Project Marathon

OK people, Project Marathon coming atcha!

Florida Keys Marathon Airport is a small airport, built in 1940 as a Navy airfield. It soon started commercial passenger flights, but only as a "flag stop", ie. a person would wave a big flag at passing planes from West Keys if there were passengers waiting to head to Miami.

As a small base, it's going to be a good starting point for a beginner like me, with lots of small and simple buildings, and a good opportunity for surface tile placement.



Edit 1:
OK, going good! The runway is in place, nicely aligned with real coordinates. There's been a few technical difficulties with model placement:




I'm not sure about surface tiles. I don't like the sharp edges you get with 'em, and this area is covered by Dr Schweiger's level 14 textures which is almost as good as surface tiles anyway.

Edit 2:

I take back what I said about surface tiles! After downloading Surface Tile Calculator and having a crash course in alpha channels and .png files etc. etc., Florida Keys Marathon release 1 is nearing completion...

Edit 3:

Hmmm, so custom meshes with custom textures are starting seem a little beyond me... Ah well, where there's a will, there's a way! Thinking back to Apollo 13, they didn't just give up, they botched together a CO2 filter out of stickey tape. Or something like that.

Anyway, back on topic, maybe high-res surface tiles can save the day. With about 0.5 metres per pixel resolution, I can almost recreate taxiways on the ground from aerial shots, so at least there's a way of doing it! Level 6 tiles seem pretty good. Level 7? I'm not sure if I've got the time...

Release 3 coming soon (ish), maybe Tuesday.

, today IS Tuesday. I knew that.