[I/JG27_Waggel]

In the last months there was a new technique: Painting the whole runways and taxiways on a map texture. The result is not bad but there is a big disadvantage.

If you want to land the whole runway is a little bit blured. First idea was to use the old groundplates but on a big airfield you will need a lot of them and this rises the size of the objects in a map if you are planing round about 50 airfields.

So my idea was to make a 2D ground plate like the plates we have in game. But the plate should have a size of 1.6 km x 1.6km. So you can make the whole taxiways and runways with one plate.

Advantages:
- You can make curves absolutly round. You also can create special forms easily (Gasoline station etc)
- You can paint numbers and symbols on the runway where you want. You also can make a big carmouflage system on the runway etc.
- You still can make a special map texture for this airfield under the plate

Disadvatage:
- The whole airfield has to be on the same altitude

[Guest]

Sounds like a good plan to me! :lol:
The advantages far outweigh the one and only negative, imho. 8)

[Bee]

Airfield pop-up and the need for absolutely flat surfaces are a couple of others unfortunately.

[KG64_Cnopicilin]

Flat surface isnt problem; show me a big airfield what is not on flat surface :?

[CzechTexan]

Is this something similar to FabianFred's catplate runway? It's one large runway plate and looks good. But while editing my map I seem to have slow frame rates and comp lockup when over it. Maybe it's just my system but this is a problem I have with it. Anyone else experience the same?

[Dunois]

Yes I do too
And I bookmarked these to avoid using it in big maps because, the're slowing down the process too much.

[I/JG27_Waggel]

A 3D program should not eat many polygons to make a simple rectangle. The runways and taxiways can be done with alpha layers. We should make 4 textures:

1024 pixel
512 pixel
256 pixel
32 pixel

or:
512 pixel
256 pixel
128 pixel
32 pixel

There might be a problem that the grafic card can not show a whole airfield in high resolution so we can make 4 x 400 meter plates. All together they make a 1.6 km x 1.6 km plate too.

[canonuk]

I'm actually already doing this on my final release. I had the idea about 2 months ago and it works perfectly. The only real problem is pop-up distances, but I can get them to the same as the standard runway plates, so no difference. I need to play with the number of smaller squares each plate is chopped up into to find the optimum balance between convenience, pop-up distances and file size,.

[fabianfred]

on my thai and BurmaLower (beta) maps I used the large plate for some lesser used/emergency strips

I didn't notice any FPS drop

there is a 'shimmer' to them and even getting the ground underneath as flat as I could....it is sometimes possible to see underneath.

To combat the pop-up I placed the texture underneath to be a similar sand/colour so that when the plate popped out of view there was still a visible patch of ground to be seen from a distance which helped to locate the strip

[C6_bandini]

The toungoo airfield is just unplayable for me. Depending where I look at in the cockpit, I will get visual bugs like on the following images :

in cockpit :


in FMB :


Is it a size problem or a mesh problem. The AngkorPlate for example is ok, and so are other big plates.
But the CatToungoo and CatStrip are not on my system.

[dunkelgrun]

This will be agreat addition if they can be made. I've painted the runways onto the ground textures for my new Midway, but then there's hardly any land on the map so using up the available tex's doesn't matter. On other maps there's definitely a need for some big airfield plates.

:cheers: