Interesting: No Chernobyl in FS2004

Devildog73

Devildog73

SOH Staff
Staff member
I just flew over the desert textures of Chernobyl, Ukraine. Nothing like the Google Earth satellite photos.

MS has even removed the river and cooling pond from their textures.

From Kiev you have a nice river going N and NW until it reaches about 5 miles from Chernobyl power plant ruins.
At that point it turns to desert scenery instead of an accurate depiction of the power plant ruins and the ghost town.

Political Correctness gone wild?

Same in FSX.
 
The ground depiction in flight simulators is only as good as the source data to produce it from. Bad source data -> bad accuracy on the ground in Fs9 or FSX.
 
Bjoern said:
The ground depiction in flight simulators is only as good as the source data to produce it from. Bad source data -> bad accuracy on the ground in Fs9 or FSX.
Click to expand...

Bjoern,

And yet, Google Earth, I believe has existed from some years now. It is in an area of large rivers flood planes.

No elevation data really needed beyond surrounding areas.

Though the radiation poisoning is still taking place for human and animal life forms, the vegetation seems to have recovered quite nicely.

BTW, I did find Chernobyl scenery for FSX at AVSim. I haven't tried it in my FS2004 install.

Also, is there accurate mesh for Kyiv (Kiev)? FSX does a nice job of showing the hill on the west side of the river the main city sits upon.
FS2004 has no terrain elevation up from the river on the west bank.
 
Devildog73 said:
Bjoern,

And yet, Google Earth, I believe has existed from some years now. It is in an area of large rivers flood planes.
Click to expand...

The existence of data has no bearing on its availability. Google doesn't sell its data, other sources may not have vector data available (an effect of the undoubted difficulty of gaining permission to ground truth GIS data in the irradiated area), no doubt they didn't feel they had time and budget to create vectors from such raster data as was available in 2001 when the datasets were acquired for FS2002 (and reused for FS9 and FSX with some modification) or simply never even thought about testing the Chernobyl area...
There's a huge number of reasons that the area might have been overlooked entirely innocently even with available data on the region.
 
There are lots of areas missing from the flightsim scenery. I tried to fly to the town I was based at when I was stationed in Germany and not only is there no town, but even the airfield isn't there although you can see it today on Google Earth.
 
If the airfield is closed and abandoned, then in all likelihood, FS won't put it in - unless Jeppesen has data on it. The only abandoned strips I've ever seen in FS are in the US, and probably a third of those are in Hawaii.
 
Chernobyl main reactor hall

Got me thinking, a quick and easy version for you DD.....

It would be a huge project to get it complete, there is someone who has done it for themselves on Youtube, pretty good but unfortunately he won't release it.


Just a basic main reactor housing and the (in)famous chimney.

Uploading now.


Cheers

Shessi
 

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Thanks Shessi!

As I said earlier, I downloaded and installed the FSX version.

I will download yours and install it in FS9.

It still amazes me that the desert textures were used around the area there. The vegetation has completely come back in 90-99% of the area surrounding the plant.

And, there are people living in the area according to a show I watched on TV the other night, which prompted this entire fly-over and discussion in my flight sims.
 
Google Earth has nothing to do with land classification data as it's only useful for producing photoreal ground textures.
Land classification essentially defines a piece of ground as, say, farmland and then links the appropriate FS9 farmland texture to it. Sources for this are either government-sponsored (such as the CORINE project for Europe) or community-created (OpenStreetMap).

So unless someone produces some land classification data for a given region that's made from a more accurate source than what was available at the time FS9 (or FSX) was made, you will see very inaccurate depictions of towns, fields, forests, rivers, etc...


You can produce landclass and vector (roads, rivers, rail lines) scenery with tools like SBuilder, which essentially allows you to "draw" a FS9-compatible landscape using stellite photos for reference. This only works for rather small regions though. If you want to do an entire country, you'd need an entirely automated solution, which is prone to processing errors.
 
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