Hard Lakes

[Jaybird]

Hi. I'm having a terrible problem with some scenery I'm making, in-that a lake approx 6 miles from my scenery "turns to hard surfaced" causing terrible burning, smoking and grinding of my floats :-( . Disabling the scenery returns the lake to normal, floatplane usable water. I have 8 flattened areas in the scenery. I'm beginning to sense that MS default lakes don't like nearby flatten areas? 'Appreciate any info on whether or not this is true and if so, are there any known work-arounds?

Thanks;

J.R.

[BobG]

I have a flatten right along one of the landable rivers that doesn't seem to have effected it. Also have a flatten within about 4 miles of a lake and it still works - so think you might have something else going on.

[Jaybird]

Bob --- Thanks for that report. I just stumbled onto the reason for my problem. It's, of all things, a result of applying a smoothing area within a textured polygon in the town 6 miles away from the lake. I reduced the "LatRange" in the "General" window all the way down to 0.05 which should not be large enough to reach the lake. Smoothing must be almost a global thing. Is that weird or what?? 'Stumbled onto another odd condition: Using Apt 26, build 140, If I select "water" with smoothing in the downtown polygon's surface quality, the problem at the lake doesn't occur. HOWEVER, THEN, landing or taxiing on the downtown textured polygon results in water spray on the canopy and floatplane bobbing up & down back in town -- on DRY LAND !! Also, selecting "dirt/grass" with no smoothing in the downtown polygon results in having a "Hard Lake" and the floatplane kicks up dust on the lake's water. Oh well, as long as we know what's doing what to what I guess we can live with it.
PLEASE GIVE ME A BREAK, MR. GATES :-).

[BobG]

I've never used a smoothing area - not sure I even know what it does. I'm continually amazed at the stuff you can do with the Airport program - wish there was a better user guide then the news groups. Got to give Tom and company a lot of kudos for their continuing effort. Just read on their site they are planning on version 3.0.....

[Jaybird]

I've never used a smoothing area - not sure I even know what it does.

***Smoothing is used to prevent the bumpiness, dust, dirt clods, etc experienced on add-on taxiways or any ground polygon one wishes to be normal to taxi-on. It's (SCASM) code is a simple one-liner: SurfaceType( type width_X width_Y altitude).***

I'm continually amazed at the stuff you can do with the Airport program - wish there was a better user guide then the news groups. Got to give Tom and company a lot of kudos for their continuing effort. Just read on their site they are planning on version 3.0.....

***I agree. I think it's the best because of it's flexibility to call practically any macro or insert your own SCASM code. We need to keep "nagging" the Apt team to incorporate Terrain Mesh abilities like interfacing with the Terrain SDK tools, because it's a 2D system in a developing 3D world. Even as it is, it's, IMHO, the best "utility-wise" available...***