Probably not – it’s broken more often than it works. I need to find something better. You can of course use GeoTIFFs or any local imagery as a background.

I’ve checked the forum and msgs but can’t find any reference to it not working. Just curious.

AFAIR, some article mentions that the boundary would be filled in with “airport grass”.

It might also make sense to just add an optional visual demarcation effect like a fence.

Anyway, I’d be far more interested in a relatively easy way to filter/flatten terrain for an airport. I’ve been looking at EDRZ (ZQW) which is right around the corner, and I’d like to play around with it, but the terrain just doesn’t allow it. You mentioned in some other post that you had basic functionality for that kind of auto-smoothing.

I’d love a tool that receives an apt.dat file, possibly a list of airport codes, and which then spits out processed terrain tiles based on the boundary and the runways (potentially keeping runway terrain intact in the process, that seems to be fine). That would, in my opinion, vastly lower the threshhold for people to churn out credible regional airports, and maybe even give rise to some functional autogen tools.

The boundary is _not_ a visual effect! I think this is explained in more detail in past blog articles …

I need to doc lots of things!

Thanks, I’ll play with pols.
There is another issue. Some community guys tried to find LIGHT_PARAM description to direct custom light sources, but nothing more than guesswork as a result (so am I). Could you please post somewhere LIGHT_PARAM parameters description (maybe in the “File Format Specifications” section)?

This is definitely NOT going to happen! But here is what you can do: use a custom .pol or obj file!

In other words, the goal was _never_ to make the apt.dat file extensible or some kind of modeling file…apt.dat is not at all a modeling format and it would be a true nightmarish disaster to try to allow textures. (Think of it: once we need textures then perhaps ATTRibutes, UV coordinates, and before we know it, every aspect of OBJs is in apt.dat too.)

But what we have done is made sure that _every_ trick of the apt.dat file can be done in an overlay, and WED can edit those overlays! So when you are ready for a more advanced look, you can simply move over from the “pre-made” primitives of the apt.dat file to the “lego bricks” of an overlay.

And in X-Plane 10, normal maps are available in _every_ art asset type, including draped .pol files and OBJs.

I may have been a little hard on 10.04 beta 5 I was running with no Clouds and HDR on but after updating my FPS dropped severely . Im not to sure why but after I turned off HDR and cut the visibility back to about 16 miles . I am now able to run an average of 30fps with thick cirrus clouds and thats with turning up a couple of settings .

Larry