Micro-elevation fun

[Zach121k]

I'm loving the topography but it's making my rockets launch sideways at times... any way we can modify the elevation at launchpads to be flat?

 

[martins]

I'm loving the topography but it's making my rockets launch sideways at times... any way we can modify the elevation at launchpads to be flat?

You can do it with tileedit.

 

[Zach121k]

You can do it with tileedit.

Will that be fixed though? Because custom scenery also seems to be an affected thing.


or maybe a way to disable topography?

 

[4throck]

An automated approach would be better.

For example, take the pad's altitude and size, and use it to flatten the terrain it is upon, and bring it to that altitude.
Basically, it's the opposite of what happens now.

This would allow us to define silos or elevated pads, and is compatible with both the new terrains and old bases (giving a pad new altitude it's quite trivial).

Here's an ugly example for FlightSim, but very illustrative of my suggestion ;-) :

Compare with a real launchpad and notice that it's not that different ;-):

(the spacecraft does go up a "ramp")

Runways could work the same way.

 

[Zach121k]

An automated approach would be better.

For example, take the pad's altitude and size, and use it to flatten the terrain it is upon, and bring it to that altitude.
Basically, it's the opposite of what happens now.

This would allow us to define silos or elevated pads, and is compatible with both the new terrains and old bases (giving a pad new altitude it's quite trivial).

Here's an ugly example for FlightSim, but very illustrative of my suggestion ;-) :

Compare with a real launchpad and notice that it's not that different ;-):

(the spacecraft does go up a "ramp")

Runways could work the same way.

Something similar to Apple Maps?

 

[jarmonik]

We could have a terrain editor integrated in D3D9 that would allow to raise, lower and flatten terrain in real time by using some kind of brushes. It would still require a surface base author/creator to do the flattening or in the worst case the end user.

One problem is how to distribute the modified terrain. One possibility is to zip the elevation files in a package. An other option would be recording the brush strokes into a patch file which would be then applied/baked to the elevation files in end user computer. That approach would require a patch utility of some sort.

Also, like stated a few posts above, automated flattening of terrain around surface bases could be also done unless a surface base specifies DO_NOT_FLATTEN flag. That approach would also require a patch utility to scan surface bases, create a bounding sphere for a base and flatten terrain inside the sphere and then write the modified elevation files on a hard-drive.

Just a few thoughts/ideas.

 

[4throck]

Flattening the entire base works (Orulex worked like that), and would be a good start.

But better still, would be to control the flattening of each pad or runway. These are the places where you actually land/lift off.
Some minor terrain editing for sloped areas (like on the KSC example above) would be handy of course, but can be handled in a simple way via pad flattening with a large interpolation radius.

For the rest I think that 3D meshes that built up on the terrain will work better.