Reasons I’ve seen for PaintedLine circles on the ground:
Helipads (this is the bulk of my experience so far)
Circles containing directional information like what gate(s) a taxiway is leading to
Speed limit signs on pavement
Circles denoting where jet bridge wheels sit at rest
Compass roses
Right now, I’m only an intermediate-level developer who has mostly worked on the World Hub, so maybe there are some tricks I haven’t learned. But I’ve seen some default airports with bad circles, and I’m not sure if that’s Blackshark.ai’s work or some poor developer hand-cleaning up an airport who’s not as much of a perfectionist as I am.
Right now, if I want to make a perfect circle, what I do is create a circular apron called “DELETE ME” where I want the circle to be, followed by a PaintedLine called “UPDATE ME” (the PaintedLine can be anywhere…doesn’t matter). I save my work, go into the XML, copy out all of the vertices and paste them over the PaintedLine, then copy and paste the first vertex at the end so that the line goes back into itself. Then, I delete the “DELETE ME” apron. It produces this:
Add a circle apron with asphalt material, colorize in yellow
Duplicate, scale a little bit, priority+1, colorize as base apron, you are done
Another option
Add circle apron
Add paintened line and use circle apron as a guide (place a painted line vertex every 4/6 of the apron)
Remove the apron
Latest option, projected mesh (of course this doesn’t work in world hub)
Thanks! I wouldn’t do the lazy method, anyway, because I would prefer to do things the way the devs intended us to use them (::cough:: mostly). But I love the out-of-the-box thinking. I don’t know how long it would have taken me to come up with that idea!
Note: I want to make it clear to any SDK team member who’s skimming this thread that, although there are techniques for making a circle, it’s still a pain point. Having native functionality for this would be great.
Hi Umberto,
Don’t you use any ground material layering at FSDT?
I use to stack several ground items on top of each other (aerials/projected mesh/aprons) and never found any noticeable frame rate issue
(Of course I do not use overly res texture in ground materials, there is no need for them because of limited ground res. Looking forward for fs2024 for these!)
That’s why I said shouldn’t be “abused”, that doesn’t mean shouldn’t be “used”. In fact, precisely because the scenery might already use many layers, might be a good reason not to add extras.
It’s just an extra information, maybe not many are aware of what pixel overdraw means, clearly if an airport has just a few rounded circles, it wouldn’t be much of a problem doing them with two overlaid polygons.
