royalwin

I think many hard core airliner types feel the same as you do. But many others don’t need all the detail. Different strokes...

Isn't it more valid to count up what you get for the extra money, rather than call it "doubling". How much would that content cost for a current sim compared to the extra cost for that upgrade? 10 planes and 10 airports for $60... that's about $3.00 each. Think that's what they'll cost on the marketplace? Just a different way of looking at it.

VL3

Just refers to an in-game marketplace.

That's right.

C-172 in steam gauge and G1000?

You assume the data is perfect, and even correct. There just isn't reliable data that represents the actual runway and can have this approach work. I know it sounds reasonable, but I suggest you try it, and have it work for the whole world. Unfortunately It won't even though it would be awesome if it did. The subtle runway imperfections are well below the noise floor of the DEM data. No signal.

Sorry 🙂 I won't mention it again.

I guess it's not exactly the right place for this post, but since so much discussion has been around it here maybe it's ok. I thought it might be worth talking a look at the complexity of the problem of "undulating" runways. I believe some people look at it as if it were a relatively trivial thing to implement and that not doing so somehow shows ignorance, incompetence, or spite on the behalf of the developer. Not only is that view rather... uncharitable... I think it shows a poor understanding of the magnitude of this problem. Let's think about it. First, there are some constraints. If they are going to make 37,000 airports they need to all work, as in a plane in the sim can land on them, and most planes are not offroad vehicles, so they need to be flat and smooth enough for that purpose. And they have to be so despite the wildly varying "quality" of the underlying data. Additionally, this has to be done as procedurally as possible. Even if you only averaged 2 days per airport you'd be talking about nearly 300 man years of labor, that's just out of control from a cost and time perspective. So with those constraints, now we have the technical problem. As a few people here have correctly pointed out, DEM resolution, or the spatial sampling frequency or density or whatever you want to call it is much less than what would be required to capture runway undulations. 30M is pretty high res these days, though there is spot coverage that's better, but much of the world may be 100M or worse. This will all get better over time, but this is still way short of what's necessary to capture these imperfections as some sort of ground truth. I wouldn't be surprised if many - most even - of the runways don't even have a single DEM vertex on the actual runway surface. The belief that you can just drape the textures over the DEM and have usable runways is based on a misunderstanding of the precision of that data. Not only, that but the problem gets much worse, because the accuracy of the elevation data isn't precise to the level one might suppose. Airport data has touch down zone elevation and airport elevation, usually to the foot, which is more accurate than the DEM data. However, it's critical to get the runway data correct, so you have to merge two conflicting data sets, at very different resolution and accuracy and have the airports be correct with no or minimal artifacts. That's not easy, and on top of that you have photoscenery textures that aren't exactly georeferenced to the airport data so they don't even line up perfectly which can create very unsightly double airport effects. So you are merging three conflicting data sets. Tough problem. Even if you wanted to put these undulations in and have them perfectly match reality, where would you get the data? Undulations are mistakes. They are the errors that occurred because the engineers tried to get perfectly flat runways and were unable, or things settled over time. I'm not aware of a comprehensive data base of survey points along all the runways in the world. If someone is, please correct me. The fact that they manually edited, to some extent, 37,000 airports indicates that they couldn't solve all of these issues procedurally. It's a certainty that the decision to manually do this wasn't taken lightly or even happily, what a massive undertaking! That they have done so is pretty awesome, and hopefully thinking about it this way will make it easier to appreciate what they've done, rather than conclude that this sim is unusable without these RL undulations perfectly matching reality. My two cents.

Awww... I suck... I should put my finger and my thumb in the shape of an "L" on my forehead...

Barenaked Ladies... 🙂

Nice to see someone else on here with some seat time in the mighty Starlifter!

I’d guess it’s somewhere else based on the gst being the registration on the TBM in the other videos with that plane.

Could be wrong, but it looks like GST is the registration/call sign.

Pretty cool to see cross over between Age of Empires and Flight Simulator 🙂