ANNOUNCEMENT Airport elevation fixes and using AEC - read this first!

[StefanSchaefer]

Hello to all!

 

Since there seems to be a lot of confusion (and many support forum threads) about issues with airport elevations, here's a guide on what AEC is and how you can configure it to prevent these issues.

 

What is AEC?

As written in many previous threads, AEC is an abbreviation for Airport Elevation Corrections. When Microsoft created airport data for FSX they changed some (if not many) of the airport elevations from their real values to values that would better fit their (in some places not very detailed and realistic) terrain mesh. In other words: MS had bad mesh data in some areas (especially South America) and to prevent plateaus from happening, they changed the airport elevation. Since VECTOR is meant to be used with a decent mesh add-on (as well as FTX Global and OpenLC), we took all those faulty airports and correct their elevation so they would better fit into a detailed, realistic mesh. You can read more explainations in higher detail in my post here:

http://www.orbxsystems.com/forum/topic/74942-vector-readme-important-for-better-understanding-what-vector-intends-does-can-do-and-what-it-cant-do/

 

Why are there some issues after installing VECTOR?

The answer is pretty simple: because flight simulator has a bug (maybe it's by design, but it's stupid design nevertheless). Let me clarify on this: normally, the order of your scenery configuration determines which scenery excludes other scenery and which scenery will be displayed with a higher priority than others; place an add-on airport above your default scenery: voila, you can see the add-on airport and the default one is gone. However, there is one exception to this, which is the airport elevation. FSX uses the first airport elevation it finds when scanning the scenery configuration (which it does from lowest to highest priority). In other words, it will always find the default elevation even if you have a corrected airport in a scenery entry with higher priority. This is why we had to place AEC files to the very bottom of the scenery configuration file; by doing this, we can be sure that FSX first finds the corrected elevation and displays the airport accordingly.

 

However, there are some situations where we don't want this to happen - if you have an add-on airport installed that is built upon the default FSX elevation (which might be different to the corrected one we supply with VECTOR), FSX will now first find the corrected airport elevation BGL at the bottom of the scenery library, but will then display the add-on airport (because it has a higher priority than the VECTOR one) in combination with our corrected elevation > this doesn't work and causes many troubles.

 

The only way of dealing with this problem is to deactive the corrected AEC file we provide for all airports you have problems with.

 

How can I fix the issues I encounter?

Since VECTOR 1.15 there is a simple way to do this. With VECTOR comes a configuration tool that allows you to enable / disable layers of VECTOR scenery so you can adjust the number of displayed layers to your requirements. In addition to that, VECTOR Configurator allows you to activate / deactivate airport elevation correction files. There are basically two ways of doing this:

 

MANAGING AECs MANUALLY

 

 

 

The list on the left ("AEC IS ENABLED FOR")  contains ICAO codes of all airports with AEC enabled. To manually deactivate AEC for a specific airport, type its ICAO code in to the list until it is displayed in the list below. Select the ICAO code in the list and click Disable (please note that you can select more than one item from the list by using your SHIFT or CTRL key). The ICAO codes will disappear from the left list and be added to the right list, which contains airport codes for which AEC is currently disabled. To activate AEC you can select the ICAO Code(s) in the right list and click Enable; the ICAO codes will be then moved to the left list again.

 

Important: 1) You have to click Apply! in order to save your changes to your scenery files. If you forget to do that, nothing will change when starting your simulator.

                   2) If the ICAO code your want to disable AEC for is not present, then there is no AEC in place and you must look somewehere else for your problem. 

 

 

MANAGING AECs AUTOMATICALLY

 

 

Since it's very difficult to find out which airports cause problems (and you often find out when completing a flight and trying to land on a problematic airport - not the most satisfying way to end a great flight!), we have introduced an auto-configuration feature. In order to use it, you have to select the simulator for which you want to auto-configure AECs (because the auto-configurator scans installed and activated add-ons, it has to know the simulator; installed sceneries could be different!). After seleting the simulator, by clicking Run Auto-Configuration! the tool will scan the appropriate scenery configuration files for airport add-ons that have a different elevation than our corrected one (these are the ones that cause troubles) and subsequently add all affected ICAO codes to the "AEC disabled" list.

 

Important: You have to click Apply! after running the auto-configurator in order to save your changes to your scenery files. If you forget to do that, nothing will change when starting your simulator. Please also note, that whenever your scenery configuration changes (i.e. airports get added / removed / activated / de-activated) you should run auto-configurator again refresh AEC file states.

 

 

What's that "Profile" feature you have?

VECTOR Configuration Tool has a feature that allows you to load / save profiles of your VECTOR configuration.

 

 

Profiles not only contain the selections you have made to the scenery layers (i.e. road classes you want to have displayed etc) but also AEC configurations! You can therefore create certain AEC configurations, store them (or back them up for fresh installations of your simulator)  and load them at a later time.

 

 

What else is there to say about AEC?

As written previously, AEC was designed to improve the looks of airports that had wrong elevations when shipped with FSX/P3D. This does, however, not mean that there are no plateaus at all. FSX as well as the current version of P3D do not directly support anything other than flat airport boundaries (there are some add-on airports that feature sloped runways, but these require a lot of manual work which is simply not possible for a global product like VECTOR). This means, that if in reality the airport has different elevations at different spots, it will have one fixed elevation in the simulator, even with AEC enabled. This might lead to small plateaus and it seems that there is nothing we can do about it at this stage (let's see what Lockheed Martin comes up with in future versions).

 

Okay, I have done all this but I'm still not happy with the outcome - what can I do?

If you have read and applied the solution above and it still doesn't work, please open a new support thread on this forum and be sure to add the ICAO code of the airport, a screenshot as well as information about add-on scenery you have in the affected area and we will have a look at it. However, 99 % of the problems should be solved by following the above procedure.

 

Happy landings!