Version: 1.1.7.0
Frequency: Consistently
Severity: Blocker
Marketplace package name: CYSH Smiths Falls
Context: When loading the 2020 version of the CYSH Smiths Falls airport using Community Folder in 2024, snow appears inside the main hangar on the floor. This floor is specifically marked as a “no snow” object in the 2020 SDK so that it does not snow inside during winter. It seems to have the opposite effect in 2024, it’s snow covered all year round.
Bug description: This happens consistently in that main hangar, but there’s another small hangar starting spot that uses the same method of splitting the floor as a separate object with “no snow”, and that one does not have the snow issue.
Repro steps: Spawn at the airport, look at hangar floor.
So after a lot of digging I found this was caused partly by the CGL. It had a picture of the white roof of the building, and that was causing a snow-like bump to get generated all year round despite having an apron with a different texture covering it. Can we get a fix for that?
The second (and currently unsolvable) issue is that even after coloring the CGL, there is still a smaller bump (now dirt color) sticking out and covering about half the hangar floor, despite a terraform rectangle being under the entire surface and making it perfectly flat in 2020:
The only way I can fix that is by taking the airport into the 2024 SDK and using the “exclude secondary height maps” option on the terraform polygon. However, building that project makes the airport a 2024 airport, which has the very aggressive LOD options, and making several more LODs for 60 different hangars for a niche little rural airport would be weeks of work for so little payoff and no noticeable performance gain. And building a 2024 project does nothing for Marketplace customers who can’t yet download any 2024 version for now, nor does it meet Asobo’s goal of making 2020 airports “just work”.
Yet another issue with this airport is that the DEM has changed between 2020 and 2024, and now the base ground level is about 1/2 m lower in 2024, and all terraform rectangles are too high (and so are all objects that are not “snap to ground”). Again, there is no workaround for this that would allow the same 2020 airport to “just work” in 2020. I know eventually Asobo plans to put the new DEM in 2020, but what can we do in the meantime? Can we have the new DEM and aerial imagery much sooner in 2020? Without that, I don’t see any way to fix this other than issuing a completely new 2020 version that tweaks all terraform rectangles to expect a lower DEM, and not have any objects that have “snap to ground” off. Again, a full 2024 version is beyond a reasonable scope in the short term. And once 2020 gets new DEM and aerials, we will have to update those 2020 airports yet again.
So given this situation, can you please consider backporting the “exclude secondary height maps” option to the 2020 SDK so that we can issue quicker and far, FAR easier fixes to our 2020 sceneries to make them 2024-compatible? I think having a handful of these forward-compatibility flags to allow us to make simple tweaks in existing 2020 scenery and make it 2024-friendly would speed up adoption of 2024, since people would be able to use it with their favorite sceneries much sooner in the new sim. The difficult 2024-native ports could come later, as developers have to put a lot of effort into making them, but helping faster user adoption of 2024 would also encourage developers to do the native 2024 versions sooner.
