Runway problem in Radar/top-down view

[Guest ssurjap]

Has anyone else notice this? On some airports, like SJC for example, when I go to top-down view in the window, I don't see the runway, but GRASS! I see the taxiways fine, but not the runway. I can see runways at other airports fine, but not SJC. Any clues? Is that a bug?Thanks.

[Daviddv 0]

Was there ever an explanation for this?I have just come across this problem and found this old topic.At a particular airport, I go into slew and top down mode. At zoom level 4200 ft I can see the runway as normal, but at 3300 and below - no runway! The taxiway is there, but there is just grass where the runway should be.I'm sure someone has a simple explanation.I am still running fs2k2. Puzzled!David

[Guest Barney1]

As with most of the disappearing acts within flightsim, I believe we can chalk it up to elevation conflicts. Other examples are disappearing taxiway/runway textures when taxiing in large aircraft (higher off the ground) at certain airports.

[Daviddv 0]

I guess you're probably right.Do you know if there is an easy way round this?David

[Guest BobL]

Actually, there is a fairly easy fix in terms of technique but can be a little time consuming if you start trying to fix every airport you find.The core issue is that FS can't handle a slope at an airport because of the tiered way in which it 'paints' scenery starting with the mesh and then building up. Airport polygons and airport sceneries have the highest priority and are therefore, 'sitting on top' of everything else. If the elevation of the airport polygon and the underlying mesh are different, voila! Conflict and disappearing textures.Those airports that have texture issues most likely are not at the same elevation through out the boundary described by the airport polygon and what needs to be done is to flatten them. Starting in FS2000 and maybe prior to that even, there was a switch that you could put in the Scenery.cfg (airport by airport) and that would probably still work but good grief, that would take for ever.Steve Greenwood has a utility kit that does this same thing by building a SCASM file and then creating a flatten BGL. I'm not sure where I got it from. I think he emailed it to me direct. It's in my archives as flatten.zip. Try a search here at AVSIM and also at Flightsim. If that doesn't work, you'll need to contact him directly. He did not include a re-distribution license in the readme so I hesitate to send it to you. I don't know if he wants me doing that. The contact information from his readme is Steve Greenwoodsupport@fs-traveler.comwww.fs-traveler.comGood Luck.BobL