10.50

[tonywob 4,769]

It's a great solution and I'm very glad they've done it. However, for it to really shine they need to let the developer choose the area to be flattened inside WED. I know in the post Ben said he had a working prototype, so hopefully they'll revisit this in a future version.

 

As an example, I was working on ENSD Sandane for X-Plane which is a famous airport surrounded by steep terrain and it also has a sloped runway. Whenever I placed a building it would almost always float on one side because of the bumpty terrain, and added basement areas looked wrong. To flatten the airport in the areas I wanted without destroying the sloped runway, I had to make a custom mesh for the entire 1x1 degree tile (which was a lot of work and is not an ideal solution since it prevents people using photoimagery). A 1x1 degree is a big area, especially this far north, so it's not a great solution.

 

When flattening is enabled, the airport looks awful. It ends up in a ditch with huge cliffs of water at the end of each runway. Basically, it looks better with floating buildings and bouncy taxiways than it does with flattening. If we could choose the area to be flattened/smoothed then it would be perfect. My only solution was a custom mesh or to instruct users to use Ortho4XP which has a clever method for flattening airport terrain.

 

The golden prize would be for LR to implement mesh patches, i.e. To allow parts of the mesh to be patched without distributing an entire tile. Once we have this (and I have no doubt that we will eventually), I think we will see some serious creativity appearing and airports will look much much better.