First attempt using any SDK, ever, so have patience please!
I’m trying to add an airport into the sim based on this landing strip. There’s a fair amount of undulation to the native strip but when I place a “runway” over it in the sdk it terraforms (flattens) the landscape and creates a lot issues with surrounding objects. I’d like to keep the natural undulations of the airstrip anyway so is there a way to make the “runway” conform to the landscape? So far I’ve messed around with the terraforming options without any luck. Or am I going about this all wrong?
Yes, it would be nice if “Runway” had a snap to ground control.
Unfortunately, because it doesn’t snap to ground, it’s super easy to move a runway up and down if you try dragging. The first thing is, rather than dragging the dot, when dragging a runway, only choose the “square” that is parallel to the ground.
Other than that, the best way I have found around this is to either 1. delete the runway, and recreate it being careful not to move it up and down, and/or 2. with the runway inactive, fly to the point where the runway origin is, and add an object at that point, with snap to ground turned on. Then look at its altitude in the “gizmo”. Make sure your runway has this same altitude. This should minimize the “terraforming” that a runway does if you change its height. In my experience, if the altitude of the origin matches the altitude at its location of the default ground, it’ll do a decent job of “painting” the runway on the ground without too much terraforming.
That’s the limit of my knowledge on it. You can also control the altitude of the runway start and end points as well. This might help on say a sloped runway. Other than that, I imagine there might be other things you can do, but, until it’s in the SDK or someone more knowledgeable pipes in, that’s all I got. Good luck!
Thanks for the suggestions, I ended up getting it to work by just shrinking the runway size down to a tiny 1m x 1m square. At that size the runway doesn’t impact the surrounding terrain features, and I was still able to drag the starting locations to where I needed them. Not ideal but it works.
Thats one way of doing it.
My problem is that on the airport im working on (KMDW Chicago Midway), all the runways going east to west are 10 feet lower on the east side.
When i load my runway in the scenery editor the first time, my plane drops about 6 feet down! ( i guess because of the flattening of the airport). I have been trying to find an Altitude button/ setting so i can set my airport at a certain altitude above Mean Sea Level.
Or at least set the runways so they are at a certain level with the slope like IRL .