New source to download Condor landscapes: torrents

You can download most Condor sim landscapes at skylinescondor.com/landscapes.

Condor Club has a nice Condor Updater service that we recommend if you have a premium membership. If you don't want the premium membership it can be very slow to unusable, disconnects you often, etc. Or maybe you want to help crowd source these fan-produced public domain files. So you can try skylinescondor.com/landscapes.

One cool feature is that you download landscapes using a torrent. qBitTorrent is a great download manager for these large files and handles interruptions seamlessly. Torrents also get faster the more people participating.

It's pretty simple: Download and install free qBittorrent at www.fosshub.com/qBittorrent.html.

Download one or many small torrent files from skylinescondor.com/landscapes.. They contain instructions for qBittorrent on where to download the landscape files. Open them at the same time in qBittorrent. Your downloads will start.

Bret H. and Brandon M.

This is really fantastic. Thank you.

May I ask something of the wonderful people running USNS:

Would you consider consolidating the races to three sceneries or less so people can be better prepared?

I think this would help keep new people flying. I've been unable to keep up with downloading the most recent scenery required to race that night. Computer memory and connection speeds prevent it.

We have barely exploited all that is to offer with the stock scenery. Do we really need to travel around the world (virtually) to race each other?

This was more reasonable in Condor 1, but Condor 2 is a different beast with regards to disk storage space...

Thanks for doing the races. They are AWESOME!

On Wednesday, April 29, 2020 at 7:21:30 AM UTC-4, Turkey Vulture wrote:
This is really fantastic. Thank you.

May I ask something of the wonderful people running USNS:

Would you consider consolidating the races to three sceneries or less so people can be better prepared?

I think this would help keep new people flying. I've been unable to keep up with downloading the most recent scenery required to race that night. Computer memory and connection speeds prevent it.

We have barely exploited all that is to offer with the stock scenery. Do we really need to travel around the world (virtually) to race each other?

This was more reasonable in Condor 1, but Condor 2 is a different beast with regards to disk storage space...

Thanks for doing the races. They are AWESOME!

Another option would be racing in one scenery for a week - one download. Vary the wind, type of glider, cloudbase; that would provide a 'same but different' experience and be easier to prepare for. Announce the following week's scenery a week in advance so that people can be prepared.

Hey Guys,

Thanks for the feedback!

We've been running US Nightly Soaring/Monday Night Soaring for a long time and have found that operates in a delicate balance of challenge, variety, and classes to keep people interested.

It's very hard to keep virtual racing engaging indefinitely. It is exceptionally easy to make it too hard, too easy, or too boring. Flying in different places around the world is one of the ways we manage this and how we've kept people interested for approaching 9 years of tasking (~3000 tasks!).

_____________________

That said, we will do two things that should help.

1) School Class in Slovenia has been well received. Starting next week, we will lock in Thursday Nights for this scenery and class.

2) We will publish a list of sceneries in the contest description for the May (and subsequent) series of the competition. At this point, we have a reasonable suite of sceneries to work with, so contestants shouldn't expect to have to download landscapes on a weekly basis.

If we feel a strong desire to amend the list mid-month, we will announce any new sceneries to download a week in advance.

All the best,
Daniel

One suggestion for folks with disk space issues is to use the Condor Club "texture reducer". While it makes the scenery less pretty, it can cut down the mega-GB monstrosities down to several GB and save a lot of room.

All the best,
Daniel

Daniel,
Thanks for the detailed response! Makes sense.