Trying to fix a "sunken airport" in FS2004, help!!

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Trying to fix a "sunken airport" in FS2004, help!!

Postby Blaze4402 » Wed Jul 28, 2021 9:06 pm

I've been playing FS2004 for ages, but just recently I've started to "fiddle" with scenery stuff. In particular, I'd like to fix a couple of those middle-of-nowhere airports that in FS2004 often show up sunken in "holes". I understand that this is the result of inaccuracies between the airport elevation and the surrounding terrain...

There are tools out there that supposedly allow me to change FS2004 airport elevations, and also mesh terrain that supposedly is more accurate than stock terrain, but for the last 5 days I've been trying multiple tools and meshes and nothing seems to work...

The only thing that "kind" of helped was to "flatten" the surrounding terrain, but all that does is just to make the hole wider... In particular, I'm trying to fix SVIC... Its elevation everywhere is reported as 1575 ft, but the surrounding "hills" are about 2200 ft high, so there's over 600 ft differential between field elevation and surrounding terrain (i tried FSGenesis TopoSim South America mesh and also Fernandois relevant meshes, none seemed to have any discernible effect in that particular airfield).

I've tried to "lift up" the airport to 2200 ft with AFCAD, but even as I'm able to change the elevation in AFCAD, the game always shows the airport at elevation 1575 ft. Like I said, just recently I've started to fiddle with scenery, so maybe I'm doing something wrong (I've successfully added add-on scenery elsewhere, though, so I know the basics...)

I'd prefer avoiding "tools", and I'd rather edit FS2004 files directly, if possible, as I'm really tired of unzipping/installing stuff that doesn't work or that would take weeks to master (e.g., AFCAD... I get that it's great to add taxiways and gates to airports, but that's not what I want to do...)

Many thanks in advance for any suggestions!

SVIC, The real thing (google maps 3D view)
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SVIC in FS2004
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Re: Trying to fix a "sunken airport" in FS2004, help!!

Postby hjwalter » Sun Aug 08, 2021 1:56 pm

I've been fixing issues such as your's for years by doing the following:

Create a so called flatten switch in your scenery.cfg file immeiately below the airport's entry so that it becomes part of this entry. This flatten switch should be at the elevation of the surrounding high ground and should cover the airport's hole completely via four geographical positions. Don't forget to edit the default airport's elevation as well in it's APnnnnnn.bgl file and in your Afcad file. The edit of the APnnnnnn.bgl file is especially important because your AI aircraft will park at that elevation and could therefore then be invisible.

Good luck and regrads.

Hans
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Re: Trying to fix a "sunken airport" in FS2004, help!!

Postby hjwalter » Sun Aug 08, 2021 2:56 pm

Oops !! I had wrongly assumed that your SVIC (Icarabu) airfield was a third party addon scenery, so please (partially) disregard my previous post.

In my opinion, the only way to get your default SVIC airfield out of the hole, is to edit the airfield's existing elevation to the elevation of the surrounding high ground, in it's APnnnnnn.bgl file.

The SVIC hole is the same in my FS9 setup but I do not use this airfield myself so, if this issue is important for you I could send you an edited version of the AP file concerned but will then need your e-mail address via a personal message. However, I myself have no experience (yet) about if such personal messages are possible via this site.

Regards

Hans
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Re: Trying to fix a "sunken airport" in FS2004, help!!

Postby TruNorthSim » Mon Aug 09, 2021 3:27 pm

I recommend you give ADE Airport Design Editor a try. You should be able to edit the airport data, change the elevation of the airport to the surrounding elevation, and use the POLY tool to create a ground poly around the airport. Download the user manual in PDF. Give it a read to understand how it all works. Make sure you download the SDK, because you'll need the files in order to open the airport and compile it once you're done.
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Re: Trying to fix a "sunken airport" in FS2004, help!!

Postby Blaze4402 » Mon Aug 09, 2021 8:34 pm

Thank you Hans & TruNorth for your feedback... I figured that flattening is indeed my best bet, making the hole really wide (several miles). I ended up creating an Excel sheet with several formulas that give me the 4 points (NW, NE, SW, SE in Lat / Lon) after I enter the distances of the hills in the surrounding area (NW, NE, SW, SE). It's satisfactory and looks reasonably close to reality...
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