active NCA : poor rendering of salt flats in Modoc Cy

[dominique]

Hi team

 

This is what I see above Eagleville Ca in NCA. The salt flat edges are not blended and in places crudely drawn. The lakes are also weird . Have I a problem with my terrain.cfg   or something ?

 

 

 

 

[Richard Lincoln]

Hello Dominique,

 

                           That is what I would think initially and will not hurt to try , please report back if it does or does not look better after this

 

[dominique]

Hi Richard

 

before I do that, could you tell me what you see on your side ? 

[Richard Lincoln]

Hi Dominique,

 

                      Well I flicked through all seasons when I got home and I am seeing the same, I will look into this a little further and get back to you. It does seem there is a fault and would very much doughbt this would slip through. Back soon.

[dominique]

1 hour ago, Richard Lincoln said:

Hi Dominique,

 

                      Well I flicked through all seasons when I got home and I am seeing the same, I will look into this a little further and get back to you. It does seem there is a fault and would very much doughbt this would slip through. Back soon.

Ok thanks. 

 

In the meantime, if any other user would check...

 

[FreeBird]

I got the same as you and agree it needs better blending. I flew to a few different spots that have salt flats and they seem to be blended but others not so much. It doesn't look bad when I fly GA planes but I could see Airliners up high not liking it.  Look at Lone Pine this is how I think it should look but I understand to soften all those edges is allot of work and mouse clicks. I think the ones that look good are photo real.  I think they picked and choose where to put the most time into. 

[dominique]

 

Thanks for the confirmation, FreeBird, I appreciate it as we are now three, with Richard, to see the same. That avoids me to reinstall the terrain.cfg, except if we get some further indications from Holger. It looks like a SBuilderX-like polygon just laid on the terrain. Not very nice, a sore point in an otherwise excellent NCA.

 

[Holger Sandmann]

Hi guys,

 

when placing a landscape feature a developer has the choice of either using raster landclass or polygons. The former allows for blending but that blending happens over several hundred yards and is somewhat random (meaning the texture might extend onto nearby slopes). Polygons don't allow for any blending but that also means that the spatial extent of the feature is precisely controlled.

 

Looking at salt flats in Google Earth or Bing one can see that their outer limits tend to be very well defined; no surprise since they are dry lake beds and limited to the flat valley bottoms. Thus, using polygons is the more appropriate placement method here. In fact, those salt flats polygons stem from the US National Hydro Network database.

 

I would agree that photoreal coverage tends to work best for these kinds of features but, as with all FTX Regions, we start with a long wishlist and then pick those features that we consider/hope to be most desired by our users, given our overall budget (I realize that I sound like a politician here  but that really is the way these overall design and project choices work). NCA includes 25 photoreal areas and that's what we had the time and money for.

 

In this particular case the eastern edges of those salt lakes extend beyond the boundary of NCA meaning those odd slivers of water are either default or Vector features, depending what you're using. Both Vector and the default landscape depict those salt flats as lakes -- if you temporarily deactivate the four NCA entries you'll see what I mean -- which isn't realistic at all. Unfortunately, we can't just add an exclude to NCA to remove those water bits because those excludes affect much larger areas. 

 

Cheers, Holger

[dominique]

33 minutes ago, Holger Sandmann said:

  

 

 

Thank you, Holger, for taking the time of a long and interesting answer. So, I don't have to refresh my terrain.cfg, good !

 

As an amateur scenery doodler, I understand well your technical point (the economics, I cannot judge, the more the better for me and this Eagleville spot is not very nice). On a parallel line of thought, I cannot understand why so many brilliant people in this industry (You, Arno, Jon, Allen, etc.) have  found ways to circumvent many FS scenery engine limitations but not yet found a way to blend a SBX polygon as we can do with a small photo-imagery patch  !