We observed the following behaviors:
Airports made with the MSFS 2020 SDK and loaded in 2024
Apron polygons with Opacity value < 128 will show the underlying terrain details, for example grass+flowers.
Apron polygons with Opacity > 128 will cancel terrain details.
This happens regardless if the material is coming from the default Materials library, or it’s a custom one.
This behavior is breaking 2020 compatibility, because those opacity values might have been carefully chosen to obtain a good blend between the apron polygons (providing details) and the underlying aerials/projected mesh.
Also, even in cases where a blend wasn’t required, a common method to exclude grass from custom aprons was to add Apron with Opacity 0.
Airports made with the MSFS 2024 SDK
Some materials used as Apron polygons respond to the Opacity in a linear way.
Other materials seems to show more/less grass depending on Opacity and their normals, which is nice and would offer new possibilities.
Could you please check the issue with MSFS 2020 Compatibility ? Is this a bug that can be fixed or should we change all opacities < 128 to have at least an acceptable rendering with 2020 products in 2024 ?