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[WxTech]

For a number of reasons, I find the usual green hue for the widely used "Ground" airfield texture for runways, taxiways and parking aprons to be very unsatisfactory on maps with a brownish tinge. For green maps, a brown strip has some logical basis by virtue of the fact that the vegetation will be beat down and generally impacted by the traffic. A green strip on brown terrain is unnatural to the point of being ludicrous; it would suggest a deliberate planting of a comparatively lush carpet of grass. 

In the two screen grabs below, the first is of Tacloban airfield on the Philippine map, and the other is one of the fields on the RRR Smolensk map. I have inset a couple of swatches of the texture beside the strips on each map. One swatch is the stock green scheme and the other is my adjusted brown hue. The latter of course is in effect for the map.

[Frankiek]

so finally it should be easier to identify runaways

[WxTech]

Not always. If the tone, or brightness of the runway and underlying terrain texture are not notably different, even if the color is different, they can be pretty hard to differentiate.

From the get go it would have been wise to have created a series of runway plates having different tone and hue. For instance, light and dark variations of, brown, tan, yellowish, green, etc.

[shardana]

yes perfect job!

[WxTech]

So many maps already use the now ancient Ground runway plate set that implementing a process to replace them on some number of those maps with a different plate via substitution in the actors.static could prove a bit daunting. That's why I'm looking for what I hope could be a close enough one-texture-fits-all solution, which would involve no extra work on any existing maps. Certainly not ideal, but anything that lessens the more unnatural combinations of runway and underlying terrain tile color is better than nothing.

Now, if one only flew on 'summer' maps where the landscape--or, more properly, the airfield landscape tile texture--is generally green, then the stock runway texture would be good enough.

When I release this, I'll have the new brown texture given a different name. This means one could go back to stock at any time, such as for the duration of a campaign, just by selecting the original .mat files which would use the stock texture.