Tony Wroblewski

We are working on Alcatraz: There are actually quite a lot of new POIs here created in higher detail.. We're still working on getting it working with the terrain correctly.

Yes, believe it or not, it's real.. When I went to photograph the airport it was quite a surprising site. The runway is closed most of the time and you need special permission to land there.

What @Gulfstreamtwosaid above

We are working on a new model for Alcatraz (the entire island), so expect that in a future update.

As mentioned above, many sceneries include the plugin in their own installation to add the cars, it's a common thing with bridges. However, the plugin only works over a small radius per scenery package, so we could only add traffic to one bridge in all of North California, and to add more we'd need to split it up to many smaller packages. If the goal of the scenery was only a San Francisco cityscape, then it would make sense to add it, otherwise the logistics behind adding large numbers of separate packages to just add cars to bridges is just too difficult. I can't remember what exactly the radius was, but it was something like 10km. So you're limited to that area per package. The other way I mentioned presumes the default bridge in X-Plane is correct, and then somebody will model around that. This is very difficult to do correctly as users have different meshes etc.. In our case, the default road bridges were not correct and wouldn't fit the model (wrong width, lanes, etc) I'll look in to the possibility of adding it to both San Fran bridges

Our bridges have never had traffic flowing over them, to do that would require the groundtraffic plugin which is limited to small areas. Basically, for every bridge we would want to add traffic to, we'd have to create a standalone scenery for it with a plugin. X-Plane's road traffic doesn't care if a model is hard or soft, the cars won't drive over it. You would need to model the bridge exactly around the default X-Plane roads for that to work. My only guess in this situation is that you were using a third-party addon or airport that added it, possibly something from MisterX? As for Alcatraz, I agree the model isn't great and is basic, let me discuss this internally first and see if we can sort something out.

I'm currently trying to work this one out. Looking at Fizelle's shots, his colours are much greener/yellower and darker than mine are. So I'm not sure what's going on. Yes, there are colour differences on various sources as can clearly be seen if you check Google or Bing, but nothing as dramatic as the colour changes shown in his shots. The original source imagery as well matches the colours I'm seeing in the sim and they're not as green/yellow as they are in his shots. The colours I'm seeing match better the real-life shots he has taken from the ground. As for Bing, I suspect what they do is colour balance aerial imagery to higher level satelite imagery. You can see this in MFS, especially in places like the UK where everything is a very darkish green colour that comes from the satellite imagery colours and not the aerial.. I think this is also why places like Lanzarote look quite green in MFS as well, since their satellite imagery is actually quite greenish

Let's move this discussion to your support topic...

Hmm.... this looks to me like FlyX Fuertaventura has flattening enabled on the airport which would cause something like this. I'm afraid I can't confirm as I don't have this product. Did this product include its own mesh?

I'm sorry, but I don't understand this... It's aerial imagery, hence the island looked like this at some point when the imagery was taken. Colours can depend on time of the year, weather conditions etc... but a plane flew over this island, took photos and this is what you're seeing in the sim, so Lanzarote looked like this at some point when the photos were taken. Same can be said about Bing imagery, google imagery, etc... at some point it was reality.

Some of them have been tweaked to be compatible, e.g. by removing trees or adding/removing exclusions to fit in with the scenery.

It's not green, i.e. looks good to me and as it should be. 60cm is high resolution already, if you go down to 30cm all you will get is a scenery that is 4 times the size that looks the same and video cards running out of RAM because nobody can run it smoothly. The increase in size and disk-space requirements wouldn't be worth it and X-Plane will simply make everything blurry if you force in too much. Also, bare in mind this has a high resolution mesh as well that really brings out every detail in the landscape.

This is 60cm Approx 30gb

I've not heard back from Aerosoft so I'm unable able to fix a third-party airport, so my hands are tied there. The issue with that airport was that it included its own custom ortho tile and mesh changes that won't work with TrueEarth's The conflict of buildings at JustSim's LEPA or the default is likely not from the Orbx TE Airport folder, but is because the airport itself does not have the correct exclusions on it to block out the buildings below. This is not something I can fix in TrueEarth and it would need resolving in the third-party scenery itself. I've taken the default airport and added facade exclusions that it was missing and attached it below: a_LEPA.zip Unzip this and place it in your Custom Scenery folder. Make sure it is above all the TrueEarth folders (basically right at the top of the file). It may also work with Justsim's LEPA, as long as JustSim's LEPA is installed above this, this one should correctly block out the facades (but not having Justsim's scenery I'm unable to test it)

We're checking over this.. There was indeed an update to the mesh in GB Central to support this airport so we're investigating how this happened

Once I get permission from Aerosoft I'll see if I can distribute a modified DSF file to add exclusions and fix the ortho issue

@benweston Technically you could delete the orthos yourself from the package using WED (https://developer.x-plane.com/tools/worldeditor/) since it seems the package provides the .WED file with it. You can open up the airport in WED, select the orthos folder and delete it. But you'd lose the orthos completely then. The best bet as I posted above is for us to work with Aerosoft to get a solution. If Aerosoft give me permission then I can distribute a fix here.

Sounds like it's missing exclusions and it's not something I can fix without the help of Aerosoft because I'm not allowed to modify their airport packages. I'll get in touch with them to see what we can do.

You should disable the ortho package for any 3rd party airports you install, and normally they'll be seperate packages anyway. As for scenery order, make sure the 3rd party airport is above our airport package so that you get their airport and not the default one.

Yes they will work the same no matter where you buy MFS from.

Yes to both of those

Yep, certainly will be

I don't think you'll have anything to worry about... Also, plenty of videos out there now showing users flying over densely populated areas

Hi Sergio. There is an update on the way that will add helipads to lots of the downtown buildings and to fix some more problems, so the update should please a lot of helicopter pilots who were looking to do this type of flying.