Adding taxiway signs to existing airports

max3max · October 14, 2025 at 5:25 PM

Hi all,

ApfelFlieger and I have been working on a method to add taxi signs to the existing airports, and we made some good progress. I have made a converter for crowd-sourced sign data from Xplane Gateway, to make it suitable for conversion to TMB POI files. You can see some of the results in the attachments, taxi signs for Zurich, Basel and Geneva airports (latter 2 are attached); those should be installed in the custom scenery/poi folder (e.g. c:\Users\yourusername\Documents\Aerofly FS 4\scenery\poi\).

However, we have run into an issue with object heights when placed on an existing airport - autoheight=true is not placing the signs on the ground, some are partially buried and some are floating. I believe it has already been discussed here a couple of years ago, that objects not in airport's main TSL file will not have the correct elevation with autoheight.

That is why I have set the converter to create a separate TAP file for each sign, and to use an elevation dataset (COP30) to set the absolute altitude for that coordinate. But it is still not enough, as the actual in-game terrain elevation is different than that, as I believe that the game is using more precise elevation data and/or terrain flattening after loading and deciding the elevation of the signs.

Is there a way to make autoheight behave correctly and place the objects loaded as POIs on the final ground elevation? It is not that practical to manually adjust elevations for 100+ signs per airport. Or at least is there a way to reliably calculate what will be the final in-game elevation of a coordinate? That way, at least, we could automatically set the correct absolute elevation of a sign in the converted files.

chrispriv · October 14, 2025 at 10:23 PM

Hi,

The placement of the taxi signs looks good!

I don't think it's possible to calculate a correct absolute height, as the geometry of the airfield merges with the elevation mesh from FS4 from an unknown source.

The only option I know is to levelling the entire airport ground to a fix height based on a edited elevation mesh, e.g. COP30 in a separate elevation data file, as I have done it for other airports as a bug fix (this changes the elevation not only the airport area but also for the hole level 10 tile).

I have set a height of 270 metres for the entire airport area of LFSB (COP30 dataset edited) in the included elevation file: test_lfsb_taxysign.zip
Now autoheigt works very well, have a look yourself!

But you would have to do this for every airport with your taxi signs, and it only works for airports in quite flat terrain (but still better than manually adjusting 100+ sign per airport).

Jet-Pack (IPACS) · October 14, 2025 at 10:43 PM Official Post

Autoheight works by adjusting each object's reference 3d position z-coordinate by the height difference between flat ground and actual terrain loaded by the sim. This means large objects only get moved based on the their location in the scene and not per vertex for example. If you have multiple signs then those need to be separate objects for auto-height to work independently for each sign, otherwise they are all just moved together as one object.

ApfelFlieger · October 14, 2025 at 10:59 PM

The current solution of max3max is to use a separate TMB for each taxi sign, which is then as correct as possible by means of autoheight. But even directly next to the runways and taxiways there are already height differences of a few centimetres to metres, which are sometimes not compensated.

I'm curious how well this can be done, because with the taxi signs FS 4 will definitely be a bit more realistic again. And with regard to ATC, this is also helpful.

The next step could then be the integration of groundtext.

Jugac64 · October 15, 2025 at 3:29 PM

Great work, this sounds promising!

Tomfa · October 15, 2025 at 8:20 PM

Excellent addition, thank you max3max and ApfelFlieger !

The tests are conclusive and work perfectly with the new elevation adaptation from chrisprivThanks!

All that's left is to integrate the lighting.

ApfelFlieger · October 15, 2025 at 11:13 PM

Moin Pascal,

groundtext is also a topic.

max3max · October 16, 2025 at 8:15 AM

chrispriv awesome, the sign heights look great with your custom elevation. Is there a way to automate generation of such elevation tiles for desired locations?

Jet-Pack, as ApfelFlieger said, each sign is a separate object, but autoheight places them on a wrong elevation mesh. It seems that autoheight for custom POIs is using same elevations as displayed on Location screen (which in turn seem quite similar to SRTMGL1 dataset), but actual in-game airport elevation is different. Is there a way to get the POIs to be placed after the final airport elevation mesh is loaded, using that more precise/transformed mesh?

chrispriv · October 16, 2025 at 8:59 PM

Quote from max3max

chrispriv awesome, the sign heights look great with your custom elevation. Is there a way to automate generation of such elevation tiles for desired locations?

I use my new AeroScenery MOD still in development to download and read at the base of AFS level 10 tiles GeoTIFF images from the OpenTopography server and get them ready for the GeoConvert process. However, I do the leveling of the ground manually using the QGIS App with an add-on.

Therefore, it is certainly better if IPACS's autoheight would also work for merged airport grounds.