Landscapes

Condor comes with one landscape which is the home country of the developers – Slovenia. It covers around 37.000 square kilometers of very varied terrain ranging from alpine to medium height mountains and large flat areas. It’s perfectly big enough to make some nice 500 km FAI triangles using different lift sources.

Terrain

The landscape uses a high resolution terrain model with synthetic hand crafted textures. As can be seen in the pictures, the landscape is shadowed according to the time of day. Planes, objects, and clouds also have shadows on the landscape.

Lakes, rivers and forests

The sense of scale is enhanced by the 3d forests with hundreds of thousands of pine and broadleaf trees.

Lakes and rivers have moving, reflective water.

Airports

Airports are precisely modelled on the actual airports in Slovenia with  buildings, trees, cars, glider trailers, and other parked aircraft.

The grass areas are made with a high resolution real grass texture, and the runways have asphalt texture with weathered paint markings.

Airports have animated windsocks, which are placed on the airfield, or on building roofs, as required.

Villages, towns and cities

Isolated villages, towns and cities are modelled with buildings, halls, churches.

Industrial areas have warehouses and chimneys

Landscape Development

Condor uses a limited area or “Sandbox” approach with landscapes. This was chosen because of the specific needs of a soaring simulator and the limitations of current hardware. Condor is optimized for SRTM data for terrain mesh, use of synthetic (rather than photorealistic) textures and heavy use of 3D ground objects, such as forests, cities, airports, villages, mountain huts, telecommunication towers, etc.

Creation of a wide selection of quality landscapes for Condor is a complex and time consuming task that exceeds the capability of our team. It would be impossible for us to cover many interesting soaring sites that our users demand. That is why we chose to give users the ability to create their own landscapes. This way the workload is spread among many people and also users can choose to create the landscapes they like without being limited to specific areas.

Since the release of our Condor Scenery Toolkit in 2006 a number of great landscapes have been made by Condor users and many more are in the pipeline which is a great acknowledgment for our landscape policy.

The toolkit is updated and renamed for Condor 2, and its now known as Condor Landscape Toolkit. It can be found on the Downloads page.

Much more additional information can be found at our Landscape development forum.

Landscape links

Quality, highly detailed handmade commercial landscapes with 3D objects for Condor 1 and Condor 2

Almost all free landscapes are available to be downloaded at Condor club.

Free downloads of almost all available landscapes.