Exclude TIN not working / problems with Terraforming

[MSFS 2020] Bug Reports
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@Boris has there been any update on this bug? I know you last replied here a year and a half ago and have possibly forgotten about the issue.

There are still a number of us fighting against this problem of how photogrammetry overrides terraforming. It’s making it impossible to develop and release airports that have a lot of terrain variation.

I’m trying to develop an airport in Colorado and, I’m sure you can imagine, it is anything but flat. Because of this photogrammetry problem, I have 3 choices:

  1. Develop the airport with “flatten” turned on, in which case there’s no point releasing the scenery because some of the defining characteristics of it are wiped out, including its sloped intersecting runways and the fact it sits on a plateau.

  2. Develop the airport and release it with the caveats: “it won’t work on Xbox” and “PC users must turn off photogrammetry”, which might make the airport better, but would destroy the character of the surrounding area. Turning off photogrammetry is such an immersion-breaking change, I doubt anyone would do it just for the sake of a single airport.

  3. Quit developing the airport altogether because, in the current state, there’s no demonstrable advantage over the AI-generated version. I don’t want to do this because it’s my “home airport” and I’m invested in releasing a better version.

Is there any way, if the bug can’t be fixed, could there be a Polygon attribute added such as “exclude photogrammetry”? Or could terraforming be given priority to override photogrammetry contours?

If no development time can be set aside for this (totally understandable with the impending release of 2024) could you shed some light on how your internal developers handled this problem for the bespoke airports? Do they all just use “flatten” regardless of the surrounding real-world terrain? Or is there some way around this apparent rendering prioritization issue you could share?

Cheers,
Shawn

PS - my own thread on this issue:
Getting a sloped and flat runway with terraforming just isn’t workable - Questions & Community Discussions / Airports & Sceneries - MSFS DevSupport (flightsimulator.com)

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