FSGenesis mesh and airports on hills...

[Jay R 0]

Hey guys,Wanted to get some expert opinion on whats happening here.I bought US/Canada/Mexico/South Americo/Carribean mesh from Fsgenesis a while ago, due to real life and being not able to fly much until recently I have only just got around to installing it all.Now, it's really great stuff, but I have one side affect, or maybe it's just me. Most if not all my airports now sit up on a plateau. Anwhere from a few feet to one in Colombia (Cali) thats sits up about 100ft on a 'hill'. Now I pretty much know the Fsgenesis stuff is right on, its the elevation of all the airports thats wrong.Anyone have ideas on how to correct this innaccuracy in FS9? Or if you know of this being discussed anywhere in a forum. It doesn't affect my flying but does look kinda funny.Thanks for you input.

-----------------------------"There is an art . . . to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss!"

[kerosene31 349]

Airports in fs2004 have to be 100% flat, which in real life is not true. This is what causes most problems, as well as the airport elevations being off. Hopefully the next version of flightsim allows airports with realistic elevation differences (pretty please with sugar on top?) :)

[Jay R 0]

Yep,Just browsed over to FSGenesis and saw the reason for this. Should have RTFW (Read the Friendly Website)!!

-----------------------------"There is an art . . . to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss!"

[Holger 0]

Howdy,actually, the main reason why smaller (!) airfields often end up in trenches or on plateaus is not the lack of sloping runways but rather the fact that they are misplaced spatially. Even in the US the AirNav database - http://www.airnav.com/airports/ - which the FS team used for compiling the default airfields, is often incorrect, and sometimes rather badly so. That's probably because smaller aifields are mostly VFR only and it doesn't make much difference for an approaching aircraft whether the actual lat/long is off by a couple hundred feet. BTW, these misplacements become also apparent when using road and water add-ons of high accuracy, like Ultimate Terrain.However, in mountainous terrain, a small difference in runway heading or placement can make a big difference in the way the airfield looks in the sim. When I worked on my Columbia River Gorge project I ended up with lots of the small airfields looking pretty bad. By moving them to their accurate position according to topo maps and orthophotos 95% of the display issues disappeared.Unfortunately, the process for moving default airfields is rather complex because of the way the infrastructure and underlying textures and flatten files are defined. Here's a thread that discusses the procedure: http://www.flightsimmer.com/forums/showthread.php?t=35920Cheers, Holger

[RFields5421 1]

Holger's spot on about the location issues and what an accurate mesh, roadways, landclass does which appears as an adverse impact.Another contributor to the issue is the "slope" effect which occurs with a good mesh.Basically - at the default at Cali airport you have a mesh supplied by Microsoft where the elevation change from the flat airport polygon to the surrounding mesh occurs over over a distance of a several hundred meters. This appears as a fairly gentle slope.Replace the default with a detailed mesh where the altitude difference is reflected in just a couple dozen meters -the effect is a steeply sided plateau.The airport really is on a plateau in the default - just because the new mesh is much more detailed - the slope of the sides of the plateau is greatly exadurated - because the entire airport polygon must remain flat.