• Which the release of FS2020 we see an explosition of activity on the forun and of course we are very happy to see this. But having all questions about FS2020 in one forum becomes a bit messy. So therefore we would like to ask you all to use the following guidelines when posting your questions:

    • Tag FS2020 specific questions with the MSFS2020 tag.
    • Questions about making 3D assets can be posted in the 3D asset design forum. Either post them in the subforum of the modelling tool you use or in the general forum if they are general.
    • Questions about aircraft design can be posted in the Aircraft design forum
    • Questions about airport design can be posted in the FS2020 airport design forum. Once airport development tools have been updated for FS2020 you can post tool speciifc questions in the subforums of those tools as well of course.
    • Questions about terrain design can be posted in the FS2020 terrain design forum.
    • Questions about SimConnect can be posted in the SimConnect forum.

    Any other question that is not specific to an aspect of development or tool can be posted in the General chat forum.

    By following these guidelines we make sure that the forums remain easy to read for everybody and also that the right people can find your post to answer it.

P3D v2 Default runway covers ground poly, GPW layers not working.

U

UnitedExpress4180

Messages
222
Country
us-colorado
I had to redo the ground model for my scenery (yet again. It's a long story) and am having a totally bizarre problem with it. First off, I can't seem to get it to render anything on top of the ADE runways. I've tinkered with the z-bias settings to no avail, messing with the texture settings didn't have any effect...I've even tried physically raising the model itself several meters above the ground, and oddly even if I set MCX to both flatten and place it at a higher altitude, it still smashes everything down to the runway altitude (and at that, it totally ignores the layers and renders the ADE runway on top anyway). I also noticed that layers don't seem to be doing anything at all and I get z-fighting on all my geometry anyway. This doesn't happen if I set it to output a legacy-style ground poly, but this isn't a good fix because I'll lose all my specular materials.

What's driving me crazy was that I had all of this working perfectly until a few days ago, and then when I went back to redo it, it just totally lost its brains.
 
Maybe what you should do is to make the Ade runway invisible. If I understood what the problem is. It can be achieved by making the taxiways, etc, "0" wide, in this way is how I always have worked.
 
Last edited:
How did you do your ground poly? It seems to me that you export as it is to FSX. It won't work that way. You need to use Groundpolygon Wizard from MCX to convert that.
If you want a native FSX material for ground poly and want to use specular material. You need to raise it above the ground about 15 cm and make LOD for it. I heard that Z-bias can take care of that but there is still some issue more, like curvature of the earth. You need to slice it by yourself not more than 100 meters apart. ADE runway is visible because your ground poly is under the earth, I guess.
 
I export it using the P3D2 sdk (and I'm testing it in P3D) so it should function properly. Perhaps I should clarify, the z-fighting isn't occuring with the terrain, it's only happening where the ground poly layers intersect.

I took another look at my material settings and found that I had z-write turned off in my backups from a few months ago, so I gave that a try. It would explain why I was getting z-fighting, but somehow it just made it so that nothing gets drawn. I'm lost as to how even with identical material settings, this thing refuses to show up correctly.
 
Okay, I think I've got something. It appears that P3D does something kinda screwy with textures using alpha channels. It seems you have to disable everything involving z-writing or z-testing to get them to display properly, while it appears textures that don't have alpha channels can use these just fine. I apparently neglected to disable the z-testing, and when I turned that off it started doing what it was supposed to...
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top