Hello guys!
As a new X-Plane user I was really surprized when I connected to Vatsim for the first time and saw other aircraft floating 5 meters above the ground or buried so deep I could only see a tip of their tail sticking above the surface. We all know this is a problem coming from the fact that people use different terrain meshes and different simulators. Sometimes it's better and sometimes it's worse, depending on the mesh quality of FSX/P3D. This is also a limitation of XSquawkbox, as it's not using any 'on the ground' flag (yet). So I would like to propose a temporary solution, until an update for XSX comes out (it's pending for almost a year now).
I have written a simple wrapper for main X-Planes drawing functions, that would act in the middle of these functions and XSX. What it does is it intercepts all plane drawing functions and modifies plane's elevation so that it's snapped to the ground. You can see some examples below. Now, because there is no 'on ground' flag I had to come up with something else - so the algorithm is using a speed constraint, to determine if aircraft is on the ground (< 50kt in current implementation). Now, this is only a temporary fix that is to be replaced by working solution inside XSX itself, so I think we can live with that.
I am currently looking for someone to help me test the fix. I am a 64bit Windows user myself, so I am mainly looking for Mac/Linux users but all are welcome. Cheers!
Before and after:
