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Airport walls not showing

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Airport walls not showing

Postby filcobra » Sat Oct 28, 2017 10:12 pm

Hi everyone,

I have FlightGear 2017.3.1 installed on two machines, one with Windows 10 (nVidia GeForce 6600 GT) and the other is a MacOSX Sierra (Intel Iris 6100 graphics).
I'm experiencing the same problem in both machines. So, I'm posting it here and not in the Windows or Mac specific forums.

I'm automatically downloading scenery through TerraSync.

So, the problem is that most airports (the vast majority of them) are downloaded with only their floor and ground tiles being mapped. Their walls or buildings don't appear at all. Please, see this image of London Heathrow:

London Heathrow (EGLL)
Image

Brazil's Guarulhos (SBGR)
Image

These images show planes parked at Gates. So, the airport walls (and fingers) should be in the areas ahead of them. But they're not. They're also not in any place around the planes.

Besides using TerraSync, I've also tried manually downloading and installing the desired scenery tiles. I've also tried to download custom 3rd party-made airports.
All options leave most airports without their walls, as can be seen in the images that I provided.

What am I doing wrong?
Is this a known bug?
Is there some log file or anything else that I could provide in order to help you understand the problem and maybe point me to the right direction?
Are there known workarounds for this issue?
How can I solve this?

Thank you for any replies.
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Re: Airport walls not showing

Postby Thorsten » Sun Oct 29, 2017 6:25 am

I appreciate your confidence in the capabilities of the scenery developers, but:

Airports only have buildings if someone created them and put them there - which is generally a lot of work. Only a minority of airports is developed at all. So it's fairly normal to see an undeveloped airport without any 3d work (the airport layouts can be imported automatically, which is why FG knows there should be a gate - but that doesn't create the 3d artwork).

So unless you know that the particular airport ought to be developed and still you don't see anything, it's no reason for concern.

How can I solve this?


Easiest by creating the airport using a 3d modeling tool of your choice and submitting them to the scenery database for the rest of us to enjoy. Basically that's how nearly all the buildings in FG have been created.

(I think Heathrow is in development but hasn't been submitted yet - at least I've seen some Heathrow screenshots)
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Re: Airport walls not showing

Postby Alant » Sun Oct 29, 2017 9:57 am

I have just done a quick check,

SBGR has no buildings. EGLL has quite a few buildings and looks OK from the runway.

I am not using Terrasync as it takes too long to start FG with it. I use a local copy of the scenery that is kept up to date with terrasync.py. AFAIK the results should b the same.

Alan
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Re: Airport walls not showing

Postby wkitty42 » Sun Oct 29, 2017 5:07 pm

i just loaded at EGLL (parking slot 103) and it takes a few minutes for everything to load after the splash screen goes away... i'm using an external scenery manager (terrasync.py) to keep my scenery updated from the official scenery repository... currently i'm in the UFO so there's no real memory used there...

not all buildings are available at EGLL, yet... since i've made a fix to my jetways.nas script, i can see where the jetways are that should be connected to buildings... some buildings are there but others are not... hopefully they will be one day ;)
"You get more air close to the ground," said Angalo. "I read that in a book. You get lots of air low down, and not much when you go up."
"Why not?" said Gurder.
"Dunno. It's frightened of heights, I guess."
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Re: Airport walls not showing

Postby Alant » Sun Oct 29, 2017 5:52 pm

The problem may be in using built-in terrasync. Here it takes about 15 minutes to check and download everything, and the new scenery may not be visible until the next time that the airfield is visited, or the scenery is reloaded from the debug menu.
terrasync py takes several days to download the whole world scenery , but subsequent updates (unless someone has used osm2city to generate a new region) are less than a minute.
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Re: Airport walls not showing

Postby filcobra » Sun Oct 29, 2017 10:08 pm

Hey, thank you very much for your responses!

Well, I can live with that. Yes, it makes sense... being a community effort, it makes sense that most airports aren't modeled. I was just wondering whether I might be doing something wrong. Thanks again!

But that leaves me with another question. I was ready to post it as a separate thread (and I probably should do it):

In the case of some 3rd party airports that I downloaded, they are modelled. However, more often than not they are offset.
Ok... I was going to ask whether I was doing something wrong again, but probably it's these airports that need some correction. I will try and figure out how to do it into the whole file, instead as going from surface to surface, which would be virtually impossible or pointless, at least. Maybe a modelling application...

Thanks again!
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Re: Airport walls not showing

Postby Alant » Sun Oct 29, 2017 10:43 pm

A simplified answer, which should work for London Heathrow.

Start flightgear at Heathrow.

Make sure that terrasync (scenery download) is running by checking the menu File->Scenery Download. The log and information buttons will show the progress of the scenery update.

Leave flightgear running until the terrasync update is complete. Here this used to take about 15 minutes. Since the forest fires destroyed our telephone line it is much slower here as I have to use a weak and unreliable 3G signal.

Exit and restart flightgear. and the Heathrow scenery should be visible. It is incomplete as not all buildings have been modelled.

Please let us know how you get on.

Alan
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