We are pleased to announce the release of the 1.1 update for Vancouver scenery. Here's the list of changes:
- Configurable texture size options. During the installation, it's possible to select texture resolution independently for the Photoreal background and the Dynamic Shadows, with 1024x1024, 2048x2048 and 4096x4096 choices. The installer will give an estimate in size for each option. This way, you can keep the overall texture resolution as high as possible (to keep using HD textures in other products), and control how much space allocate to Vancouver textures.
- Addon Manager allows to set 2048x2048 resolution for HD textures. This option should give better flexibility than the previous on/off switch. Note the Addon Manager setting is global to FSX (it controls the "Texture Max Load" parameter in FSX without having to restart FSX to apply it), while the resolution options during installation affects only the Photoreal and Dynamic Shadows at Vancouver.
- User-settable texture sharpening. Since textures are now being generated while installing, we added this option to let users controlling the visual appearance of the final textures for the Photoreal background.
- A new "Spring" season, with a much greener overall appearance.
- Customizable seasonal variations: the installer will ask how many season you want to have at Vancouver, choices are 3 Seasons (Winter/Snow, Spring and Fall), 2 Seasons (Winter and Spring) and Spring only. Choose your preferred settings depending on the surrounding Landclass used.
By default, 3 seasons is Winter in January, Spring from February to October and Fall November/December. 2 Seasons it's always Spring except January and 1 Season it's always Spring. But this can be further customized: we added two parameters in the %APPDATA%VirtualiCouatladdons.ini file in the [cyvr] section, that can be changed to control the dates of the switches. By default (when 3 Season are selected) they are set as follows:
[cyvr]
lastwinterday=32
lastspringday=300
This means that Winter starts from day 1 (January 1st) to Day 32 of the year (February 1st) and Spring ends at 300th day of the year, around October's end. If you selected 2 seasons, the numbers would be 32 and 366 and if you selected just spring, they would be 1 and 366. By changing those parameters, you can fine-tune the switching dates depending on what other Land-classes products you have, which might set different dates to the seasonal switching, some might use Hard/Winter, some not, etc.
How to get the update
We updated both the full installer, and made an update file too. Any of them will update CYVR to the 1.1 version, the update file is a bit smaller (but not much), but it might be faster to install, because it won't download any Addon Manager/Couatl files, will just update the scenery, so it might be more convenient to use if you want to run the update multiple times just to play with the different texture configurations, and see how they look and how the memory requirements change with each setting.
Both the Full installer and the Update are available on the Vancouver page
We suggest starting with Ground textures at 4096x4096 and Dynamic Shadows at 2048x2048, with Mild Sharpening, but if you hard pressed to save memory, it would be best trying to lower the Dynamic Shadows resolution to 1024x1024 first, and if it wasn't enough, bring down Ground textures at 2048x2048 and eventually to 1024x1024.
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You can view the full announcement by following this link:
http://www.fsdreamteam.com/forum/index.php?topic=7960.0