Military AI Works

Hi all,
Just curious how some of you create the nice asphalt taxiway edges along concrete taxiways? I tried creating an asphalt apron underneath my concrete taxiway that extends beyond the taxiway width and it turns out very uneven doesn't look very good. Any tips would be appreciated.
Matt

Matt you can use taxiway links to make those. Look at just about any one of our AFCAD files that is part of a custom scenery set, Nellis, Yuma, etc. You will see that the main taxiways are bordered by secondary smaller taxiway links which serve as the edging.

I will have to take a look at that. Thanks for the reply.

Did what you said..worked awesome.

You do have to be careful though when you use these dummy taxi links like this.

Through a lot of head banging we finally realized one day that if you have any taxi link nodes that are being used as "eye candy" for your AFCAD file next to a runway hold short node, this can cause problems.

Here is the midfield taxiway/runway intersection from the Nellis AFCAD file. All the red arrows point to nodes that are being used as eye candy. The problem is that when an AI aircraft clears the runway it transitions from the runway link network to the taxiway link network. When it does this, it will taxi to the red hold short node and stop to get its instructions or make a radio call. Then when it's ready to proceed, it will look for the next closest taxiway link node that it can find so that it can follow that network to the parking spot. The AI engine just assumes that the next closest node must be part of the taxiway link network. It does not know that we are also using these nodes for eye candy.

So if we use all these extra nodes like in this image, the AI may see one of these unconnected nodes and decide to follow it instead of the real taxiway node and link network. When it does this, it all of a sudden disappears into thin air! It took us a long time to figure out why the AI were disappearing like this when there were ample amounts of parking spots available.

It also seems that the AI model's radius value also plays a part in this. The larger the radius, the further away it will detect these unconnected nodes and have a chance for disappearing.

The fix is to either not use these unconnected nodes in these critical spots next to the hold short nodes or to do as we did here in this example and bracket the hold short node with two blue nodes to ensure that the AI follows the correct node network.

So just be careful when you use this method.