Bumpy run- and taxiways

Hi Guys,

 

I'm in the process of giving many of my small tropical airfields the real steamy tropical feel and look, mostly via the Abacus EZ object placement program. Works great and the obviously not so accurate looking airfields, are now beginning to look very steamy indeed with their surrounding tropical forests, tropical buildings, etc. but the dirt taxiways and gravel runways remain very bumpy, so much so that especially the takeoffs, are extremely hazardous, with my plane bouncing around all over the place and difficult to control.

 

I've searched for and have read most of the older forum posts on this subject but as yet nobody seems to have come up with a real solution, other than changing all the Afcad taxi- and runways to, e.g the very unrealistic but hard concrete, asphalt, etc.

 

I've understood that the dirt and gravel taxiways/runways, drawn via the Afcad program and directly on top of the default concrete/asphalt runways, are somehow structurally soft and will therefore always remain bumpy. Very strange indeed because, e.g. my Afcad gravel runway textures, are drawn directly on top of the "hard" underlying default textures.

 

Has anybody ever found a better solution ?

 

Regards

Hans

Hi Hans, in the AFCAD program you can draw a concrete apron polygon over the runway or taxiway which is slightly narrower and won't show, especially if you don't tick the Draw Textures box. This gives a hard surface but keeps the look of the dirt or gravel texture.

Sounds good Tim. I'll give it a go tomorrow and will report back on the results.

 

Hans

Alas Tim, your suggestion sounded to good and too simple to be true but please just forget about my dirt taxiways being bumpy because these were not really the biggest problem ...... but ......

 

After a lot of testing it seems that the bumpy runways are somehow directly related to the textures being used on them. Anything which deviates from concrete or asphalt causes the bumpiness, no matter if these are drawn by the related Afcad (or ADE) file, by the original APnnnnnn.bgl file or even by both.

 

E.g. when I de-activate my new addon tropical airfield in my scenery library, together with it's "gravel" runwayed Afcad (or ADE) file and I edit the default APnnnnnn.bgl file's "concrete" into "gravel", the bumps are there. After restoring the "concrete" back into the APnnnnnn.bgl file, the bumps are gone. When I then re-activate the gravel runwayed Afcad (or ADE) file, the bumps are back.

 

I'm now convinced that concrete and/or asphalt runway textures remain the only non-bumpy ones, independant of where they come from.

Sigh !!

 

Regards and thanks for your reaction.

Hans

Hi Hans, you're only changing the textures of the runways and taxiways. My solution is to add Apron polygons which are slightly narrower than the runways and taxiways, with concrete as the Apron surface, but leave the runways and taxiways textures as they are.

If Tim didn't make it clear, you slide the concrete apron underneath the runway, so it's completely covered by the runway.

I'm sorry Guys if I wasn't clear enough but Tim's concrete apron polygon method in the related Afcad file was the first thing I tried but sadly that didn't work as hoped. I firstly tried a narrow invisible one under my gravel runway and then a wider visible one just for testing purposes but to no avail. I even tried a very large apron polygon, which covered the whole airfield but the bumps on my gravel runway remained.

The test airfield surface elevation is exactly the same as that of the default airfield and that specified in the Afcad file.

 

I took another good look at the Afcad instructions under "Runway properties" and "Surface" where it said in a for me rather cryptic manner:-

 

"This sets the visible surface texture and the smoothness of the surface. There does not appear to be any provisions for custom textures".

 

How I should interpret "custom textures" and if any of these would include my bumps causing gravel texture, remains unclear.

 

I've now arrived at the stage of giving up un this one and just accepting the smooth concrete or asphalt runways for my tropical/bush airfields, which incidently are all situated "on top of" their existing default concrete or asphalt versions.

 

Thanks again guys for your reactions.

Hans

Sorry that didn't work, I had never tried it for that (I use it to flatten the ground under the runway).

 

You could create your own ground polygon with a texture of the kind of runway you want. That will cover up a concrete runway.

What aircraft are you using?

What aircraft are you using?

 

Normally on most of these small tropical airfields, I use propeller driven single engined light aircraft.

 

Hans

Normally on most of these small tropical airfields, I use propeller driven single engined light aircraft.

 

Hans

 

Ok, does it do it with a default aircraft such as the C172? does it happen with any aircraft you use? have you used multiple different aircraft and gotten the same result? asking because there are entries in the aircraft.cfg that can cause bouncing during taxi.

Yes, it's bumpy for all aircraft types, even for some (test) heavies but these are far heavier and can therfore make more use of their suspension properties specified in their aircraft.cfg files. However, experimenting with these same suspension properties for the light aircraft, does have some effect but not nearly enough to make it "As Real as it Gets".

 

This bumpyness is somehow directly related to the runway texture being specified, even when it gets (test) used in the default APnnnnnn.bgl file and together with the related addon scenery being in a de-activated state.

 

When I create a very wide "concrete" apron polygon in the airfield's Afcad file and which then becomes visible along both sides of my bumpy runway, I can then (test) taxi my plane from the runway onto this concrete polygon and the bumbyness will immediately disappear. Taxiing back onto the runway and the bumps are there again, even although the concrete polygon lies at exactly the same elevation.

 

Normally the default APnnnnnn.bgl concrete runway is aotomatically de-activated by the standard coding within the related Afcad file but even if this coding is removed the bumpyness remains as the result of the runway texture being specified via the word "GRAVEL" further down the code listing.

 

I can therefore only conclude that something within FS9 itself automatically creates these bumps whenever it even smells a runway which is non concrete or non asphalt. The mechanism itself seems to be steered by so called "reserved words", e.g. "CONCRETE", "ASPHALT" or "GRAVEL" (and some others), which can be specified as such either in the APnnnnnn.bgl or in the Afcad file.

 

Regards

 

Hans