Maximum resolution of heightmaps?

[MSFS 2020] Questions & Community Discussions Airports & Sceneries
1

Hello! While it seems to be possible to give heightmaps any resolution you
want, the actual output still seems to be downsampled to a certain resolution.
Check out the following sample with a heightmap that’s 200x200 meters and 100
cols and 100 rows (so roughly 2 meter resolution). I’ve created a small
mountain with a flat top and marked the flat top red in the screenshot to make
it more distinguishable: This is what it looks like in Developer Mode:

1049×976 538 KB
This is what it looks like
after building the scenery and loading it:
1049×976 516 KB
You see that the actual result
is far away from the intended resolution. Even though the terrain resolution
is set to a maximum of 400. To confirm this I created terraforming polygon
with a minimum possible falloff of 1 meter that seems to be bound by a similar
underlying elevation map’s resolution:
1448×999 715 KB
Which brings up the question:
Is this intentional and what is the actual maximum resolution that we can do
with heightmaps? There seem to be quite a few developers out there that
offer extremely high resolution heightmaps of about 1 meter in data while
actually that doesn’t seem to be supported at all.

2

I indeed come to the same problem. Can’t make any nice embankments at all, due
to the resolution of the terrain which is about 5x5 meter.

3

This has been mentioned many times. You can’t really do it this way.
https://devsupport.flightsimulator.com/t/3348 You may check Asobo’s KCGX
though, they integrated vertical 3D walls into the terrain very nicely.

4

Hi, The terraforming system has been updated, it will no longer use an
elevation map internally. As a result it will remove some staircase effects.
You can already see the result by unchecking the option “Ground > old
terraforming method” in the devmode option. For SU12 to not break existing
packages, a version will be set to rectangles and polygons. The new
terraforming method will be only applied when a scene is saved by the scenery
editor. Regards, Xavier