eaters" like moving fuel trucks, moving gates and moving hangar doors. Putting 40+ "moving gates" on e.g. EKCH would make the scenery a truly unflyable one with below 5 in frame rate on the average PC system. Putting 15 "moving gates" at ESGG would likewise hurt the frame rates on final approach runway 21 too much.

If we at all consider dynamic scenery - it will be things that contributes to the pro pilot experience like correct docking systems, 3D approach lights, also better taxiway markings, better runway markings etc. are given priority. Also, we always will prefer the true "flight simulator" scenery over a "doll-box" type scenery.
 
Maybe we have this attitude since our team partially consist of professional pilots. This is also why we do not put a multitude of signs and other gimmicks on the back of the terminals. We do believe our customers, which mostly consists of professionals and dedicated simmers, prefer to spend their time in our scenery flying from the airside.

Question: I can't find any of your airports when going to Search Add-on scenery in the simulator.

Answer: These sceneries, like our latest freeware versions, have a setup where you do not have to write anything in the file Scenery.cfg  With that follows that you can't find them under the button <Search Add-on scenery> where a lot of add-on sceneries are normally found.

In stead you have to use the 'normal' and default procedure to find them. Just activate the button <Search places> (that is active as default) and write the Airport ID in its box and the airport will automatically appear in Search Results. Or write the name in the box <Airport Name>. But the Airport ID box is definitely the easiest one to use - only four letters. In the box Runway/Starting position down to the left you can choose any of the predefined starting positions for the actual airport. The example here is for ESSA Stockholm/Arlanda

Question: Why do the AI aircraft taxi on the grass and not on the taxiway and why are some aircraft parked inside buildings?

Answer: The behavior and movements of the AI aircraft are correlated to the MS version of each default airport. Now when the airports are rebuilt with high precision and taxiways are moved to a more exact location and more houses are added where there was free space before, this correlation doesn't fit anymore.

Recently it has however been possible to change this situation by editing the files in FS2002 where the AI data are stored, in our case the file eurnwafd.bgl, located in the directory FS2002\SCENEDB\AFDFILES\SCENERY. However, we can not distribute the edited file to you because then we would violate the copyright owned by Microsoft. In stead we distribute the source files for each airport, used for the changing (patching) of the original file. This is an easy procedure done by each user with the help of the program AFCAD.

All this is described in our Add-on section where you also can download the AFCAD program. After the patching of the AI file you will get a proper behavior of the AI planes. Beside of taxing on the taxiways the planes will also be parked at suitable places at the airports, plus you get the right taxi help via ATC and a new correct tower view position.

The source files from us are only basic ones which you can modify yourself, adding more aircraft and changing the movements as much as you like -  also that is possible to do with the help of the free program AFCAD (by Lee Swordy).

For FS2004 the patching is done by a separate BGL file for each airport and which are delivered with the scenery packages. Those files can also be downloaded separately in this section: ADDONS

Question: The frame rate is not so high as I want, despite following your advice in the Airport Handbooks.

Answer: The modern graphics board need a more specific setup than the older versions. There are also more manual tweaking possible in the simulator itself. For the latest version of some of our Scenery Packs we have included more detailed advice that may help you to get a higher frame rate. If you haven't read that part of the Installation advice, please do that first. As an example of these advice you can download this document: SWFL Recommended Settings.PDF  If you skip the scenery specific parts you can use this document as a more general advice for these settings.