fsx groundpoly with sp2 - flytampa did it

[borisforero]

SDK2002 Style Ground Polygon flickering in FSX

Hi,

I'm working on ground polys (converting from FS9 to FSX), and I have no problem with my old dxt3 alpha textures for ground in FSX. But some flickering is when my aircraft rolls at ground level. I have a flatten poly with a low altitude that my airport reference altitude. Flickering is still there. But when you see the poly from above there are no problems. I have three polygons for my airport. Attach are two images of the problem. Ideas?

 

[BASys]

Hi Folks

Boris -
Could it be that -
you haven't compiled your tiles to a high enough LOD,
and as the underlying default is of a higher res,
they show through local to user a/c ?

HTH
ATB
Paul

 

[arno]

Hi,

I'm working on ground polys (converting from FS9 to FSX), and I have no problem with my old dxt3 alpha textures for ground in FSX. But some flickering is when my aircraft rolls at ground level. I have a flatten poly with a low altitude that my airport reference altitude. Flickering is still there. But when you see the poly from above there are no problems. I have three polygons for my airport. Attach are two images of the problem. Ideas?

First I would check the flatten altitude, it should be the same as your airport altitude. Also make sure that your ground polygons are split in pieces of at most 100 meter in size, else the earth curvation is not taken into account correctly. For the rest there are no changes compared to the FS2004 code.

 

[borisforero]

Split Ground Polygons to convert FS9 to FSX

Hi,



First I would check the flatten altitude, it should be the same as your airport altitude. Also make sure that your ground polygons are split in pieces of at most 100 meter in size, else the earth curvation is not taken into account correctly. For the rest there are no changes compared to the FS2004 code.

Arno!

Yes, the flatten altittude is the same, and I split my polygons to smaller ones and everything now is OK!...thanks to all the people in this Post! Attached is a picture of the command for do that in gmax. Hope it helps to anyone else. Another question, about that "funny trees" with some special effects due alpha channel. I try with imagetool FSX SDK2 in DDS format, but is the same like the picture below (originally I have trees in alpha with DXT3)...what is the trick? Thanks!!

 

[danchircop]

Just to add to my last post in this thread I made a rather strange discovery related to my problem.
We all now know that it's extremely important that in order for Fs2002 ground polys to work correctly in FSX, they have to be split up into sections of not more than 100m, if obvously they are larger than that.
Well not in my case. If made polygons that are much larger than that and they work just fine. I only have to split up a polygon in 100m sections if one of it's sides is less than 100m for example 2000mx60m. I definitely have no idea how this is happening.
Moreso it is even stranger that the aircraft shadow problem i'm getting, appears only on the small polygons. On very large polygons this problem totally disappears. This is not really desired as there alot of polygons that are smaller than 100m. I do appreciate if anyone can help me investigate this.

Thanks in advance
Daniel

 

[arno]

Hi Daniel,

That sounds weird. Are you saying that when you have a big polygon, of say 5000x5000 meter, you do not have to cut it into pieces? I would certainly expect that you get floating edges if you do not do so.

 

[danchircop]

Hi Arno,
yes I know, it's very wierd. I can't understand why this is happening. For example I have a 7000mx4600m polygon split up as a grid of approx 450m x 450m (each square) and it works just fine.
Maybe I can create a couple of polygins with different sizes and perhaps send them to you and check them out and see what's happening. Obviously if you have time.

Thanks
Daniel

 

[arno]

Hi Daniel,

Maybe the 100 meters is not a strict limit, that number is commonly used because it was mentioned in some blog post by ACES if I remember correctly. But with 450 meter tiles you would also get correction for the curvation. Could be that in between the vertices there is a bigger offset in that case.

 

[martin_ktpa]

100m isn't strict indeed. I don't recall for sure but I think I didn't see problems with large grd polys until later on in development. Perhaps the problems only become obvious after several layers are added. One thing I recall doing is segmenting the TNCM runway edgeline, at first it was just one very long piece and clipped.

 

[danchircop]

Arno, Martin
thanks for the replies. Yes I fully agree with both of you that having to divide a large polygon into 100m segments is not a hard and fast rule. Honestly I can't figure out why some polygons have to be segmented and others not. Maybe the idea that Martin mentioned could be a valid one.

However from my side all polygons appear correctly, it's the aircraft shadow and landing lights that are giving me problems. This problem only appears when using DXT3 textures. However I doubt it, if it's actually a texture problem because there are other sceneries for eg Martin's TNCM whose ground texture have a trasparency and they work perfect. I think that the problem lies in my polygons I can't figure out what it is. Could it there be a problem with my Makemdl, or bglc?
I have attached a couple of sample polygons. If anyone can have a look at them I will greatly appreciate.

 

[borisforero]

Arno, Martin
thanks for the replies. Yes I fully agree with both of you that having to divide a large polygon into 100m segments is not a hard and fast rule. Honestly I can't figure out why some polygons have to be segmented and others not. Maybe the idea that Martin mentioned could be a valid one.

However from my side all polygons appear correctly, it's the aircraft shadow and landing lights that are giving me problems. This problem only appears when using DXT3 textures. However I doubt it, if it's actually a texture problem because there are other sceneries for eg Martin's TNCM whose ground texture have a trasparency and they work perfect. I think that the problem lies in my polygons I can't figure out what it is. Could it there be a problem with my Makemdl, or bglc?
I have attached a couple of sample polygons. If anyone can have a look at them I will greatly appreciate.

Hi, try with value 8:

ADDCAT OBJECT_0_SCALE, 8 <----THIS ONE!!
OBJECT_0_FAIL label BGLCODE
OBJECT_0_FAIL label BGLCODE

And, do you use SDK2002 isn´t it?

 

[danchircop]

Hi Boris
I had already tried playing around with the layers but unfortunately no success. Yes the Fs2002 gamepack is being used for the ground polygons.
BTW I forgot to include a flatten area for the polygons.

Thanks
Daniel

 

[Manny]

I have a Q on ground Poly. Don't mean to hijack the topic exactly.

I managed to create a nice custom runway using the 2002SDK and the tweak. I used the Repeating UV tiles for the long runway poly since repating tiles seem to make sense for runway for the most part.

But what is the best practice for ground poly for the entire airport (apron included)? Do I build 1 large poly with multi segment and then how do I texture this poly? Do I use a large BMP texture for this entire airport or do I go each poly segment and apply its own square texture? If so how do I align all these square texture?

Manny

 

[borisforero]

Hi Boris
I had already tried playing around with the layers but unfortunately no success. Yes the Fs2002 gamepack is being used for the ground polygons.
BTW I forgot to include a flatten area for the polygons.

Thanks
Daniel

Daniel,

If you didn´t have flatten areas, some irregular forms can go through your mapped plane. Hope this is OK now.

 

[borisforero]

Ground Polys Tiles

I have a Q on ground Poly. Don't mean to hijack the topic exactly.

I managed to create a nice custom runway using the 2002SDK and the tweak. I used the Repeating UV tiles for the long runway poly since repating tiles seem to make sense for runway for the most part.

But what is the best practice for ground poly for the entire airport (apron included)? Do I build 1 large poly with multi segment and then how do I texture this poly? Do I use a large BMP texture for this entire airport or do I go each poly segment and apply its own square texture? If so how do I align all these square texture?

Manny

Hi Manny!

You can make few textures like tiles of your airport. Some people overlap the sides of each plane to exactly fit them each to other. In my case, I don´t need to do that, I only put them together with "0" of separation, moving planes, making zoom out and zoom in, and everything is Ok. Maybe you need to edit some textures in the boundaries, because sometimes they look like small lines across the entire end of the planes.

A trick to mantain the constant proportions of your runway, is to make a plane of the whole background and map it, beeing sure that the runway fits with the runway at your scenery made in AFCAD or ADE if in FSX. Then, you simply do the 4 tiles (like the attached image), and map them with the reference that is a layer down of it.

Good luck with this!

 

[Manny]

Thanks boris.

How big are the textures for each of those four square? 1024 x 1024?

Is that resolution good enough for the runway texture? And what do you do to get rid of the lines (if any) straddling the two squares?

Manny

 

[danchircop]

Daniel,

If you didn´t have flatten areas, some irregular forms can go through your mapped plane. Hope this is OK now.

HI Boris what I meant is that I didn't include a flatten for the test area I uploaded in the zip file. I did create a flatten for the area in my scenery, so the problem is not a matter of not creating a flatten.
As I said the poygons in general work fine. It's the aircraft shadow and landing lights that are having problems.
One other funny thing is that on a large poly the problem becomes less evident until it completely disappears once you make it a certain size. At the moment it seems like everything is working the opposite of what MS stated regarding the 100m segments. In my case the larger the polygon the better it works.
This is really driving me nuts.

Regards
Daniel

 

[danchircop]

Hi everyone,
unfortunately up till I still haven't found any solution to the problem. Incidentally whilst searching through the forum exactly the same problem was mentioned in this thread: http://fsdeveloper.com/forum/showthread.php?t=4516

It was mentioned that SP1 would have solved this problem. Can anyone confirm this? I have SP1 installed however the problem remains.

Daniel

 

[danchircop]

Hi everyone,
finally found some time to post again. After alot of experimenting I finally found a solution to my problem. All one has to do is to set the opacity level in the gmax material from 100 to 99. That's all. My polygons now work perfectly both shadows and aircraft landing lights now display correctly. Hope this helps anyone who might encounter the same problem.

Daniel

 

[bsbs]

rain effect with 99% alpha

That is useful information. Didn't know that with 99% alpha I get the full rain fx.

As how you made so brilliant ground poly textures, I guess you did it all by hand like an art designer?

Hi Thorsten,can you please explain step by step how you get rain effect with 99% alpha?99% alpha is almost white,almost non transparent?is it for custom runway?did you make it with "make mdl sdk 2002" method?sorry for my english.thanks... Boban