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possible solution for FSX groundpoly

@Bob5568...

Hi,

Does anyone know the equations?
Click to expand...


40.000 : 360° = 0,009°/km
At the edge of a circular area of 5 km, there will be a difference of about 2 meter to the center.

That wrote a friend to me. :rolleyes:


Greetz. José.
 
Hi Bob,

Yes, I have thought about adding the curve to my polygons as well. Seems like a cool I idea for a tool.

Using SDK figures the circumference of the earth in FS is 40007 km at the poles and 40075 at the equator. So if my math is correct that should give about 15 cm of heigh difference per kilometer. In these calculations I did not take the flat earth projection into account though that is used for the meters in FS.

I have the intention to do some tests with ground polygons and this curvation problem. Hopefully I can do them this weekend already.
 
Hey,

I just had a thought whilst reading this thread, this may or may not be possible, but worth a try.

How about making an FSX-Style Platform via the AttachTool, to give us a flat platform, then put the FS2002-Style Ground Polygons on top of that? Then some sort of blending polygons like Gary Summons is doing: here
 
Hi three.

Tapering the landscape around airport runways has been possible for quite some time using FS2004 LWM flattens. We now have the newer FSX flattens, that do the same thing.

Using gmax attached platforms is an idea, but I don't know if they are also following the curve of the earth, or if there is a size constraint for the platforms.

Dick
 
Hi guys,

I did some tests with the ground polygons and SP1, here are my first results.

The first thing I noticed is that after applying the tweaks to make correct ground polygons, they always show correctly in spot plane view. Also my test polygon that is 8x8 km (with the reference point in the middle). So in spot plane I don't see the plane sunken into the ground poly, which happens without the tweak.

But when I look in the cockpit, there are still some display problems due to the curvation of the earth. So the next thing I am going to do is try to put that curvation into my poly as well. I'll report back when I have tested that as well.

But can others confirm that they have no curvation problems when viewing in spot plane mode?
 
It did some more tests and with my test polygon I get no problems if I keep it smaller than 4x4 km (reference point in the center). If I make it bigger, then I have the curvation problems at the edges. But I find it surprising that the polygon can be that big before I see trouble. Can others confirm this as well?
 
Well, so far it is looking promising :) I've managed to produce a flat FSX Hard Surface, and an FS2K2-Style Ground Polygon on top with no dipping at the edge. However, the FSX Platform seems quite unstable - sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't - just need to figure out what makes it tick, or not :)
 
You can forget my post about it working correctly in spot plane view. Although it looks like the wheels are nicely on the polygon, once you rotate your view it is clear that the ground is not at all under your wheel. It moves around quite a lot in that case :).

I just tried it with curvation in the polygon, but it was not enough yet, I guess I made a miscalculation somewhere in the maths.
 
Hi guys,

I continued playing with the ground polygons, but I have sort of given up on the idea of having it curving with the earth. I tried it, but it is very hard to get it look right. I could calculate the height offsets, but if you draw polygons between them they are below the ground of course (just try to connect some points on a circle, you will see that these lines are always inside the circle). So I tried to give them an additional height offset, but that still looked weird. I think this is too much effort to get it looking right.

Then I returned to a general aviation airfield I made a while ago. It uses two layers of GMax generated ground polygons. One is a polygon with an aerial photo covering the entire airport and the other layer contains all the aprons, etc. The total airport is about 2000x1000 meters in size and it uses one single reference point in the centre.

I noticed that the aprons did you correctly all the time. Even though they are more than 100 meters away from the reference point. The (big, 1x1 km) polygons that contained the aerial photo did not show correctly though. So that made me thinking and as a test I split those 1x1 km polygons into tiles of 100x100 meter. And guess what, everything shows correctly now.

So to me it seems that splitting the polygons might already solve the problem. In that case it does not matter if they still have one reference point. I think this is good news.

Of course the airport I used now is relatively small (the maximum distance to the reference point is something like 500 meters in one direction and 1000 in the other). So I think my next test would be to see if this splitting in tiles also works if you are covering a bigger area.
 
It almost feels like I am having a conversation with myself (would I be going crazy :rolleyes:). But I just tried the 100x100 meter tiles technique on a much bigger polygon of 10x10 km. And also there it works fine. So it seems like MS has created a good solution in SP1 for our ground polygon needs. As long as we make sure they are split into tiles of 100x100 meter it works fine.
 
Arno, good on yer for doin research while I was out playing (for days!). I'll have to pitch in here to contribute to the solution. nice find that the ref point can be common for the mosaic.

Bob
 
Hi Arno...

I looked frequently to this thread, seeing you were very buzzy, hà.
At last a solution. Thanks for that.
So we make a large poly and devided into squares of maximum 100 x 100 meter and one refpoint... and no curvation tweak ?
Well, you did it fine. :D

Best Regards. José.
 
I am not that keen on 100mx100m tiles - thats a lot of texture files - would have to write some sort of batch program to slice it all up from the photoshop file :mad:

Good work on the testing Arne!
 
José Bourgoignie said:
So we make a large poly and devided into squares of maximum 100 x 100 meter and one refpoint... and no curvation tweak ?
Click to expand...

Yes, that's it. Just make your polygons as usual in GMax, but just make sure to split the largers onces into more slices.

threedeltamax said:
I am not that keen on 100mx100m tiles - thats a lot of texture files - would have to write some sort of batch program to slice it all up from the photoshop file :mad:
Click to expand...

Who says you need a texture for each tile? I just took my 1x1 kilometer polygon and used the slice plane in GMax to turn it into a grid of 10x10 pieces. On these 100 pieces in total, I just mapped the 1024x1024 texture I used before as well. So absolutely no change was needed to the texture.

I have added a screenshot of how my ground layout now looks in GMax. You can see the tiles of the ground polygon in green.
 

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Hi again,

Sorry for letting you talk alone Arno, I actualy made a long reply, but the server timed out and when I clicked the back button it was gone and I didn't have the strength to rewrite it all again.

What is the best way to slice a larger plane into smaller pieces? Because in my tests instead of slicing, I made new planes, obviously more work.

Kindly,

Blazer
 
Hi,

I think the slice tool of GMax is the easiest way if you already have the polygon. If you start from scratch you can specify the number of sections you want in the plane object. That is even easier :).
 
arno said:
Hi,

I think the slice tool of GMax is the easiest way if you already have the polygon. If you start from scratch you can specify the number of sections you want in the plane object. That is even easier :).
Click to expand...

Hi Arno,

Thanks yet again. The slice tool can only be used "by eye" or is there an option that we can make it slice every x meters?

Kindly,

Blazer
 
Hi,

I never use that tool by eye :), I always type in the location for the slice in the coordinate boxes at the bottom of the screen. That why I could quite easy put a slice every 100 meters.

But that could also be because I do nothing at eye in GMax, I always type in the exact coordinates I wish :).
 
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