I'm missing something very basic

[Guest chwood]

Hi All,I yearn for an "Airport for Windows" for FS2004 ... is there ever going to be one?Anyway, I have a very simple, single-runway airport designed for FS2002 using AFW. It consists of a rectangular turf field with a grass landing strip in the center of it. I also placed a flattening polygon around the whole thing.Moving it to FS2004, I had to add an exclude rectangle to eliminate some buildings and autogen trees. Removed the Rwy, too.Then recreated the Rwy with AFCAD2 but the AFCAD2 Rwy doesn't show up on my screen.Anything pop in your collective minds that I might have done wrong?Is there a freeware program for doing simple FS2004 airport design that includes Exclude and Flattening capabilities?Thanks for any help. I can send my .apt and AFCAD2 files to anyone who wishes to see them.Charles Wood

[arno 1]

Hi Charles,The problem you have noticed is that a runway made with the Fs2004 format (AFCAD) is hidden by polygons made with AFW (or FSSC, GroundMaker, any old style tool basically). This is because the code used for these polygons is in Fs2004 only used for 3D objects and these are drawn after the runways, aprons, etc.To fix this, I would suggest that you give SceneGenX a try. It is the Fs2004 version of AFW, available from the same side.For the ground poylgons of your airport, like the grass around it, you can probably best use mesh polygons. This is also how the grass in the default scenery is placed. SceneGenX can not do that for you, but there are tools like Ground2k4 and SBuilder that can help you here.

[Guest chwood]

Hi Arno,Thanks for the excellent tips plus explanation of why what I was trying to do was failing.I'll download the suggested programs and give the new FS2004 airport another try. Will report back on my success.Charles Wood