Vector texture width depends on direction (and latitude...

[Guest tml1024]

It is somewhat disappointing to notice that despite the fact that FSX now knows that the Earth is a sphere (or ellipsoid even) and properly handles this for many aspects, there are still obvious problems in other aspects.Using some airplane as a yardstick (landing it on a road and driving around a bit), it is plain to see that at moderately extreme latitudes (like 60 deg N, where I live), the width of road segments depends very much on their orientation. The closer the road segment is to the N-S direction, the narrower it is.(My first impression is that in the E-W direction does the road width actually match the StripLineWidth value in terrain.cfg. This would be kinda logical, I guess, as it's the surface size of longitude units that get narrower the closer to the pole one gets. Latitude units stay constant in size. So one can almost imagine the scenario behind this problem.)So, when preparing some vector scenery, in order to get realistic and consistent road widths, one would have to use different terrain.cfg entries for road segments in different directions. The different entries would have different StripLineWidth values to compensate for this bug. Oh well, just a small matter of programming... Hopefully the number of entries in terrain.cfg doesn't have a large effect on performance, as long as the actual texture bitmaps used by such direction-specific entries are the same, with only the StripLineWidth varying.Of course, this isn't really a such big deal. FSX is after all a Flight Simulator, not GIS software...--tml

[scott967 62]

I guess they must burn in the terrain features into the texture tile before adjusting it for earth position. Probably would be better to overlay it onto the scaled texture so a 30 pixel road would remain 30 pixel.scott s..

[Guest tml1024]

It's small irritating things like this that makes one consider just abandoning MSFS and start contributing to the Open Source FlightGear instead. I really should check out the status of that, download and build it.Sure, all the data (planes, landclass, mesh, navigation data, etc) that comes with MSFS, the mass of 3rd-party addons to it, the general smoothness of the UI etc is hard to beat, but... It is *so* much nicer to be able to read the source code and see how something is done wrong, and then start working on fixing it. (And yes, I *am* an experienced programmer.)--tml