Hardening polygons

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The area of a hardened polygon is not showing in the same place in FS2002.
The purple dotted line is in exactly the right place, surrounding a taxi way and textured ground polygon, but the hardened area in FS is offset by about 50%, so only half of the area is actually hardened and the hardened area continues beyond where it should be. This has only happened since I uninstalled airport ( missing files problem) reinstalled build 122 and upgraded to build 139.
If anyone can understand what I am trying to explain here I would be grateful of a reason and remedy.

[Bagman]

My hardening area in 139 went away too

Brian

[link:greenmtnflightsim.homestead.com/Home.html|http://www.flightsim.com/dcforum/Use...055b814f6a.jpg ]

[bahri]

Hi All!
I am Having the same problem, in fact I was searching for the 135 upgrade to go back to.
It was working fine , then with the 139 upgrade my concrete turned to soil.
I hope our friends Tom and Brian, two guys that deserve a lot of thanks can help us out.

Regards
Carmel Grech

[Jaybird]

Hi... The uninstall/reinstall/update was a good move. I'm not sure that's what's causing the dotted line offset you mention though. I've noticed it but haven't considered it a problem because I always have to re-adjust X and Y to fine tune the smoothed area anyway.

The new build 139 polygon routines are working good in the tests I've made with them in FS2002, however, it can get a little confusing because the default dotted lines you first see almost always need to be adjusted to get the actual smoothed area laid-out just the way you want it. You can manipulate the dotted lines by using the X & Y inputs on the build polygon window. As the numbers in X and Y are varied you can see the "general" change responsive to their variation on the scenery map. By adjusting them so that the dotted lines "generously" overlap the area you want smoothed, testing the result in your scenery, and coming back and "fine-tuning", it will yield smooth, dust free taxiing.

BTW, this is not a "hardening" function but rather a "smoothing" to provide smooth surfaces for taxiing. The hardening is at the mercy of the ground your polygon is lying-on. You can use either the "Flatten Area" or the "Create Runway" routine in Apt when needed to re-adjust the elevation of "Hardened" surfaces. You'll notice a new input so that you can now adjust runway elevation in FS2002. It will also work in FS2000 but requires an Area16 "hardening" as well in FS2000.

The best feature provided by the new polygon routines in Apt, IMHO, is the fact that they allow textured polygons to be laid-down "Under" the autogen trees & buildings and allow them to remain visible. Previously, including build 135, they wiped-out most of the nearby autogen objects....

'Hope this helps; J.R.

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[font size="1" color="#FF0000"]LAST EDITED ON Mar-01-02 AT 03:40AM (EDT)[/font][p]Thanks for the help here JR, but just to add that changing the resolution of ground textures from 1 to .1 removes the smoothing altogether unless the 'purple lines' are extended by 10 times their original size. This means I'm covering an enormous area for a small amount of smoothing.
The invisible runway option works well with the exception that the runway number appears in the AFD and causes confusion when selecting a runway.

[Barney]

Instead of creating an AFD entry, just depend on the Initial Location option which places an entry in the "Scenery from 6.0 and above" menu. And if you're up-loading for others to use, a note in your documentation to that effect would be handy.

Barney

[Jaybird]

I tried your 0.1 scaling scenario and see what you're talking about. Under the condition of scaling down to 0.1, it would be impractical to try and create such a large smoothing area graphic by manually "hunt and peck" of X and Y as I suggested. The Apt programmers could probably factor it in the code to track the user's chosen bitmap scale, provided that process didn't screw-up something else in the object performance.

Then I tried to remember the times I've downscaled a bitmap that radically and honestly, I never have. I'm usually going in the other direction, increasing scale and thus trying to allow more detail per area of the texture bitmap. That's what I love about Martin Wright's BMP2000 -- It lets you edit a small section of a bitmap so that when seen in normal or cropped scale, it looks a lot better.

Invisible runways used for smoothing in a high-density ground textured situation are not too swift, as they start wiping-out autogen. They're great for taxiways at airports though.

One thing I don't understand about your comment on invisible runways showing up in your sim as a valid runway in the AFD data? Don't you have assign an Initial Location to at least one end of a runway for that to happen; and if so, why would one want to set-up an IL on an invisible runway used for smoothing?
Maybe I'm ignorant of that process --- (Just Asking).

I guess the bottom line is that we can probably always find something wrong if we look hard and long enough. Meanwhile, I'm really glad we've got Apt to "kick-around". It may not be the best but It's free --- and for that matter, I think it IS the best because of it's placement capability and flexibility to import and/or allow modification of source code.

If we can just convince the Apt crew to start throwing in some Elevated Terrain Mesh capability it would be too good to be true.

Regards; J.R.

[Jaybird]

THIS JUST IN...

Tom Hiscox has just posted build 140 for download here. It fixes the condition described by Cazador in that the dotted lines now appear to define the smoothing area without offset. It also adds an Invisible Runway option for smoothing. In my quick and dirty testing, the IR has some problems with elevation assignment and wiping-out nearby autogen objects when used over flattened areas with elevations different from scenery elev in the "General" window :-(. Otherwise, It just keeps getting better and Better... :-)

[carousel]

JR.Thanks for the posting about build 140, will try that later.
If I may refer to the invisible runway part, it is only in the AFD ( search places) that a duplicate runway appears although no IL has been assigned. In 'search add-on scenery' you are right, this presents no problem.
As far as the texture sizing is concerned I use seasonal texture 128b2su1.bmp for grass like areas and to make it appear in FS2002 must have a resolution of .1 otherwise at the default resolution it is far too big and hazy, looking totally unreal at close distance. If you can suggest another way of creating the same appearence without changing the resolution so much I would be grateful. I have Martin Wrights app but have never used it for this.

[thiscox]

The elevation used for the IR is the elevation of the polygon, not the Section/General elevation. The IR does push back the autogen scenery, which seems to be an unavoidable side effect.