gypsymoth wrote on Mar 4^th, 2010 at 4:38am:


When you speak of "grass" are you referring to the color/texture of the ground on the property of a default airport?

Or are you referring to a specific airport which has been enhanced with a new afcad and has some "grass" areas which look odd to you?

If the latter, there are only a few grass options in afcad and none of them look very real. 

If the former, you would likely need to use a program such as SBuilder and create a whole new background polygon using a different texture.

More details would help.  If you are speaking of a specific afcad you have downloaded and installed, a link to it would also help.

gypsymoth wrote on Mar 4^th, 2010 at 7:42am:



SBuilder could be used but it has a rather large "learning curve".

There is another approach ypu might want to consider and you can use Afcad for this.

1. Find a bmp file of a grass texture you think you can live with.

2. Backup the original taxi_planks.bmp which in is your main texture folder.

3. Place that new grass.bmp you found in that folder and rename it as taxi_planks.bmp.

You probably should resize the bmp to it is approx 256 x 256 and also use the free DXTBMP utility to convert it to DXT1 format with 7 layers of mipmaps. (that is what the original one has I believe)

4. In Afcad, open your new airport and draw polygons in the areas where you want the grass to be displayed. Right click on the edge of the polygon and select properties and change the texture to Planks.

The original Planks texture is almost never used so it is doubtful that changing it to your special grass would cause problems eleswhere.

This concept has been done several times by other authors - they relaced a little used default texture with a bmp of a parking lot with cars.  That allowed folks like you and me to draw a polygon at an airport and fill it as if it was a parking lot.

Kind of "sneaky" but it does work.

Hope this idea is useful.

Hi Opa - I'm going to email you.   I'm just getting round to your tip but problems.....!   This does include my non-expertise!!      

David, you've come up with some great tips in your time, but this one goes to the top of the list!
The AFCAD textures have been begging for an update for years.
Why on earth is this not the subject of a whole industry?
I assume one could work your way through the entire texture folder, fixing the bmp's with updated textures.
Here's one I got by slightly tweaking one of the freeware grass textures - that helicopter is sitting on an AFCAD grass surface!

Now I've spent a bit of time looking through the FS texture folder.
I was hoping to identify the various grass and other textures used by AFCAD, and mess with them.
But not much success I'm afraid.
There are things called grass.r8 and so on, but editing them doesn't seem to show up.
Do I have the wrong files, or are these legacy files which can't be altered?
I'd love to be able to match up all the AFCAD texture possibles with their editable filenames.

Thank you David,
I'm a bit embarrassed that I didn't manage to think of that!
Interestingly, there are 24 AFCAD texture options, but only 23 taxi_ files.
Can't wait to see what "Unknown3" is
It shouldn't be an issue; I'm going to start by creating a decent set of grass textures for the 5 grass files, no matter what anyone used for their AFCAD, it's still going to be grass, and better than the default (I sincerely hope)

AFAIK Unknown is displayed as Cement in FS9, and Transparent in FSX.  Unknown2 and Unknown3 are AFCAD-only codes (not allowed by BGLComp), and are displayed as Cement in FS9.

BTW this is different from the Unknown taxiway surface, which displays as Concrete in FS9, but does not have a smooth surface (bumpy).

Hope this helps,