hi everyone,

 

Am trying my hand at creating an airport, but got a small issue.

 

I created a ramp using the taxiway creation layer, and put a concrete poly over the top so it looks closer to the real thing...made the boundary around the airport and selected "flatten" in WED...

 

Problem is, when I try to taxy around the ramp, my aircraft jumps up a few meters in the air and crashes back down....and every now and then when moving along if swerves to the side as if hitting something.

 

Any ideas please?

The boundary doesn't make any difference when smoothing as it's hard-coded into the mesh. Whilst they do use the boundary when baking the DSF tiles, once they are baked, that's it, and changing the boundary has no effect on the smoothing. If there was no boundary for the airport in the first place then there will be a default one created during scenery recut that extends out over the airport, but it should at least cover the runway, but of course it could miss the apron or taxiway if they're not in the default airport. I think this part seems to be misunderstood or badly documented, as changing the boundary will only work and be used if the airport is used during the mesh creation and the actual hard flattening doesn't respect the actual boundary tightly

 

http://developer.x-plane.com/2013/12/aircraft-authoring-airport-boundaries/

The boundary doesn't make any difference when smoothing as it's hard-coded into the mesh. Whilst they do use the boundary when baking the DSF tiles, once they are baked, that's it, and changing the boundary has no effect on the smoothing. If there was no boundary for the airport in the first place then there will be a default one created during scenery recut that extends out over the airport, but it should at least cover the runway, but of course it could miss the apron or taxiway if they're not in the default airport. I think this part seems to be misunderstood or badly documented, as changing the boundary will only work and be used if the airport is used during the mesh creation and the actual hard flattening doesn't respect the actual boundary tightly

 

http://developer.x-plane.com/2013/12/aircraft-authoring-airport-boundaries/

Thanks Tony, so the moral is to put a boundary as soon as you start then?

I will start from scratch again and see how we go

Yep, if you can get an accurate boundary done and it's an airport you are going to submit to the gateway, then the earlier the better, but you don't need to start from scratch. At least in terms of a possible HD Mesh recut this year, the smoothing will take effect in that version, but it's unlikely now to be seen in XP11 unless they haven't yet cut the tile it is on. Once you've submitted an accurate boundary for smoothing the terrain, you can then possibly increase your boundary in your own version to force the hard flattening to capture all the triangles, but the hard flattening (the one where it sets the entire area to the same elevation) is brutal and often does not work too well. If you have a look at Bergen in Norway or ENSD, the flattening there causes a cliff of water. I can only presume this is because the boundary was badly defined when the scenery was cut. I've had hell with ENOV (an airport I'm working on) with floating buildings and holes cut in mountains that I decided to distribute a new mesh with it, which isn't ideal as it means anyone else doing airports in the same tile will likely need their own mesh as well :-). LR know this is a problem, but it isn't being fixed in XP11.

 

Anyway, good to see you joining in the development fun. Making airports can become addictive (frustrations aside).