AFCAD Q: How do I raise a whole airport by only a few feet?

PilatusTurbo

PilatusTurbo

members+, Fighter Fanatic
The title pretty much says it. I've played with Afcad a bit, and I'm not sure if I'm raising the airport correctly.

I'm doing this because the airport has that weird flashing/tearing effect thru the runway and taxiways. I read years ago back in FS2002 times that the way to fix this was by raising the airport by a foot or two. I'd really like to do this, but I don't really know how. I would try the trial and error, but it'll take me a long time without some help.

Please let me know how I might do this. Thanks fellas :ernae:
 
Man, I haven't done any of this in a while now but my guess is that if you're getting that effect then either the airport itself is off or the rwy is off just a bit. I use AFX because I can do both FSX and FS9, I haven't used AFCAD in ages. Normally, in AFX, I would select the airport, then look at the elevation info (usually in meters), then click the rwy and see if the elevation matches that. . .both can be edited, but a third parameter comes into play as well, the flatten polygon (if there is one that can be edited). That pretty much sets the standard for what the airport general info and the rwy should be set at. . .all of them need to be the same.

Not much help, I know, but maybe that can give you a few places to look anyway.
 
PT there are 2 elements:
1. Airport - right-click on the magenta spot which is the airport definition point and enter the elevation
APMedium.jpg

2. Right-click runways and update elevations to correspond
RWYMedium.jpg

This will fix anomalies in the AFCAD.

However there could be other issues such as mesh, default runways underlying etc.
Step 1: make sure there are no other AFCADs lying around in some forgotten folder, this is the most common problem.
Step 2: Confirm the scenery does not have flatten files, either in the scenery.cfg file or as bgl files in the scenery addon.

If absolutely all else fails, COPY your AFCAD and PASTE it into
Flight Simulator 9\Scenery\World\scenery
 
Ok, Thank you so much for that, Wing Z and Falcon.

Wing, that is very detailed and straight forward. I'm off to try all your suggestions, and I'll let you know how she goes. I don't have any additional stuff at the port; it's completely default. Only an FS Genesis Mesh in the region. I will check for any potential flatten files.

This has been, and still is a huge FS pet peeve of mine. I hate some of my smaller and more favorite ports to operate out of having this dumb visual anomaly. Hopefully, I've figured out how to fix it permanently. :ernae:
 
It is a FS peeve of mine too... and one I can't solve it either. :frown:

Example happened just yesterday. I tried to go into the small airport of SCIR (for reason of flight planning)... only to find it on a platform at 466 feet above the rest of the scenery (this problem was born ever since I installed FSGlobal 2008 mesh), and tried, following the same suggestions given here (but read elsewhere) to take the darn thing to 4 foot total altitude, like the rest of the scenery immediately around.

No dice. The runway disappears, I suppose it brings itself down to the entered new altitude, but the rest of the airport remains at 466 feet, dragging up the scenery all around. :censored:

Going by experiments I have discovered that if an airport is totally new, put there by a self-made AFCAD, the suggestions given to me, and above, work pretty well, but if said airport already exists coded into the main FS9 .BGL files (say, KJFK for example), there is no way to change altitude to the airport, even in presence of gross scenery mistakes.

I have pretty much renounced correcting SCIR's problems. :banghead:
 
Ashaman said:
It is a FS peeve of mine too... and one I can't solve it either. :frown:

Example happened just yesterday. I tried to go into the small airport of SCIR (for reason of flight planning)... only to find it on a platform at 466 feet above the rest of the scenery (this problem was born ever since I installed FSGlobal 2008 mesh), and tried, following the same suggestions given here (but read elsewhere) to take the darn thing to 4 foot total altitude, like the rest of the scenery immediately around.

No dice. The runway disappears, I suppose it brings itself down to the entered new altitude, but the rest of the airport remains at 466 feet, dragging up the scenery all around. :censored:

Going by experiments I have discovered that if an airport is totally new, put there by a self-made AFCAD, the suggestions given to me, and above, work pretty well, but if said airport already exists coded into the main FS9 .BGL files (say, KJFK for example), there is no way to change altitude to the airport, even in presence of gross scenery mistakes.

I have pretty much renounced correcting SCIR's problems. :banghead:
Click to expand...
Yep, that's what happens when conflicting mesh and current exclude and flatten poly's get together in certain areas. FSGenesis supposedly has corrected much of that with their Terrain mesh, although I still see some of that from time to time. . . .like the sunken rwy's that are 200ft underground, lol.

Normally, as you said, if you are the one setting up a new airport, then you control the elevations based on the surrounding terrain, but trying to fix a preset, default airport. . .good luck. It's not that it can't be done, it's just that the average simmer doesn't have the expertise to know how.
 
Yeah for some default airports you end up going into MS machine language.
Problem is, it can then have some unexpected, far-reaching and undesirable effects elsewhere, which is why most folk don't even try.
Often is best to create a large flatten file around your strip at the required level.
 
Unfortunately, it did not work. I just don't get why it does this, and it kinda ruins operating out of whichever airport that it occurs at.

I wish I knew how to fix it, and you think MS would have fixed it from FS2002, as it was a big issue in that version, too. :kilroy:
 
JABBgl by Jacky Brouze
http://library.avsim.net/search.php?SearchTerm=jabbgl_134445.zip&CatID=root&Go=Search

This little utility will allow you to change the elevation of the runways, start points, and such that are either FS default or of default-like compilation. I have used it a few times over the last few years. It makes a backup as well in case you don't like your changes or screwed up somehow.
The combination of JABBgl and the other utilities available to us, like AFCAD and FSTflatten, you can do a pretty fair job of getting an airport to your liking... most of the time. :icon_lol:
 
Yeh, what dogknot said. :ernae:
I've used JABBgl a few times, and it works well. It's just been quite a while ago.
 
Wing_Z said:
Often is best to create a large flatten file around your strip at the required level.
Click to expand...

When the strip is moderately sunken, this works good. It works as well in repairing some other scenery's intemperances. For example, quite some time ago I successfully repaired "in house" the South American 60.000 feet spire with a magic consisting the use of a wide, invisible apron poly attached to the AFCAD of a nearby small airstrip, or a now forgot airport which runways and some of its taxiways were suspended on holes... :ernae:

But when the damned airport is on a platform high 466 feet on a small island in the middle of 4.6 feet wide plain... things get hairy even trying to reason about how to do such a thing. :kilroy:

I thin k I'll try Dogknot's suggested program. :mixedsmi:
 
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