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Venice X
Operating Guide
40 pgs4.83 Mb0
Table of contents
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Aerosoft Venice X Operating Guide

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Contents

Contents ....................................................................................................... 2
Copyrights .................................................................................................... 3
Credits ......................................................................................................... 4
Introduction .................................................................................................. 5
System requirements ..................................................................................... 6
Support ........................................................................................................ 6
FSX Service Pack 1 or Service Pack 2? .............................................................. 6
Performance .................................................................................................. 7
The Airports .................................................................................................. 8
The city ........................................................................................................ 8
Exploring the city ........................................................................................... 8
Proposed settings ........................................................................................... 9
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) ................................................................... 13
Charts ......................................................................................................... 13
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Copyrights

The manual, documentation, video images, software, and all the related materials are copyrighted and cannot be copied, photocopied, translated or reduced to any electronic medium or machine legible form, neither completely nor in part, without the previous written consent of AEROSOFT. THE SOFTWARE IS FURNISHED «AS IS» AND IT DOES NOT COME FURNISHED WITH ANY GUARANTEE IMPLICIT OR EXPRESS. THE AUTHOR DECLINES EVERY RESPONSIBILITY FOR CONTINGENT MALFUNCTIONS, DECELERATION, AND ANY DRAWBACK THAT SHOULD ARISE, USING THIS SOFTWARE.
Copyright © 2007 AEROSOFT All rights reserved. Microsoft Windows, Windows® 95, Windows® 98, Windows ME, Windows® NT, Windows® 2000, Windows XP, Windows Vista and Flight Simulator are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other Countries. All trademarks and brand names are trademarks or registered trademarks of the respective owners.
Copyrights are serious stuff. If you find any pirated copies of this software please notify us at info@aerosoft-shop.com. We will make sure reports of copyrights violations are rewarded.
Aerosoft GmbH Lindberghring 12 D-33142 Büren, Germany
www.aerosoft.com
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Credits

Concept: Andras Kozma / Winfried Diekmann
Developer: Andras Kozma
Project Management: Mathijs Kok Manual, documentation: Mathijs Kok Installer: Andreas Mügge
Additional credits should go to Microsoft’s 'Virtual Earth' as it w as a great help while making the scenery, without it there would have been a lot of faulty buildings and the like. Judging the height of a building is not really possible while looking at an aerial or satellite photo but Virtual Earth solved that problem.
Thanks also to the beta testers. They found some nasty bugs for sure and had some suggestions that were really useful.
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Introduction

Andras Kozma has done three versions of Venice for Flight Simulator and I have been involved with all of them. Seeing a product like this grow from the concept to the released code is fascinating and the two previous versions where a great commercial success. We are sure this one will be received with the same en thusiasm as it shows the new options of FSX fully. Right at the start of the project we decided NOT to do a FS2004 version, not only because it is commercially less interesting but mainly because it would limit what could be done. This is pure unadulterated FSX scenery. With all the new options FSX has to offer.
Why Venice? Because it is famous. Because it looks superb from the air. Because Tessera is a great medium sized airport. Reasons enough.
As always it has been a pleasure to work with Andras on this project. He is one of the true professionals around and even after all these years his keen eye for colors and how things ‘should’ look is unmatched.
Mathijs Kok, November 2007
Image from Wikipedia under the terms of the GNU Free Document License.
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System requirements

• Flight Simulator X with Service Pack 1 (at www.fsinsider.com)
• DVD-ROM drive
• CPU: 3 GHz (duo core highly recommended)
• 1 GB RAM (2 GB recommended)
• 400 MB free disk space
• Soundcard
• Windows XP, Windows Vista (fully updated)
• Adobe Acrobat® Reader 7 minimal to read and print the manual (1)
(1) Available for free, download at: http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html

Support

Support for this product is offered by Aerosoft. We prefer to have a support forum for the simple reason that it is fast and efficient because customers help customers when we are sleeping.
Aerosoft forums: http://forum.aerosoft-shop.com We feel strongly about support. Buying one of our products gives you the right to waste
our time with questions you feel might be silly. They are not. Updates, when available, will always be found on the Aerosoft-Web site
(www.aerosoft.com) under FAQ’s / Updates (you will need to register this product before being able to access the updates).
Note: Please see known issues for more information..

FSX Service Pack 1 or Service Pack 2?

This scenery is fully compatible with SP1 and SP2. However during the development of this product we confirmed some ideas we already had. On all our systems the scenery was faster under SP1 and we traced this back to the way general memory management and specific bumpmaps and specular are handled. As far as you discard the very interesting DX10 pre advise SP1 for this product.
If you move from SP1 to SP2 (or vice versa) you just have to rename one scenery file to make it fully compatible. In the FSXMainFolder/Aerosoft/Venice X/Scenery folder you will find two files like this:
ven3d_sp2.bgl_inactive ven3d_sp1.bgl
view we see no advantages of SP2 and for that reason we strongly
or ven3d_sp1.bgl_inactive
ven3d_sp2.bgl
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If you rename the files so they match the Service Pack your scenery will be FULLY adapted for your FSX.

Performance

This scenery is created to guarantee a solid 20 fps virtually over the whole scenery on a machine with the following hardware at the settings advised in this manual;
- CPU: Intel Dual core 6400 running at 2.13 GHz
- Memory: 2 Gb
- GPU: GeForce 8800 GTS (running at 1680x1050 res)
- OS: Vista 32 bits (XP SP2 probably 10% faster)
- FS: standard FSX deluxe SP1 Similar hardware will get the same results of course. We advice to limit the FPS to 20 so FSX has the time to preload textures. If you run it unlimited FSX will never actually catch up.
If your hardware is not to the specs shown above and you get framerates that are too low you can do three things:
- Reduce the settings of the sim
- Remove objects
o Start with removing flr_obj.bgl contains a lot of small objects like ships,
flags etc
o If that is not enough, remove vaporettos.bgl that contains (a lot) of
gondola’s and other ships.
- If you are working with FSX SP2, move back to SP1 (and talk to MS, lol)
Page 7 of 13

The Airports

There are two airports in this scenery. Both have been designed so they look great yet are kind on framerates. The center of this scenery is Venice, the two airports are more or less needed because otherwise there would be no airport in the product.
San Nicolo (LIPV) is a small airfield on a small island ju st south of Venice. It has a small grass strip, a few hangars and an old terminal building. On the same small island there is a major hospital and some old fortress like buildings.
Tessera (LIPZ) is the main airport of the region. It seems there is a major conflict about the name as the airport has different names in different documents. Expect to see Venice Marco Polo Airport, Venezia Tessera, Venice Airport and Aeroporto di Venezia Marco Polo to be used. It’s all the same airport though. About as confusing is the number of runways. The main runway is 04R but 04L is indicated as taxiway/runway, however feel free to use it as taxiway only. There is a very exiting short approach to 22L that starts from the ILS to runway 04R!

The city

Venice is built on 117 small islands in salt water Venetian Lagoon. Many of these islands are artificial, but all of them slowly sink (while t he water level rises) and Italy faces a major struggle to keep this world famous city above the water in the next decades to come. It is one of the most famous cities in the world, mainly because it so well preserved the original water based infrastructure. Most travel in Venice is done by boat, small distances are walked. Cars simply have no room on the islands. The main buildings are all in the center or along the “Canal Grande”. On the map below you see the location of the main buildings . All can be found in the scenery.
There is no approved landing location in Venice, though you could land a helicopter in many locations. Landing a seaplane on the lagoon you can taxi around the islands and if you are careful even some way on the Canal Grande. The water busses called Vaporetto’s always have right of way and are notorious for going fast and being aggressive.

Exploring the city

Our favorite way of exploring the city is to fly into Tessera airport from France or Germany (lovely routing over the Alps), then jump in a Cessna and fly directly over Venice to San Nicolo. This will give you a great idea of the full layout of the scenery. At San Nicolo we suggest either a small helicopter, an ultra light or even a boat. There are many boats for FSX available, using Google with this search;
http://www.google.fr/search?q=FSX+ships
small fast craft.
you will find many you could use. Pick a
Page 8 of 13

Proposed settings

As you will have noticed by the many gigabytes of this product, there are certain settings that are important for a fluent. The settings marked in red on the images below are the most important.
To see all houses, aircraft and other 3d objects in good detail the Global texture resolution is very important, it needs to be at the highest setting. Take our advice and always leave it at that setting. Light bloom can create very nice effects but it seriously overdone in FSX and very framerate hungry.
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Detail radius: Important for the resolution of the photo scenery as seen in the distance. Mesh resolution: Determines how detailed the undulation of the terrain is. Even at
higher settings this does not affect framerates a lot. Texture resolution: Determines the resolution the ground textures are shown at. Venice X uses textures of just over 60 cm so a setting of 60 cm is okay. Water effects: The High 1x setting is advised as higher settings reflect scenery in the water and that is highly CPU demanding. Scenery complexity: Although all the objects of VFR Germany are shown at „Normal“ settings, we advise the highest setting as this also shows the airport objects and does affect framerates too much. Autogen Density: We advice a low setting for Venice X for two reasons, it will get you better framerate and it will reduce the automatic placement of buildings on the small islands. Ground scenery shadows: As we could not implement complete shadows in Venice we advise you to keep this option switched off. Scenery effects: Although important as this determines if chimneys emit smoke etc, it can be a framerate killer, so be careful setting this too high.
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 
Cloud draw distance: A setting that affects framerates a lot but higher settings don’t really seem to add a lot of visuals. Cloud detail: Detailed clouds at medium settings will be enough for superb views, but when you are getting low framerates, the Simple clouds could help.
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Aviation Traffic: The other aircraft in the simulator do eat a lot of frames even if you do not see them, but both Tessera and San Nicola are not very active airports, so high settings are acceptable. Land and sea traffic: As CPU hungry as the aircraft, but they do make the waterways come to life. Low settings of Road vehicles are advised as there are dense roads close to Tessera.
Note: Due to a bug in FSX SP2 most (if not all) Traffic will be removed in the areas close to Tessera airport. This is because of a ‘flatten’ that is needed in this region. It’s for this reason that we advise SP1 for this product.
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