Grass Strip runways need a mow

Hi.

Enjoying the Sim on my old banger of a laptop and will be upgrading soon.

Bit of feedback from me and don’t know if anyone else has this issue, but my local airport is a grass strip. The grass on the runway and taxi ways are the same length and almost the same colour as the grass verges and it all merges into one. Very difficult to navigate around. If they can be adjusted in any future updates, fantastic.

Otherwise, thanks for getting me back into flight simming.

5 Likes

Aah, yes, now I realise what you meant Randal, yes I get that on one of the grass strips near me.

Non controlled APTs grass strips and RWY´s marking not implemented in “offline” generic mode. Hope it will be fixed anytime soon.

Yes, that should be fixed soon - the random little bushes etc. on grass strips…not so nice

Here’s my mowing fix.

Top tip 5.

Mow the lawn.

MSFS\Official\OneStore\asobo-material-lib

layout.json

Take a copy of the original file and store in a safe place.

Scroll down to the GRASS_ALBEDO and GRASS_COMP values

Reduce “size” to desired…

My values
ASO_GRASS01_ALBEDO.TIF.DDS 50000
ASO_Grass01_Albedo.tif.DDS.FLAGS 30
ASO_GRASS01_ALBEDO.TIF.DDS.json 40

ASO_GRASS01_COMP.TIF.DDS 100
ASO_Grass01_COMP.tif.DDS.FLAGS 11
ASO_GRASS01_COMP.TIF.DDS.json 16

Adjust you blade height :smiley:

Now the grass strip is visible from the air as a grass strip should be. Mown shorter than the rest of the field. At least that’s how the grass strips in England are kept. :blush:

4 Likes

Can a Coder at ASOBO give us a clue.

Which parameter in ‘asobo-material-lib’ gets rid of the long grass tufts on the airstrip?

Cheers.

Interesting thanks. Will have a look…

Yeah, I’m trying to create a simple dirt airstrip, but the default “grass” overrides it. It looks terrible when on the ground. I know there’s a way for knocking the grass out since I’ve seen some freeware airports do it, and the asphalt material does it by default. As you can see in this image, the runway looks like what I want in the distance, but within the default grass render range, it blends it in with the surrounding area.

I just want it to be dirt, no grass, this should be relatively simple since other materials do it, even if it’s just a transparent texture.

Fire up that John Deere with the mower deck and get going!

Bumping this thread as it’s almost impossible to spot a grass airstrip from above.

I just wish they’d fix the trees. Many back country strips are unuseable because they have 100ft tall trees right at the end of the runway

1 Like

Yep! Reading the Cessna Skyhawk manual only gives a takeoff Total distance over a 50ft obstacle, not a 100ft one. The trees do seem better now, but they do like growing in and around airfields, and especially just outside the perimeters.

Has anyone figured out a way to prevent grass on runways yet?

Short of getting into the SDK and editing each airfield, no. It’s not just runways, but also beaches, sandbars and some roads. being able to do it by editing is fine, if you have the time and inclination to figure out the tools, but not really a permanent solution for most people, unless you want to have potentially dozens of mods in your Community folder. Any of which would override, and potentially break undocumented fixes made by Asobo in their patches.

But referring to the grass inside Airfield boundaries, then Asobo have a greater chance of getting it fixed - First of all, reduce grass length from the current knee high fronds of grass that sway gracefully in the wind - something I have never seen on an airfield, and the reduction even further on the actual grass runway to show that it is closely cropped and more often than not flattened with a roller. This is assuming the grass strips have been designated correctly in the first instance.

1 Like

Yeah, I’m completely fine with doing it via the developer tools, that’s what I’m actually trying to do, make my own test airfield to get to know the developer mode better. I’ve tried all the different runway types, I’ve used polygons to exclude vegetation, etc… Nothing removed the grass. I’m just trying to figure out which tool makes this happen since it’s been done in other sceneries that I’ve seen. As you can see in my screenshots from the devmode earlier in this thread, the grass causes the airstrips to blend in with the surrounding area.