[v5.3] Airport terrain/ elevation issue after a long flight

[SimeonWilbury 220]

Hi all,

I purchased some South American Sceneries recently, among them Pauo Ricardo's SBKP scenery - not a native v5 scenery but I got it installed and an exclude from the inibuilds site working. No issues when I load into the airport from the scenario screen.

Upon my maiden voyage into the airport however - a long haul from EHAM in the PMDG 744, the elevation and terrain appeared to have loaded in incorrectly, the runway and the taxiways were embedded in the ground with the lights etc. floating above them. There was also uneven default terrain sticking out. I had to abandon my taxi to the stand after I got caught on a hill sticking out under the taxiway. After unloading P3D and then reloading into the airport everything was fine again.

There's a chance it was a one-off but I'll need to do more testing to confirm, one assumes that if it happened once it can happen again..

Has anyone had this kind of issue with airport scenery before? If so is there a fix? I have the Airport scenery close to the top of my scenery list (above anything that would conflict), only thing I haven't done is give the exclude bgl it's own addon entry (I've lumped it in the airport's scenery folder per the instructions the exclude bgl came with). So I'm not sure why it loaded in like this. Any help would be appreciated.

Kind Regards,

Martin

Edited February 28, 2022 by SimeonWilbury

[Bunkie 43]

Hi Martin,

I've had that happen as well.  I've got the same airport installed in P3D V5.3 - and didn't have the problem there, but I had it at different payware addon airports.  It only seems to happen after very long flights, and as you mentioned, reloading the airport after the flight, all is well.  I've no "real" idea what's happening, but my guess is that some calculations just don't get performed well after very long flights.  I was lucky - when it happened to me the elevation difference between default and the payware was minimal, and it only looked like discoloured pavement... no hills and and valleys a la ORBX Vector gone rogue... 

It's frustrating, but so far it's only happened to me randomly, so nothing really to try to pin down.

[SimeonWilbury 220]

4 minutes ago, Bunkie said:

I've no "real" idea what's happening, but my guess is that some calculations just don't get performed well after very long flights

Yes, that is also my suspicion, it was an 11 hour flight so plenty of time for things to go wrong, next test for me will probably be a shorter flight from KMIA to see if the problem arises there. If not I may be able to hope I was just unlucky this time.

[Bunkie 43]

I flew into SBGR from Buenos Aries when I didn't have any issues, I'm going to go out on a limb and suspect KMIA will be okay as well.  Only time I had those elevation issues was on flights over 10 hours duration... Fingers crossed it stays that way!

[BlueStar 323]

Most of my flights are long haul flying about 50 hours a week.  The scenery issue has not been a problem for me.  I have converted several payware airports from P3dv4 without any issues.  

I use ADE to convert my v4 airports to v5.  The one thing I do in my conversions is change the elevation of the airport to be converted to the stock airport elevation for P3dv5.  

[Bunkie 43]

That's a good tip.  I just bung the V4 (and even older!) stuff into V5 and if it looks ok, I just carry on.  I never thought about adjusting anything... 

[SimeonWilbury 220]

4 hours ago, BlueStar said:

Most of my flights are long haul flying about 50 hours a week.  The scenery issue has not been a problem for me.  I have converted several payware airports from P3dv4 without any issues.  

I use ADE to convert my v4 airports to v5.  The one thing I do in my conversions is change the elevation of the airport to be converted to the stock airport elevation for P3dv5.  

Was thinking about potentially giving ADE a go, will look at giving it a try to see if changing the elevation helps. I guess it's useful to have anyway for coming up with excludes etc.

[SimeonWilbury 220]

Right, so I've given ADE a go, and worked out how to change altitude, only question is how I can properly apply this to the whole airport, as it seems just applying it to the afcad doesn't cleanly change the elevation of most of the airport elements beyond the base afcad data for runways/ taxiways etc.

Edited March 1, 2022 by SimeonWilbury

[SimeonWilbury 220]

So it's taken me a while to get round to it, but I've created new AFCAD and CVX files for SBKP that should (fingers crossed) deal with the terrain issues. Big thanks to @blaunarwal for his guide in the pinned thread. It's not a perfect solution as the terrain around the airport is still a bit weird, but it should hopefully make the Airport itself fully usable.

I've uploaded the relevent items to my Google Drive: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1OaDmXcHwesVUw-Lvx6WE-C_MUEM82oYe?usp=sharing

To install: in the PR_Viracopos Intl _Campinas\Scenery folder, delete SBKP_ADEX_ADE.BGL & cvx_CampinasFlaten.BGL (or change their file extension to .off like I did), then paste in my files.

I haven't tested this with a long-haul flight yet, (my last flight with the unmodified scenery was from KMIA, and I had the same problems I described in the first post on this thread), but I imagine this should hopefully solve things as there shouldn't be anything to intefere now.

I haven't done the wider scenery as I mentioned earlier, though if perhaps someone with more knowledge of P3D Scenery than me could work some magic then that would be even better!

Edited April 24, 2022 by SimeonWilbury

[blaunarwal 433]

21 minutes ago, SimeonWilbury said:

To install: in the PR_Viracopos Intl _Campinas\Scenery folder, delete SBKP_ADEX_ADE.BGL & cvx_CampinasFlaten.BGL (or change their file extension to .off like I did), then paste in my files.

Hi 

Thanks for your feedback on my guide. I just checked, have this airport too. I never noticed an elevation issue after long flight, since never flew into it but from it.

My mod was mainly gates and jetways. I also removed the "cvx_CExcludeampinas,bgl" and maybe changed to default altitude of P3D5 and used the default cvx, did ont create a flatten poly.

Dan

[SimeonWilbury 220]

4 hours ago, blaunarwal said:

Hi 

Thanks for your feedback on my guide. I just checked, have this airport too. I never noticed an elevation issue after long flight, since never flew into it but from it.

My mod was mainly gates and jetways. I also removed the "cvx_CExcludeampinas,bgl" and maybe changed to default altitude of P3D5 and used the default cvx, did ont create a flatten poly.

Dan

I tried using the default CVX a few times but for me it resulted in canyons and the such, so I eventually went for my own poly so I knew I'd have control. Fingers crossed it'll mean the airport will load in properly after a long flight.

I hadn't looked at the cvx_CExcludeampinas,bgl personally, I may experiment with that in case that also provides different result, especially if my current solution ends up not working. I'll admit I haven't thought about Jetways as I bought the airport purely for Cargo ops.

Many thanks again for the guide, it made the process a lot easier, the only real sticking point for me was working out the airport boundaries for drawing the terrain polygon, I'm close to useless with numbers so my solution was to slew around the boundaries and use the aircraft position to place the corners in ADE; if I were to modify the guide at all it would maybe be to put a pointer or two in that direction, though it's possible that more optimal solutions exist that I'm not aware of.

Edited April 24, 2022 by SimeonWilbury

[SimeonWilbury 220]

I re-did the 12 hour EHAM-SBKP flight the other day, with my new AFCAD and CVX files, and they worked a treat! No terrain issues anymore.

Therefore...

If you you would like to try my 'patch' for this scenery yourself I have uploaded it to the AVSIM Library.

You can download it here