Problem Manhattan is floating

[nbcfrosty]

Hey all. I generated a Manhattan.cfg using openmaps. I am not sure if I am making a mistake. It's causing a ton of glitches. From air buildings look as if they are floating off ground but it's really their shadow making it look like that. Very bizzare bugs. I have attached the cfg.

 

[misha.physics]

Nice buildings! I tried the base and got the same behavior with shadows.

I suppose Orbiter has some issuses with object shadows when surface elevation is used. I mentioned something here:

Thread 'Different object shadows behavior'

Jun 15, 2024

I thought to post it in the D3D9 Client thread, but decided to create a new thread about shadows.
I'm not sure, maybe this was always, but I'm noticing the object shadows problems both in Orbiter 2016 and OpenOrbiter. The shadows aren't exactly on the ground. They can be either above or below the surface. It appears even if the surface elevation is disabled, but the problem is less noticeable. There's the difference between shadows from the pre-defined objects (like BLOCK) and shadows from objects with a custom mesh. I see that the shadows behavior depends on:
1) Default objects or custom...

• misha.physics
• Replies: 7
• Forum: Orbiter Development

You could try to use a FLT file for terrain flattening for the Manhattan area. Disabling surface elevation makes shadows to be displayed correct.

 

[nbcfrosty]

I already tried unfortunately to no avail. My Textures/Earth/Flat has:

Ellipse 0 -73.9712 40.7831 25000

It's a shame because otherwise I was pleased with the effort/reward ratio of using openmaps to generate cities in Orbiter.

 

[misha.physics]

And, please, try to make more bases with buildings like this. I tried to make the same earlier (using some generators), but I didn't reach such the good results as you!

 

[misha.physics]

I already tried unfortunately to no avail. My Textures/Earth/Flat has:

Are you set linear interpolation, not cubic for surface elevation in options? Cubic interpolation is broken somehow, but linear one seems to work correct. I made a test. Shadows of builgins on the flatted area look good. I don't know why, but shadows of the rest buildings dissapeared when I use FLT file:



My "Manhattan.flt" test file contains:

ELLIPSE 500 -73.9712 40.7813 400 1200 -40 10

Try to increase the area.

 

[nbcfrosty]

I am using Build 21 Dec 2024, included D3D9Client. When I set surface elevation to linear (it was on cubic) and set this to my flt file:
ELLIPSE 500 -73.9712 40.7813 400 1200 -40 10

I got this monstrosity:




Right now I have set surface elevation to linear, set self shadow terrain mapping to none. It's extreme but that's the only way I can get it to not look totally buggy

ELLIPSE 0 40.7798 -73.9591 11131 4967 0 15

My FLT file. I am generating tokyo/dubai/paris/hong kong.

 

[misha.physics]

I increased the flatted area. It seems to work good for me. I attach my FLT file, so you can try.



I use these shadow options for a long time:



Building shadows are displayed as you see on the screenshots above.

 

[Buck Rogers]

Hi-res vs default Earth textures?

 

[nbcfrosty]

Thanks Misha! Your flt file and settings work!! Generating more cities split into multiple cfg files to prevent orbiter from crashing.