GAME OVER for detailed airport ground ? UPDATE 5

[martin[flytampa]]

Jeff: A marking like that should still be do-able for FSX using the "old methods". The reason being that it only covers a very small surface and the negative effect of the "round earth" only becomes an issue when large surfaces are involved. We could in fact still do whole airports the old way if we were to cut the groundwork into lots of small segments.

No reason for excitement tho, I considered this before. It means a) endless work, b) more work, c) its a dead end road, d) FSX's bump mapping, rain effects etc, all not possible using the old method, e) its crazy, f) did I mention endless work?

[michal]

have to accept the fact that airport sceneries for this version will pretty much consist of custom buildings sitting on default apron textures, with default runways and default markings.

Not sure what most scenery buyers would say to this. I personally buy add-on airport sceneries primarily for their customized ground, apron, runway textures and not for the buildings. Maybe I am a-typical.

On the other hand does the Earth curvature pose such a difficulty here? A quick calculation shows that there is a 1 cm error (less than half inch) for every 350 meters (or 1000 ft). In other words if runway is 10000 ft long both ends will diverge by about 4 inches compared to its perfectly flat counterpart. If you had to 'stitch' airport runways from smaller pieces each piece could still be fairly large - say 1000 ft without incurring any visible penalty.

[martin[flytampa]]

Not sure what most scenery buyers would say to this. I personally buy add-on airport sceneries primarily for their customized ground, apron, runway textures and not for the buildings. Maybe I am a-typical.

You are indeed "a-typical", welcome to the club

I wouldn't downplay the importance of custom airport buildings within a scenery FSX does indeed offer sweet new "effects" that we can apply to buildings but I agree that the lack of equally nice custom groundwork will ruin the overall picture.

[michal]

Martin, I edited my previous post - might be of interest to you though I am not a scenery designer and know little about the techniques involved.

[Bluestreak Dx]

Forgive me if this is stupid...I'm only just getting into Max airport design...but a quick check of the FSX SDK shows that there is a new "Flatten Mode" called "offset". It allows you to set the mesh height in relation to the origin of the object you're placing.

Wouldn't that allow you to control unintended floating of objects?

Regards,

Nick

[martin[flytampa]]

On the other hand does the Earth curvature pose such a difficulty here? A quick calculation shows that there is a 1 cm error (less than half inch) for every 350 meters (or 1000 ft). In other words if runway is 10000 ft long both ends will diverge by about 4 inches compared to its perfectly flat counterpart. If you had to 'stitch' airport runways from smaller pieces each piece could still be fairly large - say 1000 ft without incurring any visible penalty.

Yes, in theory this would work but... it is just a way of "hacking" around the problem while holding on to the past in terms of methods/tools. We do not want to keep using what I call the old" unofficial methods". Every airport designer I know was hoping for a quality replacement to this stuff which dates back to the FS2002 SDK. Now there is aparently no replacement and to keep using the old stuff requires even more work and results would be no better then in FS2004.

[martin[flytampa]]

Forgive me if this is stupid...I'm only just getting into Max airport design...but a quick check of the FSX SDK shows that there is a new "Flatten Mode" called "offset". It allows you to set the mesh height in relation to the origin of the object you're placing. Wouldn't that allow you to control unintended floating of objects?

I will have to look into it again but so far every type of "flatten" I explored conforms to the "round earth".

Again there might be a solution, but it is not clearly pointed out in the SDK or Microsoft just forgot to tell us (us meaning every addon developer I know).

[OSS-J.Nielsen]

Yeah, U said it Martin...ROFL.

That's what I was trying to show the users...when you do custom work and add the stuff we add, like in that pic, it requires the old method which was horridly (if that's a word), time consuming, and for FSX even if we were to continue with it, it would take even longer and not have all the cool effects that we should have for the new sim.

We'll see what happens I suppose.

[dmspragg]

If there was ever a compelling reason to see that the flat vs. round earth impediment is worked out by Microsoft with creative developers such as FlyTampa, we need look no further than FSX Miami, or for that matter, New York JFK.

For fairly apparent personal reasons, my first look at FSX out of the box raw was to explore Miami, New York, DFW, Boston and Heathrow.

Microsoft did not update Miami whatsoever. They fixed JFK Terminal 4 but do not have the new Terminal 9. Heathrow remains seriously flawed. So they have added Washington Reagan, et. al., their questionable level of quality certainly keeps the door open for developers of quality sceneries, so long as the ground underneath them can be properly displayed.

I am surprised, really, that Microsoft has continued to keep Miami, Kennedy and Heathrow years behind where the airports really are. Miami's D Concourse remains the old D; B is still there and their attempt at the new J is a big blob. Sad, really. AAL has been flying out of JFK's new Terminal 9 for over a year now. It is missing in FSX. Oh well.

My best to all and hopes for a solution. Meanwhile, FSX is a curiosity and FS2004 remains my workhorse. I can see the possibilities with FSX and we will see what happens. Hang in there, guys!

[george[flytampa]]

You should fly up the Thames for some really special Microsoft magic

[Jacek]

Nice and blurry.

[vegasflyboy2004]

One more reason FSX won't be gracing my hard drive anytime soon. YUCK!

[arno]

Hi Martin,

I think you have described this problem very well in this thread.

Maybe some future research into this subject can change it, but for the moment I have indeed also come to the conclusion that FsX offers a lot of improvements, but MS has forgotten to give us a good alternative for making ground layouts that look better than the default XML ones.

I think no serious scenery design would care that he has to stop using these old Fs2002 techniques, if there was a proper replacement for them. A technique that allows high resolution and good control over the texture mapping. Unfortunately I have not seen that yet...

[MD11Forever]

Agreed. I've yet to see any screenshots anywhere that are enough to convince me to use FSX. You should see some of the ones people are posting on the AVSIM forums, "hey look at this...I finally got FSX to run smooth and the scenery looks great!" And the screenshot shows a bare airport, bare ground all around it, and no clouds.

Personally, I'm sticking with FS9 and will certainly continue to buy add-ons for it.