Can change in water level be fixed?

[jgarnold]

I have noticed in a few places there is a change in water level along a straight line. In the days of FSX I would think that it was due to different altitudes in adjoining 'tiles',
Can this be corrected using either SDK or ADE.
Here is an image of Green Lake near Whistler with arrows pointing to change in water level. I have also noticed this in Vancouver Harbor.

 

[mamu]

I have already seen the issue near a scenery i was working on

Try with some terraforming (polygon) with a bit of falloff and see if you are able to solve (at least the gap Will move away from the docks)

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[=rk=]

Those fractures and divisions are everywhere in default scenery. Since they are not visible from flying altitudes and clearly are not airports, Asobo has focused elsewhere. Any simple scenery adjustments, which you already do well, will allow the area to conform to your preferences.

 

[jgarnold]

Thanks mamu and Rick. I can understand that usually a small change of altitude where 'plates' connect cannot be seen from flying altitudes but they sure mess up a takeoff on water.
I cannot remember seeing this at Green Lake before SU7 so maybe they also updated scenery.

I searched for "terraforming polygons" and also "falloff" and got some 'hits' the first one from a chap trying to fix ground scenery (maybe his own airport) and he was using SDK.
As my water airport is created using I added a polygon but although I did see a 'falloff distance' parameter I did not see 'terraforming' in the list of parameters. Maye 'flatten' and "is water Y/N"?
John

 

[jgarnold]

Ok I have a screen image from ADE showing where the change in water altitude is and the edge approximately (shown with the red line) which I can use to add a terraforming polygon BUT how do I find what altitude to set it at? The altitude shown in the C172 instrument panel is around 2180 but what would be the true altitude to set the polygon to.

 

[rhumbaflappy]

 

[jgarnold]

So easy. Thanks Dick. I wasn't sure to use the 'above ellipisoid' or 'above geoid' value but I found that the water runway I had created had an altitude which was 630 not either 627 or 642 (as displayed in dev mode) and it worked after an adjustment - being a lake I assumed the water type was also lake but apparently it is ocean which is a bit odd. Is there a way to find the water type without the trial and error method?

I used altitude 630 and falloff of 1 (metre) It looks ok.

 

[rhumbaflappy]

I thought the water type was Lake. If you make a water exclusion, Lake works. Maybe you found another bug in the sim.

 

[jgarnold]

Well I set it to lake at first and it looked terrible and nothing like the surrounding water so I changed it to ocean and then it looked correct.

Actually I now see that setting the polygon to lake results in 'land' (see below) as there are no waves and my floatplane will not move when power is applied. How can that be? I will try water exclusion.
[added later]
I now set the polygon to 'is water FALSE' (I had it set to True), 'is Water Exclusion TRUE' (I had it set to FALSE' and 'Water Type LAKE'
I don't quite understand what the first two parameters are exactly for and what they do and that is why I had them initially set the opposite way which seemed IMHLB the way to go.

Do you only have to create a small polygon to intersect with the 'edge' or (as I did) enclose the whole 'edge'?

 

[jgarnold]

Well the polygon is not having any effect of the different water levels.
I have the altitude set to 633 metres, flatten false (should it be set to true?), is water set to false, is water exclusion set to true.
Reading mamus reply earlier I searched for terraforming on Youtube and found one tutorial which I almost understood but then had a look at the ADE user guide which states that terraforming currently is not handled so I need to do this with SDK I guess?

 

[jgarnold]

I am now attempting to fix this problem of the surface of Green Lake at two different levels (see above image) which causes a (aircraft) crash when attempting to take off or land across it and have 'turned' to SDK (I had hoped to fix it using ADE which I could not get to work).
Is the only method of fixing it using a Terraforming (type) polygon? I am now working my way through trying to do this in SDK using a great video tutorial by mamu.
I cannot find a suitable Youtube tutorial on terraforming other than to create hills or depressions/holes in the ground and so not sure.
I have created a polygon in SDK around the change of surface level of the lake but not sure if this is the correct way to go and if I use terraforming to adjust the height won't it adjust the height on both sides of the line where the change of surface level is?

Any assistance would be appreciated.

 

[mamu]

Hi John, thanks for your kind words, coud be this one?

Here i'm moving the polygon up and down, in your case maybe Just the terraforming polygon could me enough, Just moving a Little bit down could do the trick.and of course a fair amount of falloff
My bet Is that drawing the polygon following the Lake shores, than shrinking/scaling that down Just a touch can help flattening the area

Will try as well

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[jgarnold]

That explains a lot for me and thanks. I have trouble though trying to make the polygon a type terraforming (or any other type either). When I select/click on anything in the Properties window it goes blank and I have to select the (drawn) polygon again. I must have missed something important in your videos.

 

[mamu]

This Is pretty odd, but not new to me, the Window rendering in the project/scenery editor Is awful..

Can you try to do that in fullscreen (al+enter Key)

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[jgarnold]

I changed the resolution from 2560 to 1200. Here is the image at 2560 (also attached as an image file)

 

[mamu]

Actually i'm working with native monitor resolution equals to Sim rendering resolution and render scale 100% (1920*1080)
in this way Window rendering in the sdk works fine (on mine side)


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[jgarnold]

Not sure if the latest update to SDK has resulted in the work flow OR I have done something wrong but in 2 of your tutorials after you enter the project name, press the Enter key then click on CREATE NEW PROJECT it shows a window with heading Add Project where you enter TITLE, CREATOR and COMPANY NAME.

When I click on CREATE NEW PROJECT it displays a different window where I select CUSTOM then enter Display name (where you enter the name), Package Name (you enter something here) and then select Content Type (I select Scenery). Is that the work flow now or did I do something wrong?
I have just changed the text above.

 

[Thalixte]

The technique that i use now is to create a rectangle with a ramp. It smoothes the changes in water elevation. I use to create a rectangle from the middle of the water area (lake or gulf), and extend this rectangle to the shore. The elevation near the shore is the one i want to use (higher than the MSFS default altitude), and the elevation in the opposite

An illustration of this technique with my last scenery (https://flightsim.to/file/24131/saint-malo-dinard):

 

[mamu]

Latest workflow(su7) for project and package creation Is the One described here

I can't remember any changes from su6/su5

The wizards are for AssetGroup creation:

In latest tutorial i used Airport wizard , but you can use Custom, since your is a Scenery ( just for a polygon.)

By looking at your screenshot you are doing well, the inability to click on the properties window Is something related to the windows drawing routine, and It Is obviously bugged,

You can even try by resettig the sdk to Default state or docking some of the Windows like in my setup and closing some others



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[rhumbaflappy]

Here's a package that changes all the elevation of the airport and the lake to 630.25 meters. I chose that height after roaming around with the DevMode and the position window. Changing the airport elevations is pretty straight-forward. Changing the water level is a bit more tricky. I used QGIS to grab the OSM polygon. (That might be a study course in itself.) I then set the Z (height) as 630.25 which gives all the vertices a height. The DBF file associated with the shapefile needs to be changed to what the sim wants and also the XML file of the polygon. I made a temporary poly in the DevMode and made it terraforming and just pushed the poly down and saved, That gave me the proper info for the DBF and XML files. You can probably just rename those temp DBF and XML files as the name of your QGIS saved poly, and it should work.

The AMSL minus the AGL is the actual ground height (with some difference caused by the wave action).

You should be able to draw the polygon within DevMode and then make it terraforming, and then just push the height down in sim, avoiding QGIS entirely, but I was too lazy to draw the outline of the poly, and wanted to set the Z height exactly.