Currently working on the South American Alberts and doing afcad for SBAF in Brazil.
As usual MS gave us a runway and nothing else. Not a problem have used excludebuilder to get rid of the autogen on the south side of the runway, where all the parking is.
Now find a big hollow in the terrain right where I need to put taxiways and aprons. Now I reckon what I need to do is flatten the pesky area to the altitude of the runway.
Need suggestions for an easy to use utility that'll do the trick.
Cheers
Stew
Stew
"There is an art … to flying. The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss."
I'm no expert, however, I've been doing some reading at fsdeveloper.com and other similar sites.
I suggest that you do some searching on these sites for the following terms: Dummy Airport Header, Airport Preload and especially look for the names Reggie Fields and Jim Vile.
It seems that a regular flatten does not solve all problems, and that they may in fact may only affect AI a/c that land at a field, but not a/c that spawn at that field because AFCAD etc create flattens for aprons, taxiways etc on a level that is different from what is needed, which may allow depressions and even holes in the ground within airport boundaries.
Instead, it is necessary to create a pre-loaded dummy airport header as a small xml file which is the compiled into a bgl and installed in the scenery/world/scenery folder which supposedly cures all ills.
Unfortunately, I haven't yet found a nice little utility that creates these, so it must be done manually, step by step, and I'm still trying to figure out xml so it's out for me for now, but you might be able to do this.
BTW, it seems that this issue is involved in the unpleasant looking clouds of dust that some AI kick up while taxiing as well as supposedly incurable low areas within some airports along taxi routes.
Ron
Edit: P.S. this info is true for both FS9 and FSX, but FSX SDK has a little tool that is helpful for this, but I don't know if it works for FS9.
Forgive me if this sound a bit ignorant on my part. But doesn't AFCAD flatten any area where taxiways are laid?
If so, can't an apron with grass textures be laid in the suspect area?
KJ
