First attempt to create sloped runway in P3d V5

First successful attempt to create sloped airport today in V5

I must say that I'm quite pleased with this new release of Prepar3D. I Finished the installation of all Orbx products witch already transformed the out of the box experience. Then I installed A2A Cherookee and Flight 1 GTN 750 that mimick my real world airplane setup. Also transferred my Garmin database for my plane to P3d so I'm now current on cycle 2004. 

I then made in the last days several tests with up to 5 layers of clouds and the FPS was solid and Vram usage quite reasonable. The engine seem very robust as there is little difference in performance between 1 and 5 layers of cloud. My system has a good graphic card RTX 2080 and a not so recent processor (4 years old). So very pleased with performance and smoothness and enough headroom for FSLabs and Majestic when they will be out.

This morning, i started to explore the sloped runway as my home airport CNV9 have a downward slope for the first third of runway 24 with about 5 meters elevation difference. This always require me to lower the engine power by approx 100 RPM and increase the vertical speed compared to a flat runway to avoid gliding too long on the landing. The default runway is flat in V5 like most airports.

I installed the new version of Airport Design Editor (ADE) released a couple of day ago and played with CNV9 file to create the sloped runway. 

The process is not so hard as all we have to do is to click on the flag (new flag) for sloped runway in the airport definition then to modify the Taxiway points to define their new altitude. There is no need to change the runway object itself as it adjust to the taxiway elevation (there always a taxiway associated with each runway). For the rest, ADE installation is as before, you need the SDK installed which take a couple of minutes and point to the SDK tools (ADE search and find them most of the time)

This change to airport to create sloped runways  may requires adding some more taxiway points and taxiway segments (paths) to avoid abrupt runway change. For instance, Courchevel (LFLJ) defined 9 taxiway points with different elevation on its runway and 5 of them are located very close to each other at the abrupt change in slope on the top or the runway. There is a flag also to set on taxiway path that rely points of different altitudes surface (Query = Elevation & Type) otherwise the runway is hanging in the air.

I still need to find a way to adapt the terrain around the sloped runway as for the moment the runway sit on a small hill that just fit the runway boundaries. We can see in Courchevel that a polygon was created to adjust the terrain below the runway but I have still to identify a tool to allow those changes in terrain elevation. If anyone has a clue on how this could be done.....  I may try to add another "taxiway" with longer and larger witdth to see if it correct the terrain around the runway. I will report back.

Will be interesting to adapt all airports in the province that has such sloped runways.

Edited April 19, 20206 yr by kama2004