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FS2004 Solved: Taxi lines for custom ground polys

pinkjr

pinkjr

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1,201
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us-texas
Hi,

I have created a decent size airport using photoreal tiles that are 1024x1024, and each covers an covers an area of approximately 1000x1000 ft.
I try to draw taxi lines directly into the texture, but they come out crappy because of the low image resolution.

Can I use the new ADE to add the lines to my texture and how? Would the resulting texture be an overlay?
Im pretty good with the previou ADE version (non gp poly featured). Some simple pointers would would help a lot!

Thanks,
David
 
Hi David,

Ground polygons are a method of projecting flat or two dimensional models onto the ground above any other surfaces. You would not be changing your photoreal tiles. The lines you create in the gp poly editor are projected on top of your photoreal tiles as well as any other surface textures. This means landclass, apron or runway textures, and effects that are placed at ground level such as runway or taxiway lights. A ground polygon is the last item to be drawn by the drawing engine. Hope this helps explain gp polys to you.

Ed
 
cool thanks. Now I have to find a way to map ADE to my ground scenery so I can route the taxiway lines. Does ADE have the ability to bring a very large iamge as a background?

Thanks for your reply Ed!
 
There is a practical limit to the size of background images. This is due mainly to the amount of memory used to display an image that covers a large area. Irrespective of the size of the image file, when it gets into ADE the memory it uses is the width of the image on screen in pixels multiplied by the height in pixels multiplied by the number of bytes needed to render the color for a single pixel. What is more the memory for it must be in one chunk. There is a practical limit of 2Gb assigned to an application. OK why am I going into this? Well ADE will take a look at the size of image as it will be displayed and if it does not think it can accomodate it in contiguous memory then it will stop loading it.

So try your image and see if it loads. If it does then great. If not then consider loading smaller sections. ADE has a way to turn off image displays which helps also.
 
Thank you so much. I downloaded ADE 1.60 last night and got to work and I'm impressed on how easy it was to create taxi lines, curves, and other features. Was a bit confused about the gp_line interface panel and what it does, but for the time being I didnt have to mess with that other than selecting the taxi line parameters. Locating the background image was a bit tedius, but none-issue. It is easier to draw a couple of lines directly off of an FS connected session, and then use those as guidelines to place the background image correctly, locate it and size it.
During compilation I saw some messages regarding "gp_line coordinates are outside boundaries and need updating", something to that effect. Then I notice that the gp_line user panel opens up and you only need to hit ok and that fixes it, followed by succesfull scenery compilations.

Overall this is great and will bring my sceneries to another level!

Thanks Jon for such a wonderful update!

BTW, not a single issue to report other than the taxi_line textures could not be found message. No biggie, I created my own from a single_yellow_line over dark background.
 
Thanks but Don (gadgets) deserves the credit for the custom GP function. He wrote it and I just integrated it into ADE :)
 
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