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A question about areas around runways.....

Bone, you are correct in your statement that flying the real deal is A LOT different than flight-simming. A2A's Accusim has helped quite a bit. However, except for a some ultralight flights I get to sneak in once in a while, I will never be able to afford flying again. FSX comes in at least third place on the experience of flight level. I too get a little tired of the way airport scenery is treated in flight simulators, but Bill Womack and some our great scenery designers here are making it more tolerable. By the way, great shots and I really envy you your profession.
Ted

These guys help ya keep it in perspective too: Great fun!
http://flyasim.com/blog/index.php/archives/115
 
Bone said:
Thanks Bjoern. We fly our arses off in these things. I hope you're able to fly profesionally someday...it's alot different than flight simming.
Click to expand...

Oddly enough, I really want to fly RJs in the United States. Its seems to be quite a paradise in that regard with all the regional carriers.
 
There is a background in FSX that will allow you to have a less maintained look. It has small bushes randomly placed.
 
You can actually use any landclass to create a background for an airfield, the trick is just which flatten to use.

Most people (including me, normally) just slap down an AB_Flatten_ExcludeAutogen_MaskClassMap and you end up with a green (brown in desert areas, white in snow areas) shape. As Bone says, though, aerodromes (covers all bases ;)) usually do stand out quite well from the background - you just need to pan across an aerial view of East Anglia to see all the disused ones out there and how easily you can pick them out.

You can actually use any combination of those, placing them over a landclass polygon, and you'll end up with a background that will blend in much better. It works better on tundra or outback landclasses than a city or forest, obviously, but it's not difficult to lay down your own if you can't use what's already there.

What I was referring to before, which it seems didn't come across very well, is that in FS, aerodromes tend to be bounded by a very specific, moulded to the shape of the runways, cut out. Things are rarely that well defined in the real world although a lot of that is to do with the simplicity inherent in having the sheer number of airports that FS includes - I very much doubt they created all those flattens by hand!

What I've tried to do when I've done a scenery is to follow the contours or a defined boundary with the flatten or exclude so that at least you don't get the perfectly symmetrical (sp?) shape around the runways. I think it looks more natural, but it may not be so much in places where the room and willpower exists to actually put an airfield boundary exactly where you want it.

Does that make more sense?
 
I use ADE over at www.fsdeveloper.com and just lay down a exclude airport background poly, then I can add in any land class I want on top of that. Easy Peasy. Normally we remove any "flattening" cause we don't land at flat airports just dirt roads and "runways"
 
I did ponder the idea of trying to only flatten the areas of Bodney where the hangars sit (FS buildings dislike slopes a lot), but for a lot of work, the terrain rendered flat anyway so I just rolled my eyes and flattened the lot. It also allowed me to add runways and AI, so I wasn't that upset to be honest. ;)
 
FSX isn't perfect, but it is an improvement. During the FSX Beta I complained a bit about this abrupt transition from airport to Autogen. The reply was that things were to far along to change anything, better luck next time. The simplified boundaries are not quite as egregious as the lack of clearways. Often right at the scenery boundaries, trees will rise to 100' or so right off the end of the runway. Makes some small airports rather interesting withut turning the autogen down!

Cheers: t.
 
OK, the culprit is generally the Airport_Backgrounds_Flatten_MaskClassMap. This landclass will put a flatten in place and place the appropriate area's grass texture down to the edges of the polygon. This is what most ADE/AFX/Microsoft airports have. Using SBuilder you could download ortho tiles to make the airport backgrounds more realistic. That resolution could go down to 30cm (but probably doesn't). Or you can use the FS-2002 Ground tiles as Bill describes.

If you have the tools, you could go out to the USGS or other ortho-imagery source and prepare a background using any grass texture of your choice, or the real airport. This is what Bill's Plum Island was made with (as well as ground tiles around the actual airport). There's all kinds of things you can do.

My recommendation would be to get familiar with Luis's SBuilder X as between that and ADE, there's very little that can't be done with an airport other than having custom modeling.

Jim
 
jdhaenens said:
OK, the culprit is generally the Airport_Backgrounds_Flatten_MaskClassMap.
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Take flat runways, position them somewhere near to where they need to be, make an airport background that's wayyyy too big and then have trees blocking final approach. Works for most of the airports in FS. :blind:

Still faced with flat runways, place the airport where it should be, layout the airport background to resemble what it really is, clear the approach paths that need to be cleared out (some places really do have trees that close!), make some mesh and then try to do something about the dreaded plateau effect caused by the flat runway. :isadizzy:

At least for this low and slow fly guy, it does make the sim more fun and a lot more challenging.


jdhaenens said:
... there's very little that can't be done with an airport other than having custom modeling.
Click to expand...

And then there's always that final hurdle that must be overcome...

BTW Jim, I'm not ashamed to ask if you have anything sitting around that would go well with Beale AFB? I"ll be placing stuff there in a few days.
 
Lance,
Search under "Jim Dhaenens" at Flightsim .com. They have all my FSX Libraries now. I may have some other stuff kicking around if you'd PM me your email.

Best,

Jim
 
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