It seems to me that - if MS is now making a "round earth" - causing developers to have a hard time making airports - why are a number of airports/airfields on dead flat plateaus? I flew around KSEA in the Dornier a while ago, and was amazed that it is as flat as a pancake - and on a perfectly level plateau. Is anyone else puzzled by this - and - please - can someone give me an explanation?

There are no sloping runways in FSX. So to fit a flat runway to sloping terrain the runways are very often on artificial plateaus. Just like FS9.Cheers,Noel.

Just wait until you install real mesh then you will really see airports on plateaus.I was flying the amazon mission with FS Genesis and some airports and lakes are a couple of hundred fit above the mesh making for some outrageus plateaus.

There's flat and then there's flat. airports have a single elevation at all points. In FS9 and prior, that meant that a scenery object polygon surface could be laid on it. In FSX, single elevation terrain follows the earth's curvature, so a polygon surface will not lie flat any longer.scott s..

It's still strange. I'd actually been quite satisfied with the screen rates and graphics after half-sizing them with Matt Fox's tweaks and the other two or three mods posted here and elswhere, and had gone back to FS9 while "my personal aircraft" are upgraded for FSX.In FS9 KSEA (FlyTampa + FSG and GE Pro)looks pretty normal, in fact I'd say fabulous, and the airport blends in very well to the surrounding area, but in FSX there's a ruddy great cliff at each end! I'm also using FSG for FSX. On a similar subject - I did some flying with both sims last night, and two things jumped out at me - the plateau - and the black winter trees twinkling, so that's another issue. How do I stop that? I've reduced aa and af to 4x in hardware and it improved. Any thoughts anyone?

>On a similar subject - I did some flying with both sims last>night, and two things jumped out at me - the plateau - and the>black winter trees twinkling, so that's another issue. How do>I stop that? I've reduced aa and af to 4x in hardware and it>improved. Any thoughts anyone?Regarding that issue, on my rig I upped AA to 8xS and AF to 16x and no more shimmer. With my card, there is no performance benefit to running lower AA and AF. It seems to handle the max just as well as the min.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2530 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian