A back-country airstrip and a feature request

  • I've been starting to model in some back-country airstrips in the Idaho foothills which can be selected from AeroFly's location map and are smooth enough to land on. Here's an example:

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    With these airstrips, I'm using Google satellite ortho photos at their highest resolution for the runway textures, rather than using some of the built-in concrete surfaces in the AeroFly library.

    The problem I run into is that, in order to smooth the airstrips enough to land on, I have to define them as "...__airport__runway" objects in AC3D. But, AeroFly doesn't let the normal ground texture show through when you define an area as __airport__runway. So in order to still have the correct original texture appear after defining these areas, I have to painstakingly re-map the original texture on top of the "__airport__runway" surfaces, and then also tweak their brightness and contrast so it looks seamless in AeroFly. I've made this work well for 2 back-country airstrips so far, but it would be a LOT faster/easier if I didn't have to re-map the textures when they're already there, just being obscured.

    The better alternative to what I've done would be to just define it all as "...__airport__outside" in AC3D, but unfortunately the smoothing provided by that isn't enough for these hilly terrains and the low-res topo mesh, so you end up with stair-stepping and bumps and broken terrain all around if you take that approach.

    So my feature request is: can we get an option (maybe in the .tsc file) to make "__airport__runway" objects transparent, the same way as "__airport__outside" objecst already are? This allows us to use the stronger smoothing of the runway algorithm, but still allow the original photoscenery to show up.

    Or, another way to do this would be to allow user-definable "smoothing strength" to the "__airport__outside" objects. That way I'd get the benefit of the original photoscenery showing up, but could make the smoothing for the outside area as strong as the algorithm for the runway areas.

    I know the AeroFly team is super busy with many other things, so please just add this to the 'we'll consider it if it's easy when we have time' list :)