Thank you so much for investing your time and effort into this great hobby we all enjoy.
When you are creating product pages with photos and/or videos - PLEASE SHOW THE RUNWAYS AND TAXIWAYS!
This is afterall Microsoft FLIGHT Simulator. While supplimentary photos of terminal interiors and landside objects is great - the runways and taxiways are what we’re going to see most frequently.
If you have taken the time to get the runways and taxiways right (for me “right” means dirt, tire marks and rubber build up, oil stains on parking stands - you know a place that looks “lived in”), I am much less concerned with the interior of buildings and land side objects.
Don’t get me wrong, these areas are great for showing that extra attention to detail but if none of the screenshots show the actual runways, taxiways, and parking areas, it makes it much harder for me to decide if I want to buy your product.
Dirt and grime is a bugbear of mine. Everything looks far too clean in most scenery addons. Give it a bit of weathering, don’t be afraid. I suspect this may be down to some complaints about dirt and offering both clean and dirty versions would be impractical.
I am of the same view as the previous posters here. I rarely do more than take a quick look at airport interiors and share the same thoughts about runways and taxiways looking a bit too clean. I hope the devs take note and perhaps give some consideration to this.
A few oil stains and tyre marks would not go a miss along with perhaps a few weeds growing through the cracks in the concrete.
Please add dedicated travel paths for vehicular traffic so that we don’t have to honk our horn at the idiot in the fuel truck that parked in the middle of the taxiway to have a smoke.
Are you talking more so in the official Marketplace? It’s kind of like how so many airplanes don’t have interior photos and then have two dozen low resolution livery photos.
I probably put about 100+ hours on this runway (NASA Shuttle Landing Facility) since the SDK isn’t capable of rendering this runway as it is in real life. It’s not very beautiful though.
The SDK doesn’t easily support this and fights back quite hard. For instance, oil stains can be added to parking but only with specific painting lines. Runways also seem to block loading custom textures.
It would be nice to have a dirt paint brush and go at it like Photoshop.
Definitely something some of the larger developers could probably do but it’s a big undertaking.
I know, I’ve about pounded my head into a wall trying various things. I think it’s really the limitations in the SDK that’s the root cause for the sim being so sterile.
Air strips that don’t have a lot of heavy traffic don’t usually have tire gum everywhere. So I’ll pull that out but then get left with something too clean.
Another issue is runway surfaces and paint are global to the sim. So it’s difficult to customize individual runways if it’s not available in the base SDK.
I’ve been wanting to get better with making custom projected meshs.
Try Christopher’s channel - he got me using projected meshes pretty fast - excellent for custom ground markings.
Adding weathering is certainly possible, (Global Textures payware does this to some extent )but yes the way the draw order relationship works between runways, aprons and projected meshes isn’t straightforward.
Sometime the solution is to make the runway object invisible then draw your own on top as a mesh which you can then layer other meshes on such as marks etc.
That’s what I did on the runway shown above, minus the projected meshes. And oh by, it’s over 3 miles long, lol! I just have custom apron textures in there now but it’s probably a blend of about 8 different ones.
Another thing I’ve been struggling with are the high contrast yellow taxi lines over the black lines. I’ve seen what some other developers have done but those tend to have their own issues too.
Have you tried the method of editing the base DDR in Photoshop? Works very well with the paintedline object as an alternative material. That channel I linked has a great tutorial on it.
Pristine runway and taxiway with bold and clean paints are a sign of a well-maintained airport. It means the cleaning and maintenance crew are working really hard to keep the airport spotless.
I agree. Everything looks too sterile and clean in the game.
The base airports surfaces look like marble tiled hotel floors. No touchdown tire marks on the runway either. In fact at certain times of the day the taxiway and runways look like a mirror is on them.
Think its time to search for some dirty airport textures! (and planes)
Yeah, I’m not talking scenes from the musical ‘Oliver’, just a few weeds, dirt streaks from rain, cracks in concrete, repair patches etc. Just to give it that lived in feel.
).
I think it’s really the limitations in the SDK that’s the root cause for the sim being so sterile.
