Fisrt congratulation for the condor 2 airport new design, it works very well and it is (in some how) easy to do for people mastering Wings3d, (except for UV mapping).
I created a Fayence Airport in a "coming next" Provence-Oisans-MtBlanc scenery for the condor simulator of the Fayence glider club and it is VERY realistic when coming very close to the ground (using asphalt and grass effect ). However, the mid distance approach is still relying on the scenery tile resolution. In order to have realistic airport view, I used a dds tile of the landscape at 4 time the resolution compared to the overall scenery, but loading more than 40 Mo. However even at this scale of tile, the approach view is not very sharp for the trainees of the gliding club simulator.
Now I am coming with a suggestion. In order to have realistic airport view in the approach phase (Base and final) , I tried to create a ground surface in the AirportO.C3D, It is being displayed well with very high resolution, it is possible to land on it, but as soon as the wing touch the ground it breaks
It is also impossible to take off because the wing touching the ground breaks the glider at the time of the entry in the scenery...If Condor team could make available an airport photo-object as an option in the AirportG.c3d, called for example "Photorealist". This tile could be made as a 5th category of objet in addition to the grass, grasspaint, asphalt and asphaltpaint category.
I made a try as part of the grass object as a textured object, but it stays hiden by the grass effect at close distance, and could not be seen clearly from larger distance because of the degressive Alpha channel of the grass effect with the distance.
So in short, the Photorealist object should be a ground object with photo realistic texture like the layer of the grass object, but without the grass effect.
I do not know how difficult it is to make it happen, but it could save a lot of time to scenery makers when grass effect and asphalt effect is not desired, and load much less in the Condor scenery than increasing the full scenery tile for just having a good detailed photo realism effect within the airport area.
I am also waiting for the OcculusVR release because as I told you earlier this year the French Federation of Gliding (FFVP) is developing a low cost training simulator for French clubs (Lab Planeur project) based on the OcculusVR …. Many thanks to the Condor team to have put that in high priority level of development !
