Ground bleeds through parking ramp

[stevewilson]

I'm having trouble with the ground bleed through my parking ramps at an airport that I've built for fs9 using AFCAD2.

The ramp appears to be somewhat transparent like tissue paper when viewed from above or flying over the airport. All other areas look ok.

I've used the flatten and exclude switches and that is ok, except that at night the lights of excluded houses and buildings bleed through the ramps.

This doesn't happen if I set the ramp to tarmac texture, I'm using the concrete texture.

Does anyone have any ideas

[garymbuska]

Hello Steve Where is your airport at
is it only in the excluded area and the flattened area that you see the bleed through in  ??? Or is it only around the edges. Also I do not if it matters or not but what was the orignal texture before. It could be a couple of different things maybe your switch settings are not quite right. Is your area the very last entry in your library. If not try putting it on the bottom.  

[stevewilson]

Hi Gary;

The bleed through is coming through the parking aprons only that I made using the apron polygon tool and the texture is concrete. Yes this area is over the flattened and excluded areas.

This is an airport that I made from scratch, using AFCAD and FSSC. If I could figuare out how to post a screenshot, I would inclued it here.

The apron looks thin and you can see the ground textures underneath. At night, where ever there was a building that was lighted the light is still there and and also bleeds through. BTW I don't think that the exclude switch excludes lighting textures :-/

Here is a copy of my exclude switch:

Exclude=N36 23,W119 46,N36 21,W119 42.9,objects

At one time the scenery that has this switch in it was at the bottom, but still had the problem.

While we are on this subject, do you know how I can include additional exclude areas. I know that I can make up to 10 flatten switches and have done so, but I can't seem to get more than 1 exclude to work.

Thanks for you help Gary.

BTW just learned how to include photo so now I can show what I mean.

[

[garymbuska]

Although I dont have FSSC it looks to me that the polygon you are using might be the problem. It appears as if the polygon is above or below the ground.
I think that the asphalt texture is just hiding it better and if you look hard you might still see the same thing happening. Maybe the flatten switch is not set low enough or maybe it is to low. The last time I played with flatten switches I seem to rember you had to set heighth width and depth of the area to be flattened.

I think you can make multiple entries by seperating them with ";" no quotes
[quote][/quote]Exclude=N36 23,W119 46,N36 21,W119 42.9,objects ;N38 23,W120 46,N35 21,W120  43,objects

[stevewilson]

I've tried verying the elevation up and down by 1/2 and by 1 foot both direction, this action had no effect on the bleed through.

The polygon is made using AFCAD2, I use FSSC for some of the other scenery. You define the boundries and elevation in the flatten switch.

I've learned by playing around with the elevation settings within the flatten switch and AFCAD2 that if they are not set the same you wind up with a nice drop-off or a sudden bump, both play havic with the landing gear.

I can reduce the bleeding by layering several polygon on top of one another, but this has an effect on the fps.

I'm sure there is some setting that I'm over looking, just finding it is the task at hand.

I'll try your idea on using the ";" in the exclude switch tonight.

[garymbuska]

lots of luck steve, I will look on my afcad for the same polygone and try it on a default location and see what happens I meant to check out one of my planes last night that I think has multiple exclude switches but forgot
Let me know if the ; works .

[RollerBall]

Steve, I'm going out on a limb here but I can only express my opinion.

The new XML scenery design standard is in my experience fraught with problems. When the SDK was first issued it was full of errors and mistakes and that seems to have set the scene for the XML system as a whole.

I can't go into the detail because it involves a scenery I'm working on and have not yet published but I have come across some very serious level problems which if M$ don't address before they abandon the BGL/SCASM standard I think they will come to regret. The problems I have experienced arise when the scenery in question is created by direct XML coding AND by AFCAD so it is something inherent in the XML system.

If you want to overcome your problem, stop using AFCAD to create your apron poygon and do it the conventional way with FSSC or Airport. Then if you get texture 'flashing' just place the polygon 0.1m above the scenery flatten level.

If you keep on I think you will just end up wasting a lot of time without solving youyr problem whereas if you do what I'm suggesting you'll have an evening's work max.

Roger

PS

The other thing you might want to do is to check whether the bmp you're using is actually transparent. It looks as though it is. Clearly a ground texure shouldn't be. Open it with DXTBmp.exe and see if it is an extended format with an alpha channel. If it has a grey alpha channel present that could be causing the transparency. If so back the original up, delete the alpha or make it pure white and re-save it.

[stevewilson]

I Thank I got It

First of all thanks to Gary and Roger for the help.

What I did was to take a short stratch of taxiway and widen it to the width that I wanted, closed it in the properties option, add a taxi link to the runway, and a few apron taxiways, and walla, an parking apron that doesn't blead through.