I have recently found out that the stock airport KMTH The Florida Keys Marathon, has a rectangular terraforming area which also excludes the photogrammetry and brings about a 2D flat imagery to appear instead.
Upon switching to dev mode and unchecking ‘Enable terraforming’ setting, the TIN comes back to the scene.
How can I find which .bgl causes this terraforming negating the photogrammetry throughout it and solve the issue without having to go dev mode and toggle off ‘Enable terraforming’ ?
Also weird, such a glitch might happen around a stock airport.
I don’t know what options you would have in terms of de-compiling the BGLs. (Maybe someone else can answer that.) The airport is going to be in one of the many BGL files in fs-base-genericairports.
One thing you could maybe do would be to get the airport XML from the World Hub. (EDIT: I misread your post. Rewriting my answer.) They have terraforming enabled by default. So if you were to simply get it, compile it, and put it in your Community folder, you would have yourself a flat airport.
I wonder how the photogrammetry seems in your vanilla sim. I tried it with an emptied community folder all default and vanilla, still it’s there at KTMH. Maybe the AI thing draws the terraforming area wrong, it’s an arbitrary rectangle that overlaps many stuff outside the default airport borders, when in fact it must have been a polygon to follow the exact airport borders.
Polygon with terrarforming
Runway with a profile terrarforming
Airport object with flatten airport properties
The last three can have a falloff increasing their area
You can enable debug shapes and look for any polygon
To remove any of the feature above, you need to place and ExclusionRectangle large enough to remove the offending features, and in its properties check what your want to exclude
I don’t recommend using excludeAll, it is better to remove stuff by step
And
Some of the ExclusionRectangle features works only when compiled (clicking build all) and/or placing the result in community
the problem here is that the faulty terraforming has been created so recklessly, or by some arbitrary dev procedures, that when you want to use a rectangular Exclusion to remove terraforming it might also remove the valued data within the airport boundaries.
I suggest we have an option in sdk to create a polygonal Exclusion to follow the exact contours rather than just a bulky single rectangular choice.
Because of how exclusion works it is very unlikely that something like that will be implemented
Using Airport2Project it should be possible to import the the default Airport data and recreate the default one in very little time
(Or maybe it is possible to do that using the World Hub, I’m not in so don’t know)
It is all about how much effort you want to put into
I really wish I would know who or what procedures might have added this faulty terraforming to the sim, which is the main cause of this very problem above.
To give some some context, it looks like this happened to an airport uploaded from the World Hub.
All World Hub airports come with a polygon wrapped around them excluding TIN within their borders. Additionally, an automatic flattening is applied to World Hub airports, which really bothers me. (We cannot disable it in the World Hub.)
So far, I’ve seen two airports where we have had potential bugs from World Hub-submitted airports. One is this one, KMTH, which was submitted by Kai and then edited by a moderator. The TIN continues to be excluded outside the polygon, even though in all other World Hub airports, the falloff is 0.
Also KCDW, where only one user has reported an issue, where the entire airport is photogrammetry and there are no autogen buildings. That one was built by me, and it has an intact airport polygon with TIN exclusion.
My hope and guess is that these are issues that the World Hub team is working out, and the reason why they’re having the alpha.
So, this airport wasn’t actually amongst the stock msfs airports before it was submitted thru World Hub by Kai ? He must have added it for the sake of his flawless AI experience but with such a bug, probably without him noticing what’s happing even a tiny little bit.
Is there an approval process before an airport is officially released thru World Hub?
How can we get a dynamic list of World Hub airports added to the sim thus far ?
Loaded the default into Airport2Project (optional, because only the following is needed, but if you are in love with the airport you can have project to work on)
I profoundly reckon that World Hub should have an approval process to stop the sim from being teeming with similar bugged airports in the future.
Furthermore, this particular airport must be corrected globally without the simmers having to deal with dev mode intrusions and to create auxiliary files.
Yep, I mentioned Kai’s name to say that this airport wasn’t just done by anybody, but by somebody we would all trust. And I also verified the World Hub version that’s out there, and the airport polygon is correct. It’s not like it veers off and accidentally covers all of those houses that got flattened.
And I brought up KCDW before, as my airport, which has a bug. I know you probably don’t know the quality of my work, but that airport was done very carefully, and it was not only approved by a moderator but also verified by other people who have looked at it.
Yes, there is an approval process for the World Hub. I don’t think that this is the moderators’ fault, as the polygon at that airport is correct. I have no idea what kind of post-processing happens to fold that airport into the BGLs in your fs-base-genericairports folder, but I have to guess that something must have broken down in that process.
Just to make sure I’m clear with what I’m communicating, there is nothing wrong with the airport that was submitted to the World Hub. I would love to post the .zip file for the airport on here for others to verify on their own, but I don’t know what the rules are on that kind of thing.
The World Hub is still in alpha right now, and there is an expectation that there would be bugs. So I’ll just cross my fingers that the SDK team is looking into the bug report that I raised.
You can’t. I can’t even in the World Hub website. But you can see what has been published by following News & Announcements in the main forums. Airports get submitted every day, but airports only get published into production once a month with every AIRAC cycle. You can expect the next one to occur in mid-May.
Please keep in mind that these lists tell you nothing about what has changed at these airports. Somebody could have comprehensively overhauled the entire airport, or they could have moved a windsock. And in either of those cases, they would be on the list.
I would love to. Unfortunately, it looks like the flattening is a deliberate choice they’ve made, as Nicolas informed me:
In that bug report that I submitted, an airport I did had a control tower on a hill overlooking the airport. The hill was intact during my development. After it went into production, the tower was sitting on the ground. No hill. And it looks like this happened by design.
There is an airport I want to do in the World Hub with a famously-sloped runway, but I’m afraid that if I touch the airport, the slope will disappear.
Thanks for all the detailed account of what’s going on with the World Hub, my discovery of this bug has also recently let me have a pretty in-depth insight of it, thanks to you, mate.
Perhaps, it would be a better idea if the MS / Asobo reconsiders and makes it optional for the simmers to let such edited stock airports flow into their simulator files rather than making it a mandatory process.
Therefore, in my humble opinion, The World Hub project should work on the Community folder instead of a direct intrusion to the stock files inside the OneStore path.
By the way, I truly do have an empathy on your concern about the automatic flattening of the World Hub airports, which sadly discourages a great MSFS thing as sloped runways, inclined apron, or taxiways.
Respectfully, I think that it would cause problems if World Hub airports were optional:
You can expect that the next round of airports being released in mid-May is going to be in the hundreds. There were a lot submitted in this round. And we’re still in the alpha. That could make for a very clumsy opt-in process.
I’ve put somewhere around 300 hours into developing World Hub airports since the World Hub alpha began. If I thought that my airports would be seen by three people who knew that these airports were available, from the hundreds available, and decided to use them, there is no way I would be putting in so much time and effort. And that would probably be the case for many people. My motivation, as a World Hub developer, is to improve the sim for everybody.
Third, and probably most importantly, if World Hub airports fork off of the generic base airports, there would then be a question on process when the world team (made up of Gaya and Orbx and perhaps others) edits an airport. Do they edit the base one, and forget about all of the changes made in the World Hub, or do they edit the World Hub version, which potentially nobody has opted into?
I’m not 100% happy with the World Hub so far, and in fact, I’ve stated my intentions to only do a few more airports and then stop participating in the alpha because of this concern I have raised. I’m afraid that my changes are going to get blown away in August or September, and I have yet to hear from anyone assuring me that everything will be okay. I’m also concerned about this automatic flattening thing, and what happens when somebody edits Courchevel, or Saba, or St. Barths, or Lukla, etc. I won’t touch them, but it’s likely that somebody else will in the future, and then we might have a flattened airport.
But overall, I still think that the World Hub is a net positive. The development team has yet to edit the biggest airport in the world (I’m looking at you, LTFM) despite hundreds of votes and pleading from the community. They haven’t touched Tocumen airport in Panama, despite 118 votes and a wish logged two weeks after launch. They didn’t touch KBWI for two USA world updates, despite a logged bug in their bug tracker and 47 votes. The World Hub is the only tool we have to fix some of these things ourselves.
Regarding number 3 of your concerns of a WH going Community instead of OneStore, I couldn’t agree more on the turmoil that’d pop at first sight but still a handcrafted airport inside the OneStore path may automatically be given a higher priority on the devmode scenery list - which I think works great and saves me a lot of conflicts, albeit still experimental - on top of the WH version in case the simmer has already opted for saving it in the Comunity folder.
As for LTFM - Istanbul Aiport, it’s a special spot for me as that’s where I live, one of the biggest and busiest hubs worldwide and such a shame that the dev team still insists on officially missing it out of the sim.
It might, however, get an handcrafted treatment in the WU’s to come in msfs2024, a World Update Türkiye - Greece could be cool.
I’m really confused by this. Is there an additional terraforming applied to some airports and not others? Many airports I’ve done are smaller and don’t have that grid like in the image you posted. Instead, they just show a yellow box outlining the runway and a larger dashed yellow box surrounding a wider area around the airport.
A few dozen airports I’ve edited have been published to the sim and they are by no means flat. Now, the runways seems to have a more singular slope than the multiple humps and valleys that runways often get, but they are not flat.
Again, are they applying this “terraforming” to only certain airports?
Hmmm, interesting. Nicolas said “all airports”. (I don’t want to reference his post again because he’ll get a notification from my link and this would be the third notification he’d be getting from me in 24 hours. Check out the second post in this thread.) He said “all airports,” but I assume he meant “all airports submitted through the World Hub.”
Most of the airports I’ve done are flat. So unfortunately, the only real data point I have is the one in the bug report I sent up.
The terrarforming applied by Microsoft since day 1 is a clever way TRY TO retain the natural sloped appearence of airport terrain while TRY TO smoothing out all the terrain Digital Elevation Model flaws/inaccuracy
With former terrarforming method (old) the smoothing of each rectangle was more effective, so less rectangle were needed, with current version more rectangle are needed
Most likely each rectangle samples the altitude values of its area and takes some average values, bending with its neighbors one
It is simple and effective and mostly works
I’m assuming they are ensuring that their default terrarforming is in place to avoid users complaining for uneven Airport terrain, so they are throwing it in automatically after the WorldHub submission.
Clever. But not perfect. Marathon is a proof
Let’s keep in mind that every choice MS does must work everywhere. The world is huge. I know too, 'cause my global add-ons have to face the same issues
So imho the only way to come to a global solution is to raise a bug
(Otherwise, so crazy fast manual work in the scenery editor and the fast solution is ready)
