Surface Base Earth Base Airport Addons for Orbiter 2016?

[Thunder Chicken]

I'm looking to populate Earth, particularly Europe and North America, with bases. Are there any base add-ons compatible with Orbiter 2016 that installs a lot of real airports in these regions? Basically just something with nearly correct runways at minimum would be fine.

 

[misha.physics]

You mean one addon which includes many airports, yes? Personally I haven't seen this. Nevertheless maybe this may interest you although it seems to be for Orbiter 2010.

By the way these days I'm going to make two regions (with surface tiles and runways) in Europe: Lviv and Kyiv.

 

[JMW]

I'm looking to populate Earth, particularly Europe and North America, with bases. Are there any base add-ons compatible with Orbiter 2016 that installs a lot of real airports in these regions? Basically just something with nearly correct runways at minimum would be fine.

This installs a thousand or so......

 

[Thunder Chicken]

This installs a thousand or so......

That looks promising. Just adding the bases and the add-on Earth.cfg seems to load the bases, but the Earth terrain in Orbiter 2016 disappears. I think that add-on was from when Earth was a mathematical billiard ball and I am not sure how it might play nice with terrain. Was sort of hoping to tool around in the Alps in my Mirage model and actually land in Locarno or something.

 

[nbcfrosty]

This installs a thousand or so......

I think it's more like 10, 000, not 1000. I converted these to Orbiter 2016 format but there seems to be a bug in Orbiter 2016 causing a crash when attempting to load all the runways. Maybe it's a bug in my code that does the translation. Works fine in OpenOrbiter though.

 

[Thunder Chicken]

I think it's more like 10, 000, not 1000. I converted these to Orbiter 2016 format but there seems to be a bug in Orbiter 2016 causing a crash when attempting to load all the runways. Maybe it's a bug in my code that does the translation. Works fine in OpenOrbiter though.

View attachment 34739

How exactly did you convert these bases to Orbiter 2016 format? Are they actually usable runways on the terrain, or just the markers?

I saw that there was a thread started back in 2019 to try to make local flat areas in Orbiter 2016 to allow simple bases and runways to be located, but I don't know if anything came from that. It seems that the old 2010 base definition method doesn't play nice with terrain without a lot of base-by-base customization.

 

[nbcfrosty]

How exactly did you convert these bases to Orbiter 2016 format? Are they actually usable runways on the terrain, or just the markers?

I saw that there was a thread started back in 2019 to try to make local flat areas in Orbiter 2016 to allow simple bases and runways to be located, but I don't know if anything came from that. It seems that the old 2010 base definition method doesn't play nice with terrain without a lot of base-by-base customization.

I wrote a little script to do the conversion. I will release the altered cfg files shortly. I removed everything except for the runway. Used haversine distance to assign available VOR's to the runways. This doesn't require any flattening I guess by virtue of the terrain being flat around runways. I can trivially also generate the flt files needed to do the flattening, but not sure if flt files impact performance. Will have to do some testing. So far in testing runways seem to be flat enough to take off from without any flattening. I am sure there will be exceptions!

This increases loading time significantly! I have a pretty bad cpu, so that's something to keep in mind. But loading all 10k runways takes me a good 1-3 minutes (haven't timed precisely). And loading all of them at once seems to just crash Orbiter 2016 due to what appears to be a memory leak. Loading 500 or so runways causes an assertion failure that you can ignore twice to continue. Chances are slim of this working in Orbiter 2016.

 

[misha.physics]

Spoiler: What a familiar place :)

 

[nbcfrosty]

This is what Map MFD looks like.... Trying to select airport by spaceport crashes Orbiter


Map MFD 2 works better: https://orbiter-forum.com/resources/extended-map-mfd.749/
But in track mode the MFD tanks the FPS. Very nice to be able to see all the runways on the MFD but destroys the FPS.

Going to fov 10 crashes Orbiter. Also no go on the 10k flt files, also causes CTD.
Boy, Orbiter really does not like 10k base files.

 

[LordCroussette]

Holy cartography, Batman! That's a lot of markers!

 

[nbcfrosty]

Air AC is awesome, a lot of airports have runways with similar layout to real life.






I have used agglomerative clustering to select 1000 runways from list of 10k. Now load time is manageable.
I have also used the open elevation API to generate flt files for these bases. I am going to tweak a bit more,
perhaps add a couple hundred special "scenic" runways.

 

[misha.physics]

View attachment 34783

Is that a real life image and not Orbiter texures? What a map is this?

 

[nbcfrosty]

Is that a real life image and not Orbiter texures? What a map is this?

Real life image. The orbiter image is the corresponding runway in orbiter.