About sloped (?) runways

[mccracken 26]

So far there are 2 screenshots in this thread that suggest sloped runways (the night time shot with the apparently curved runway lights, and the Courchevel shot).

The only justification that there are no sloped runways is that the night time shot is "probably" a graphical artefact. Using that same logic, couldn't the runways actually be even more sloped than they appear, but graphical artefacts are actually making them appear less so?

 

[rjetster1 38]

This back and forth sloped runway thread is only valid until MS releases news that there is indeed sloped runways… which they will.

[MatthewS 761]

3 hours ago, Paraffin said:

With respect, I think you're moving the goalposts here. This is what you said just 3 hours ago:

Well obviously I'm talking about "generic" airports and not "custom made" airports.  Any custom made airport can have sloping runways, and there are many in FSX and P3D that have sloping runways.

 

1 hour ago, mccracken said:

The only justification that there are no sloped runways is that the night time shot is "probably" a graphical artefact. Using that same logic, couldn't the runways actually be even more sloped than they appear, but graphical artefacts are actually making them appear less so?

Which runway are you talking about? Look at 25L and that doesn't match the hump that's visible in the Youtube video.  If you're talking about 24L suggests a "dip" not a "hump" anyway (which I maintain is a graphical artefact).

Edited August 21, 2019 by MatthewS

[mccracken 26]

25 minutes ago, MatthewS said:

Which runway are you talking about? Look at 25L and that doesn't match the hump that's visible in the Youtube video.  If you're talking about 24L suggests a "dip" not a "hump" anyway (which I maintain is a graphical artefact).

Ignoring the YouTube video for now as that just introduces more issues with perception, and focusing on the actual elevations at surveyed intervals as can be found here: https://www.ngs.noaa.gov/AERO/uddf/WESTERN-PACIFIC/CALIFORNIA/LAX__96A.TXT

Bearing in mind we're talking a roughly 10-20 feet hump over a length of 10000 feet viewed at an acute angle from a distance in an early release screenshot, to me 25L, 25R and 24L still all show the crest of the humps roughly as per the intervals in the actual runway elevations.

But really, with the very limited stuff we've seen so far and the absolute lack of any true evidence for or against, we're all just counting pixels at this stage so no one can definitively say "yay" or "nay". I'm still leaning more towards "yay" though....

[nickhod 425]

3 hours ago, MatthewS said:

Well obviously I'm talking about "generic" airports and not "custom made" airports.  Any custom made airport can have sloping runways, and there are many in FSX and P3D that have sloping runways.

In the Aerofly FS 2 this problem is solved by requiring the mesh of each airport to be heavily quadified (broken into lots of triangles). The "flat" model is then draped over the landscape. If you don't quadify enough you actually see some of your runway occluding with the terrain and you have to modify it.

It's a really smart approach as you can model airports easily without caring about the terrain.

As @Flamingpie says, if a single digit sized team like IPACS can solve this problem, I'm pretty sure a XBox Studios company with x10 or x100 times the budget can achieve it.

I'd be extremely surprised if runways don't follow the actual terrain in MSFS.

Edited August 21, 2019 by nickhod

[MatthewS 761]

1 minute ago, nickhod said:

I'd be extremely surprised if runways don't follow the actual terrain in MSFS

I sure hope they do because even a little slope/undulation makes for very interesting take off/landing and gives a lot of variety and character to otherwise plain "generic" airports.

[nickhod 425]

1 minute ago, MatthewS said:

I sure hope they do because even a little slope/undulation makes for very interesting take off/landing and gives a lot of variety and character to otherwise plain "generic" airports.

It really does and that's one of the reasons I like Aerofly so much right now.

Personally I'd bet that the teaser featuring Courchevel is MS's way of saying "look, we've done runways properly in this release". Fingers crossed.

[MatthewS 761]

Just now, nickhod said:

Personally I'd bet that the teaser featuring Courchevel is MS's way of saying "look, we've done runways properly in this release". Fingers crossed

It would certainly be amazing if Courchevel was actually a "generic" airport (not a custom airport) and all that slope is being handled natively by the sim!

[nickhod 425]

4 minutes ago, MatthewS said:

It would certainly be amazing if Courchevel was actually a "generic" airport (not a custom airport) and all that slope is being handled natively by the sim!

With all these teasers you have to factor in that if they show a sloped runway, then later say "oh yeah, we cheated and hand modelled that, the rest are flat", they're not going to do themselves any favours at all.

No one really knows (obviously), but I'd take each screenshot and clip to be a showcase of a technology they've implemented rather than just showing off pretty things that are not representative of the end experience.

Edited August 21, 2019 by nickhod

[Dominique_K 10,133]

I am rather an agnostic in this dispute. We don't have enough information to make up our mind. The Courchevel pic is interesting but remember that a trailer can make a lemon a sensational movie too. That the way the entertainment industry works. And simming is entertainment.

That being said I lean on the optimistic side. No sloped runway would be a huge disappointment for the flightsimming community that could damage the sales. 

It is not only about realism. The non adaptibility to the mesh is one of the reasons why one sees airports in trenches and plateaus when one installs a sharper mesh than default or repostions an airport (most of them are tens if not hundreds of meters off). And if there is something I don't want to see anymore, it is these wretched trenches and plateaus. 

Edited August 21, 2019 by domkle

[vortex681 806]

34 minutes ago, domkle said:

No sloped runway would be a huge disappointment for the flightsimming community that could damage the sales. 

Whilst I'd like to see sloping runways, I don't think that not having them will damage sales significantly. There may be a few die-hards who ignore the sim on principle, but I think that most won't. Neither FSX nor P3D has them by default and their sales don't seem to have suffered as a result. If it was such an essential feature, why hasn't everyone moved to X-Plane or AFS2? Simply because it's just one of many features which go to make up the sim and people are prepared to accept the odd deficiency if the rest makes up for it.

I know that it's a bit of a radical idea, but why not just wait and see, then we'll know for sure?

[andyjohnston.net 617]

2 hours ago, vortex681 said:

I know that it's a bit of a radical idea, but why not just wait and see, then we'll know for sure?

Don't be silly.  This entire forum was created so people can argue about a piece of software which is at least a year away from release.  Wait and see could be the answer to every thread.

[Paraffin 2,197]

As a side note to those images I posted above, I checked out what Altiport Courchevel LFLJ looks like in the default XP11 scenery, and it shows a flat runway. No slope or contour at all!

There is a Gateway (user contributed) airport there with buildings static aircraft and a dead flat runway. Either the designer used the "flatten runway" tool, or the underlying mesh has a problem. I suspect it might be the mesh. I'm using the free HD 4 mesh here, by the way. There is a much older LFLJ file in the .org free scenery database that has the correct runway contour, and the author mentioned he had to edit the underlying mesh to get the runway contour right. However, this file also uses an ortho overlay for snow cover, and airports with orthos can't be submitted to the Gateway database. The current Gateway LFLJ author might not have known how to edit the mesh.

Anyway, to bring this back on topic, it seems the new MSFS is already doing something better than XP11. 🙂  At that one location at least, and until someone updates that area with a better Gateway airport.

I think this also shows that even when a sim supports this feature worldwide, it won't necessarily work perfectly everywhere. Maybe Azure will "know" how to do a better job in MSFS, but it will still rely on accuracy of the available data.

[snglecoil 1,828]

Not to further make a  mountain out of a molehill (ba dum tsss) but I really do hope MS includes this feature. I honestly had never really cared as most of the airports I fly into are relatively flat. Not perfectly flat by any stretch, but flat enough that I never thought it was critical to include in the sim.  A couple of weeks ago I made an practice approach into an airport in the Appalachian foothills I'd never been to before. When it lifted the hood at minimums, I was greeted with this magnificently undulating runway! Not the sight picture I was ready for. It was really a cool experience and would be very welcome in the sim.

[dtrjones 356]

On 8/19/2019 at 12:44 PM, Flamingpie said:

I am sure MS will come up with a (rather easy) way to implement sloped runways all over the globe. If XP and Aerofly FS 2 can do it, so can MSFS. It would be totally and utterly ridiculous to NOT have sloped runways in MSFS. Imagine having such beautiful scenery and lighting but not having sloped runways......... nah, they can't do that and they won't do that. MSFS wants to be THE flight sim of the future and so it will have sloped runways. Period.

Here's how AFS2 does it: "Flat airport with 3D transformation using the Aerofly engine: if you build your airport flat the Aerofly FS 2 engine will transform the aircraft ground mesh using a polynomial fitting curve of the ground mesh. This means runways and taxiways, etc. are all bend so that they fit the overall curvature of the terrain. Buildings are moved as a whole up/down. 99.5% of the airports in the Aerofly FS 2 are done this way."

I am sure the MSFS engine will come with a similar feature.

When FSX came around the lack of sloped runways was more or less accepted because it was a Microsoft sim, but the chatter was are there cloud shadows, is that a cloud shadow or is it terain colour, can we have proper clouds and weather blaa blaa blaa... Microsoft have delivered so no one talks about cloud shadows anymore...

If they can include rain, weather and reflective PBR which shows this off and a dynamic ATC which can react accordingly to a dynamic flight experience that will be sweet and a lot more interesting than a sloped runway which after you've done one or two are just meh.