The Slovenia Times

Virtually Flying over Slovenia

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The man behind the project is Goran Brumen, an enthusiastic computer programmer, who dedicated hundreds of hours of his free time to edit the mesh terrain for the whole country and illustrate it with real settlements, roads, rivers, lakes, mountains and forests. Together with Andrej Drobun, a sports pilot and his partner in this project who was responsible for detailing the mesh among other things, Mr Brumen gathered gigabytes of digital photographic material, including aerial photographs used for the some of the landscape's textures. The orthographic textures are also available from the national geodetic institute, but they would charge an unimaginable commercial fee and, of course, make no exception for pure enthusiasts. Therefore, the creators of Slovenia 2004 Scenery Add-on dealt with the bird's eye view of the country in their own way. Another fascinating feature that has been incorporated into the simulator is the dynamic scenery of Ljubljana's airport where the 'pilot' can have his plane refuelled, open the hangar gates, etc. Moreover, the airports look extremely realistic, especially when compared to the original scenery included in Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2004 - A century of flight. The airports were produced from detailed digital photographs, which Mr Brumen also took himself. There are five airports, two international (Ljubljana and Maribor) and three local ones (Lesce, Portoroz, Ptuj) presented in the programme. Others may appear in future versions. Despite the professional result, Mr Brumen is at pains to point out that this is a total enthusiast's project, which took three years of evenings and weekends to complete. For this very reason, it's had very little advertising coverage, but even this modest approach has enticed a number of virtual pilots to order the add-on. And who are these "special sort of people" as the author would describe flight-sim enthusiasts? Users who have ordered the add-on range from kids to retired military pilots. Moreover, they come not only from Slovenia, but from many other countries as well. Some are Slovenian emigrants who obviously find it an interesting way to nostalgically navigate around their homeland. From a user's point of view, the overall impression of the product is fascinating enough. The mesh terrain is accurate to one hundred metres, the textures represent an approximation of the actual terrain with all the main roads, rivers and lakes (twenty of them compared to the two in the original Flight Simulator scenery). Anyhow, to put it laically, the scenery is accurate enough that anyone can identify his or her favourite spots and fly there. The project's web site is http://users.volja.net/slo2004/

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