POI Billboards of Andorra
Now the VFR dream comes true!
Now it is possible to have a detailed information on the area seen 1000 feet below you, injected directly into the scenery!
This upload will add POIs as “POI Billboards” - MSFS static scenery objects, for a given country/area, brought to you by 3DSpotters Team.
Here is Andorra with 522 POI points.
Refer to the included maps.
You may turn ON/OFF each part independently.
Please also check our "POI Billboards of" series for other countries.
This is a new generation of “PBof”:
- a new POIOSM2FS Tool was used,
- a new workflow is in place - the OSM data is now taken directly from OSM .osm.pbf files, from Geofabrik Download Server: http://download.geofabrik.de/index.html
- new categories od POI are added: motorways (highways & trunks), fuel stations, fire stations, helipads and some other (prisons -beware!).
To install
Drop the scenery folder from ZIP to the Community folder or (preferably) use any of good MSFS Addon Linkers.
A Technology
POI Billboards (PB), that you will download here, are based on a completely different mechanism than Microsoft/Asobo built-in POI’s. That way you will get thousands (and I mean thousands) of billboard signs scattered all over the country, based on OpenStreetMap (OSM) information, supplied by OSM contributors, with minimal to non-existent FPS hit. You can see a lot of information at once: cities, towns, villages, attractions, train stations, temples, lakes, rivers, island and so on (assuming you have good eyes and paused the simulator). POI Billboards were designed to provide this information to the simmer, while not obscuring the landscape too much and keeping FPS high (well, you will judge).
We would like to make it clear - with this solution:
- you can not turn PB ON/OFF in-flight - only before MSFS start up,
- PB text size and so on are “hardcoded” - these are static not dynamic objects,
- scenery POIs are as they are - it is not possible to turn on some types of PB and some not. Please consider this BEFORE clicking stars on-site :)
HOW-TO
=> minimize MSFS loading times:
The only possible using scenery drawback could be extended MSFS loading time, so to minimize the time try the usual ways:
turn OFF Windows File Indexing feature on the disk,
switch ON only the scenery you will really fly VFR in a minute,
keep your sceneries on SSD disks, preferably on M.2 ones,
do the same with all other sceneries/aircrafts/liveries :)
=> minimize scenery size on a disk:
turn ON Windows File Compression feature on the disk; it should have advantage to give you 40% disk space gain and processing overhead should not be high on the other side.
Credits
Credits go to:
OpenStreetMap Authors & Contributors at: https://www.openstreetmap.org
Overpass-Turbo service at: https://overpass-turbo.eu/
WinHour, member of 3DSpotters team, for JAVA POIOSM2FS software tool at: https://github.com/Winhour/POIOSM2FS-Converter
For additional information please refer to docs/files saved on this (first) scenery main folder (when unzipped to Community or elsewhere).