Spring RTS Engine

Hovering aircraft (in particular) seem to set their hover distance based on nearby terrain height. Can we have added control over this mechanic to allow aircraft to hover closer to the terrain directly underneath them? The speed of adjustment for the hovering height would preferably also be a setting.

cruiseAlt = 10,

"Hover distance based on nearby terrain" makes me think that these aircraft are using smoothmesh.

They are which is why we run into aircraft foing into terrain iirc

aircraft use smoothmesh so that do not foing into terrain.
unless you disable it for that unit: useSmoothMesh=false
http://springrts.com/wiki/Units-UnitDefs#Aircraft

smooth mesh is not here to prevent aircraft from flying into the terrain, but to make their movement less jerky/unrealistic at cliffs. it did infact cause aircraft to bump into terrain (might be fixed now, might not). it happened for example on that map with the north-south river with huge cliffs and lots of teleports to beam east<->west.

"flying into [steep] terrain" qualifies as "jerky/unrealistic at cliffs" imo.

From before there was airmesh thing I vaguely remember aircraft bouncing from cliffs very often.
So tested a bit with xta's core_shadow on "Castles" map: I was expecting the plane with disabled usesmoothmesh to run into the walls more often, but actually did not seem to make any difference in behaviour?

Castles isnt steep, try tabula penishills.

Or the pillars the back of Industrial Revolution,although it is a bit ridiculous to expect aircraft to always avoid those.

Northern Mountains the dividing hill I have seen units frequently clip through the huge center mountain of that map.

Thank you all for the helpful replies, I apologize for not taking a close look at the source code beforehand.