Dear (highly skilled developers) at Asobo,

I was wondering how the 3D infrastructure with a wide footprint will fit on the uneven airport terrain.

In another simulator that has uneven airport terrain, one needs to either flatten the infrastructure area or have the wide 3D infrastructure half float, half sink in the terrain...

Flattening part of the airport make the transition with the other (sloped) part not so smooth considering the elevation resolution.

I just wish and hope, MSFS engine will handle this in a clever way. Perhaps adapt the bottom vertices of the objects to make it anchored in the terrain? Or another clever algorithm to automatically adapt the 3D to the sloped or uneven area .

And who knows, maybe you already thought about it

You mean like this? 🙂

 

 

 

 

Of course we don't know yet how it looks at default airfields.

 

 

10 hours ago, Claviateur said:

Dear (highly skilled developers) at Asobo,

I was wondering how the 3D infrastructure with a wide footprint will fit on the uneven airport terrain.

In another simulator that has uneven airport terrain, one needs to either flatten the infrastructure area or have the wide 3D infrastructure half float, half sink in the terrain...

Flattening part of the airport make the transition with the other (sloped) part not so smooth considering the elevation resolution.

I just wish and hope, MSFS engine will handle this in a clever way. Perhaps adapt the bottom vertices of the objects to make it anchored in the terrain? Or another clever algorithm to automatically adapt the 3D to the sloped or uneven area .

And who knows, maybe you already thought about it

A good question which raises another one : can any structure, building, runway, taxiway be compatible with a sharper mesh than the default ?

I'm wondering how they will make AI planes cope with sloped runways. I know it doesn't work in P3D/FSX.

Hi jlund

you need to look at this as a team is making ai planes follow the runways in P3d4

 

1 hour ago, jlund said:

I'm wondering how they will make AI planes cope with sloped runways. I know it doesn't work in P3D/FSX.

The last rehab of the terrain was from FS9 to FSX  and the P3D team didn't do anything major, if I am not mistaken. AI not following the slopes is a legacy more than a programming difficulty as I see it. 

3 hours ago, jlund said:

I'm wondering how they will make AI planes cope with sloped runways. I know it doesn't work in P3D/FSX.

The new MSFS does not use FSX (ESP) engine. 

FSX engine was made, or let's say carried on the old FS tradition, to have flat airports. The architecture of the Airport components was meant to be on a flat surface (among other things: Rwys, taxiway lines, AI routes etc.). 

The architecture of another simulator we know, is done in a way that all the airport components (I mentioned above) follow the uneven/sloped ground of an airport. In other words, vectors and polygons representing Rwys, taxiways, taxi lines etc are not stiff horizontally, they are draped over the terrain... They follow it.

Thus AI follow the tracks that follow the terrain...

Sloped airport terrain is the way to go, it's simply true to life.

The new MSFS seems to have been done this way too by design (i.e: to have sloped airports and airport components following the slopes...)

But the tricky part is when it comes to place 3D objects with a wide footprint on the uneven terrain of an airport. If you have a wide terminal on a sloped airport terrain, part of it will be floating, the other part sinking, maybe...

Now one needs to edit the terrain and flatten the portion where the infrasrtucture sits (as I did in my project) and link the flat area to the rest of the sloped airport terrain. Not the best solution as the link could never be smooth to allow realistic transition and taxying...

But we have no choice as we need the animated gates to align with the parked Aircraft...

However, the ideal solution could be in a dynamic adaptaion of the 3D objcets' anchors. So looking forward to see how Asobo solved this.

Edited January 27, 20206 yr by Claviateur

15 hours ago, RALF9636 said:

You mean like this? 🙂

 

 

 

 

Of course we don't know yet how it looks at default airfields.

 

 

Yes but the infrastructure here does not have a wide footprint like a large terminal. Many international airports are located on a sloped terrain, not as radical as Courchevel but sloped enough to make one tip of the terminal floats, the other sinks in the terrain...

Here in the Courchevel scenery, these small buildings are manually adapted to the terrain during the 3D modeling (most probably).

Edited January 27, 20206 yr by Claviateur

1 hour ago, Claviateur said:

Yes but the infrastructure here does not have a wide footprint like a large terminal. Many international airports are located on a sloped terrain, not as radical as Courchevel but sloped enough to make one tip of the terminal floats, the other sinks in the terrain...

You model the 3D object with a below ground section ("basement").   The highest "tip" (corner) of the structure is at ground level, the "basement" extends down until it meets the ground everywhere else, thus the 3D object does not float.

18 minutes ago, MatthewS said:

You model the 3D object with a below ground section ("basement").   The highest "tip" (corner) of the structure is at ground level, the "basement" extends down until it meets the ground everywhere else, thus the 3D object does not float.

This mainly. A lot of games works like that. Then there is also the option of have objects/buildings/etc which adapt to the terrain contour. 

33 minutes ago, MatthewS said:

You model the 3D object with a below ground section ("basement").   The highest "tip" (corner) of the structure is at ground level, the "basement" extends down until it meets the ground everywhere else, thus the 3D object does not float.

This is exactly what I do to every infrastructure other than the terminal... The Terminal unfortunately should rest on a flat surface for User/AI gates alignments

Edited January 27, 20206 yr by Claviateur

14 minutes ago, aleex said:

Then there is also the option of have objects/buildings/etc which adapt to the terrain contour. 

This is the technology I hope will be part of the Asobo engine... Also they could adapt the terrain in a transitional way. Again for wide infrastructure

 

5 hours ago, Claviateur said:

The Terminal unfortunately should rest on a flat surface for User/AI gates alignments

Why? In real life the air bridges of a terminal will be at different inclinations to accommodate the ground elevation differences around the terminal.

Presumably in FS2020 your air bridges can be dynamically inclined, one end attached to your terminal, but the other end at ground level (some in-game variable I guess, the value known at runtime, depending on the elevation mesh installed).

Edited January 27, 20206 yr by MatthewS

16 hours ago, MatthewS said:

Why? In real life the air bridges of a terminal will be at different inclinations to accommodate the ground elevation differences around the terminal.

Presumably in FS2020 your air bridges can be dynamically inclined, one end attached to your terminal, but the other end at ground level (some in-game variable I guess, the value known at runtime, depending on the elevation mesh installed).

Well, if you read my previous posts including the first one, this is what I was hoping for in MSFS 🙂 Otherwise you need to flatten your terminal area, or, adapt your architecture in the 3D app to match the terrain (but the the SDK could allow people to compile their own elevation data...).

So yes, you are right, ideally, we hope MSFS will adapt dynamically such infrastructure and terminal compoenents to match the terrain.