Heliports?

[Brentd2183 6]

With this new style of 3D maps to scenery what do you think will happen with the heliports as they get scanned over? I assume the 3D buildings will be generated if its in a detailed area or autogen on top of ortho if it was a non 3D scanned area just like any other area within the sim.  X-Plane has the heliports in its database and just drops a simple H pad at the GPS coordinates.  Can we hope the Nav data with the identifiers, name, and location are added to the sim?  I assume where it sees a big concrete pad its will just remain a concrete pad in ortho and be blurry up close.  It would be great if they could combine the nav database with their scanned data and recognize its a heliport and attempt to make something more of its representation in the sim.  If you wanted to check out an example you could see Umass medical center 1MA2 in Worcester Ma or the Kearny heliport 65NJ in Kearny NJ on bing maps.  Be interesting how they are handled.

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

1 hour ago, Brentd2183 said:

I assume where it sees a big concrete pad its will just remain a concrete pad in ortho and be blurry up close.

Maybe, although if they do what Orbx does with ortho-based scenery by adding a fine-grained texture on top of the blurred ortho underneath, that could still work. You just wouldn't get an actual helipad unless it was generated as autogen or hand-placed as a scenery object.

It was one of the things that made me hesitate to pick up the Orbx TE scenery for GB and WA State, but it does let you land anywhere in a helicopter with enough ground reference for a smooth landing.

Helipads on top of buildings like hospitals or oil platforms are a different case, and that may need hand-placed objects. Or a really smart "Azure AI" that knows how that should work. The convention of a huge "H" painted on the landing pads might be enough for the AI to work with, using satellite images.