Update March 8, 2024:

New requirements. Please see relavent section.

Made many fixes and improvements. Also brought closer to the style of Port Neville and Beyond which has now been released here. 

A trailer for the new scenery can be seen here.

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Welcome to Port Harvey, British Columbia (PHBC). 

Designed to be an immersive home base for float plane pilots. 

This scenery offers very significant enhancements to the terrain and adds multiple new pontoon and wharf areas to enjoy. It includes many additions and points of interest to help make the port feel as real as possible. 

So grab your VR headset, set the time to dawn or dusk with a little low fog, and experience the beauty of the pine covered coastlines in Port Harvey.

Important:
There are some required and essential mods and World updates for this to work. Please see relevant section.

 

Please note that some of the screnshots are now slightly different to what you will see in the game as I had to replace some objects. Specifically the buidling on the the industrial dock. The lights on the main pontoon dock. And the red and white antenna sitting on the rock.

Port Harvey backstory

A recent severe storm has hit the logging port, causing some land and rock slides in areas. In the chaos of the storm many of the port's logs have been dispersed into the water, so caution is advised.

All services are now up and running however. There are workers needing to be flown in and out, and there is a backlog of mail and cargo deliveries that are required. 

Always a spare moment to enjoy the scenery though . . .

Scenery main features

-Parking for cold and dark start-up: (see image for locations)
     -9 dock parking spaces
     -1 land GA park (using mudflat as runway)
     -1 helipad

-Complete overhaul of scenery terrain. Fixed the default and disgusting acid green stretched cliffs! Added rock meshes, terrain and water textures, trees, all sorts of new objects and points of interest. Too much to list. 

*Areas of the coastline often covered in shadow and off the beaten path didn’t receive as much love as the main areas

-Revealed 2 large mudflats that were covered in the default MSFS scenery. Added streams and puddles to these areas.

-Multiple pontoons and wharves with collision you can use.

-Lighting incorporated, including a working lighthouse and points of interest to help navigation.

-log obstacles in the water with collision. (Make sure to do an inspection pass before landing!)

-Tested in VR to make sure most things feel reasonably realistically scaled and placed.

- ICAO code: PHBC (fictional)

 

Required World updates

This scenery requires 4 World updates to work. I appologies for not keeping the list shorter but I wasn't fully aware I was using these until after the release. I'll try be more carefull in any future projects

III: UK
VI: Germany
X: USA
XI: Canada

Required mods

These 3 mods add 3d models that I couldn’t do without to complete the project. Please give the authors some love on their pages for the amazing work!

-  Emerald Object Library (NEW as of March 8, 2024)

https://flightsim.to/file/8824/emerald-object-library

https://emeraldscenerydesign.com/products/eolib-msfs/

Many thanks to Emerald Scenery Design.  You can check them out at https://emeraldscenerydesign.com/

- Seaplane Asset Library

 https://flightsim.to/file/32010/seaplane-asset

(tested and working on version 0.2. October 05, 2022)

-MSFS 2020 object library 

https://flightsim.to/file/16007/msfs-object-library-with-150-models-ranging-from-towers-hangers-terminals-to-cones

(tested and working on version 13.4. October 02, 2022)

-PBK Effects Library (No longer required as of March 8, 2024. Still adds some more smoke though)
https://flightsim.to/file/21769/pbk-effects-library

(tested and working on version SU7-v2. November 24, 2021)

Essential mod

If you’re using float planes then you absolutely need this mod! Simply set the tow speed to 0, assign a pushback key to you setup, and you can hold your plane in position at the dock to simulate being tied down. You can even use it for pushback if you’d like and it has many great features.

- Toolbar Pushback

https://flightsim.to/file/15033/toolbar-pushback

Recommended feature

To get the most of this scenery, and the MSFS scenery in general I suggest looking for freeware or payware that alters the default flora colours.

Otherwise you can probably still edit it yourself. This crappy tutorial I wrote ages ago might still work but haven’t tested:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/biome-tutorial-tree-bush-colour/343996

 

Installation:

Copy the zip file to your community folder and then extract.

Delete zip file.

The folder “maty743-airport-phbc-port-harvey” should be in the base community folder. So if you open it up you will see the stuff directly inside such as “ContentInfo” and “scenery”

 

Known bugs and issues.

-There is a MSFS bug that doesn’t position the runway and parking spaces on the world map properly. So please see the parking image that show where each spot actually sits.

- The collision of the pontoons can be a bit janky at times, so try not to collide with them too much.

- In rough seas you can see under the pontoons (their position is static)

- At certain times of the day the materials/textures behind the rock meshes won’t match up that well due to the different specular properties between them. I’ve tried my best to get these as close as possible but apologies if the differences break immersion sometimes.

- Occasional terrain pop-in bugs that I can’t fix.

- Auto Gen trees can sometimes be weird and floaty around cliffs

- I’ve technically made the land parking spot and the helipad “Docks” as it stopped the annoying ground services popping up and being eaten by the prop. I didn’t notice any issues with this solution but there may be something I have missed.

- Haven't tested helipad with an actual helicopter, only default aircraft so please let me know if any issues are present for some reason.

 

Some more background on the project

I've been wanting to create a float plane scenery for British Columbia ever since I first played MSFS. After the latest Canada World update I finally bit the bullet and gave it a go. 

To my surprise the SDK scenery process is actually quite simple these days. So if you are reading this and have had the same craving please look up the SDK documentationto get started and give it a go yourself! 

https://docs.flightsimulator.com/html/Samples_And_Tutorials/Tutorials/Creating_Or_Replacing_An_Airport.htm

While browsing Bing and Google maps to find an area to make my project, I found this very interesting area, that although not labelled, I found was called Port Harvey. It had everything I could want in a scenery: 

-At low tide you get large stretches of mudflats revealed that look stunning from a distance (you'd never know they existed in the base MSFS scenery). 

-Rocky, interesting coastlines with many islands. 

-A reason to land/human activity. In this case mainly logging and some fish farms it seems. Quite a busy little area the maps suggest.

My main goal in this project was to replace those terrible default cliffs of stretched acid green that completely destroy any sense of immersion. Over 3 weeks of work later and I think I’m happy enough to publish haha. I could keep adding and tweaking but there comes a time where you stop enjoying the process and I didn’t want to get to far into that state of mind.

From the few images and videos I found of Port Harvey it looks like there are rocky cliff faces. I have no idea if they are where I placed them, but I’ve just gone with what I think works best and is most interesting. So if you are familiar with the area please forgive my aggressive use of artistic licence.

After having a bit of a break I might look at other scenery projects in the same area. So let me know of any suggestions

I hope you enjoy this scenery and I personally can’t wait to hop into it with the DHC-2 Beaver once that releases as part of the 40th anniversary update! (Can’t confirm if the parking will support the Spruce Goose though :P haha)

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Port Harvey, British Columbia

Welcome to Port Harvey, British Columbia (PHBC). Designed to be an immersive home base for float plane pilots. This scenery offers very significant enhancements to the terrain and adds multiple new pontoon and wharf areas to enjoy. It includes many additions and points of interest to help make the port feel as real as possible. So grab your VR headset, set the time to dawn or dusk with a little low fog, and experience the beauty of the pine covered coastlines in Port Harvey.

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