All autogenerated airports and many handcrafted ones have the “ground merging” attribute activated by default settings in the ground textures. This results in custom textures being merged with the existing Bing satellite texture and reduces the resulting quality, as seen in the picture below where parked aircraft shapes (existing in the satellite texture) still appear on the asphalt texture. Disabling that attribute (already possible via current SDK when creating any scenery addon), pastes the custom textures on top of satellite ones but without merging them. That would prevent this ugly effect on the asphalt and ground textures in general.
What is that? The silhouette of a parked aircraft satellite photographed from above and removed (well… more or less removed *gg) with the Photoshop autofilling / background removing option?
What purpose has ground merging, to fit custom scenery, for example an airport, better into the fields and existing streets where it is placed?
The MSFS earth is covered first with Bing Imagery, which Blackshark AI can use to create grass (and plants and trees).
On top of that developers can add textures by placing polygons filled with a color or texture. When placing these polygons, developers (including the Asobo developers) can choose to exclude vegetation (bushes and trees), and there is an option called “Ground Merging”, which essentially takes the underlying texture and the polygon texture and “merges” them together, with the upper texture taking priority. Similar to controlling the opacity of that texture, but not exactly the same.
As @geloxo noted, this often allows the outline parked aircraft, and vehicles and whatever that might be in the Bing image, to show through.
I noted grass because that can sometimes show through, although, come to think of it, that might be exclusive to the opacity control of the texture, which developers can also control. You can’t control the level of merging, IOW, percentage of merge. You can control the opacity level. The less opaque a polygon is, the more grass will start to show through from underneath and the more detail you’ll see of the underlying texture.
Do you know any practical case where ground merging turns to be handy for something? I have used the texture oppacity setting in my addons when I wanted any partial merging because I always found the ground merging setting was not looking good at all.
I like to use it when covering grassy areas as it adds some variation to the ground and I believe controls a bit how the 3D grass looks. I use the coloration a lot, too.
Is this the reason why most airport makers seem to elevate the fields a little (to alot in some cases)? to prevent this merging from happening? (i’m just a user, no programmer and i’m curious as i’ve seen other players taxiing above me at some airports.)
Elevation won´t prevent the issue. Textures are applied to the resulting ground surface, whatever its elevation is. The way to fix this is to apply on top of default textures a custom texture (without the “ground merging” activated) or a custom texture with a high oppacity value.
So is this a setting that we can just disable,or something that the developers need to do? Its very frustrating to have the custom airports that I own and have these terrible ground textures all over the place.
It´s an attribute used for textures at world editor (part of the SDK tools) and therefore used by game for rendering ground textures. Only devs would be able to change it globally for the entire set of airports because the attribute is specific for each single ground texture existing in game. Users can still create mods to replace existing ground textures at specific areas with custom textures, for instance to use a different texture or color at one or several airports.
