active Vector Issues in the South Pacific

[Sabretooth78]

Similar to my recent post regarding default bridges on Tarawa/Bonriki, I've found some more Vector oddities in the South Pacific.  I happened to find them on the first two airports I looked at while trying to see if Kazuo Kawamura's nice Tuamoto-X scenery was compatible with ORBX (which sadly it doesn't appear to be directly, at least not without some tweaking to remove the Vector coastlines).  Anyway, I decided to search a little more deeply for these problems, expecting that if I found them on the first 2 I looked at, there may be a whole lot of them.  Fortunately, after an extensive (but not exhaustive) recon of probably 75 or so airports, I did find 4 with major Vector problems (not to mention misplaced runways):

 

NTGA (Anaa) - note the bridges just northwest of the airport, as well as the missing terrain just at the south end of the runway:

 

NTGD (Apataki) - this one is pretty obvious:

 

NTGV (Mataiva) - while it looks like the runway is misplaced, it actually is not (or is at least reasonably close).  Instead, the island is "inverted"; what is island in FSX should be lagoon and the area between the two coastlines should be island:

 

 

And finally, poor Palmyra Atoll (PLPA) is completely mangled:

 

It's too bad this beautiful corner of the world doesn't seem to get the attention it deserves in FSX...

[Doug Sawatzky]

Hi

 

Just an FYI....

 

Vector usually places the coastlines in the correct location (I have been able to confirmed this by comparing with my aircraft streamed into Google Earth), but FSX has placed the airports and light blue water textures in the wrong location, Vector does not relocate runways. You can use ADE to correct this to a point yourself and/or put a request in the below topic.

 

https://orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/111485-calling-all-fsx-misfit-non-fitting-airports/?tab=comments#comment-1002436

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJ1hNXZHvJM

 

From looking at the GE image below of PLPA and comparing it to your above sim screenshot, Vector has actually done a very good job of outlining the coastlines considering it seems to be 99% underwater.

 

 

 

Cheers

 

Doug

[Sabretooth78]

I've relocated a few airports in the past, but with some of these it goes a little deeper than that.  Several of them just have runways in the middle of the ocean, and those can be fixed in a matter of minutes ("couple of clicks" in CAD parlance), but in the case of PLPA and several of the others, you'll notice there is a coastline string with an angular box around the wetted perimeter of the airport background (or in the case of PLPA, where it would be were it not inundated).  Basically, the incorrect locations of the airports has actually been incorporated into the otherwise excellent Vector data.  Therefore if you want to do a true edit you ultimately have to rebuild the island from scratch.  It's not difficult but it is tedious and time consuming - especially not having access to the source files or knowing how much of a hydro poly you're going to block out (and by extension how many islands you'll have to retrace).

 

Just for proof of concept I did take on PLPA tonight and after some relearning of SBuilderX I did get it done in a matter of only a couple hours' work.  I'll probably tackle some of the others soon, and would be happy to share the results if anyone is interested.

 

 

I had done a reef polygon but didn't care for how abrupt it looked, and I'm not going to get into trying to do anything photo-real.  So I rather just did a little work with the water classes to get more of a "default" appearance - and threw in the most prominent beach for good measure.

[Sabretooth78]

I just posted fixes to several of these airports (at least those which I have found to date) in this thread: