Bridges in FS2004

On Wed, 30 Jul 2003 henri Arsenault wrote:

Ha that's nothing, the Coronado Bridge in San Diego is not there at all!

I've seen this for myself, now. It's not the only one, either.

Thanks to Henri and all who responded on this point. I hadn't been
keeping tabs on the FS web-based forums so I had no idea this was such a
well-documented problem. I've now looked at a few forums and websites
and it really does seem to be fairly major.

What's curious is that now I've come to examine the Tokyo bridge issue
in detail, and looked at the FS2004 model more closely, the actual
TOPOLOGY of the new model is really OK. In fact it's arguably closer to
the real thing thanks to the increased polygon count. However the
GEOMETRY of it is way off. If this really is a pseudo-autogen model it
looks almost to my untrained eye as though the 'anchor points' (or
whatever the technical term is) have been put in slightly the wrong
place.

I've uploaded some comparison photos to the gallery at the following
website

http://idle.thehueys.com/bridges/Missing-Bridges-2004

and it seems to me that if the bridge towers were placed closer to the
bay coastlines like their real-world counterparts all of the other parts
of the structure would 'stretch' into place. It would look almost spot
on.

Perhaps someone more knowledgeable in FS scenery construction could take
a look and let me know if I'm barking up the wrong tree on this issue.

What interests me further is that we have dozens of bridges reported
missing in action, yet the first page of the gallery link above shows,
among other things, an EXTRA bridge where there shouldn't be one. And
it's a fairly complex model as well, almost as though it's been
specifically designed to go somewhere and ended up somewhere else. Does
anyone recognise it, and perhaps know where it should be in the real
world?

You can perhaps see where I'm headed with this. We have at least one
bridge that's in the right place but the wrong geometry. We have several
reported cases of bridges that aren't where they should be, and at least
one that is where it shouldn't be. All of which suggests to me that many
of the bridge problems could well be down to simple *typos* in the
scenery database. Even issues with bridges in the right place but of the
wrong type could be explained by this, if generic bridge types are
defined by a flag pointing to a generic model and the flag is wrong.

Could this be the case, or am I putting 2 and 2 together and getting 6?
As I said, I know nothing of FS scenery design or implementation. If I'm
way off target, please let me know.

Because the way I see it, if these are simple database errors rather
than complex modelling errors, they should be relatively straightforward
to fix. Certainly more straightforward than defining exclude files and
designing models from scratch which is, I believe, the way scenery
problems are normally tackled.

--
Kev
__________________________________________________ ________________________
"If you won't tell me who told you that, it's not worth the paper it's
written on." Malcolm Rifkind