One of the major initiatives of X-Plane 10 was to add buildings to our airports – terminals, hangers, warehouses, control towers, etc.  In X-plane 8 and 9 we had detailed taxiway line markings, lights, and signs, but most airports were devoid of structures.  The plan we came up with went something like this:

  1. Create a library of “lego brick” airport buildings.  The library provides visually high quality, high performance art-work with moderate variety and ships with the sim.
  2. Extend WorldEditor to edit DSF overlays as well as airports.
  3. Extend the global airport database that Robin Peel maintains to include buildings and not just apt.dat data, so that we can collect, share, and redistribute the buildings.
  4. Release airport building layouts (created by users, contributed to the database, using the lego brick buildings) as part of the sim.

In other words, take the process we have been doing all along  for taxiways, and extend it to buildings.  (Some would call this “crowdsourcing” the airports, but Robin has been collecting user-created airport layouts for us since long before such terms existed.)

So where are we on the project?  As of now, it is more or less completed!

  • X-Plane 10 shipped with the airport library.
  • WED 1.2 provides the tools necessary to create airports using those lego bricks.
  • We have a provisional process to collect those layouts.
  • The first 250+ airports are now included in X-Plane 10.25 beta 1.

Next Steps

So what do we do next?  We are working on a few separate initiatives.

  • Documentation, Instructions, and Tutorials.  We are working on videos, tutorials, etc. to help explain the process.  Some of the docs are done now – for example, Marty and Nick just finished their 13-part WED tutorial, which is a great introduction.
  • Automation and infrastructure.  We’re looking into what we can do to provide a more automated submission process, real-time viewing of what has been submitted, etc. We haven’t made any decisions yet; we’re evaluating options.
  • More library variety and WED features.  We wanted to wait on library extensions until we could see how people were using the existing elements; it makes sense to add more variety in popular categories.  WED 1.3 has additional usability features to make navigating the library easier.

How to Participate Now

We’ll have better documents on “how to participate” in the near future, but for now if you want to create your own airport and share it with the community, the basic process is:

  1. Get WorldEditor 1.2.0 (or 1.2.1 beta).
  2. Watch the tutorial on how to create an airport.
  3. Use “Export for Global Airports” to export the airport – you’ll get a zip file.
  4. Email that zip file to robin at x-plane.com for inclusion in the sim.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

24 comments on “Airports in X-Plane: State of the Union”

    1. They should if your custom scenery folder is prioritized properly. If you start with 10.22 this will happen automagically. If you have an older install you might want to edit the .ini file.

      1. The problem with custom airports is that MOST of them still do not have correct exclusion zones for facades and objects (despite your post regarding this in April 2013).

        In a thread at the .org some developers have argued that this is a tedious work, esp. because exclusion zones are still just rectangular.

        So it’s up to the user to add the exclusion zones on their own, if they want to avoid double objects …

        1. Maybe this is harsh but…I told them so? I mean: putting exclusion zones on your work has been standard practice since X-Plane 8.15 or so…the feature has been available in X-plane for 8 years, has been in WED since version 1.1 (as long as it has had DSF overlay editing) – and yeah, I posted about this 6 months ago. 🙂

          1. Of course not every little freeware scenery developers will read your blog 😉

            I guess the most important part of your post in April is this one:

            “custom scenery should exclude anything that would “screw it up”, not just things that have already caused problems!  If you make custom scenery and you do not “defensively” exclude, you’re likely to get broken by other scenery packs, as well as the default scenery (either via a user submitted airport or a recut).”

            This should be repeated over and over again.

  2. Please think about adding an indicator/color for Airports that have buildings and maybe something to identify newly added ones from the previous updates.

  3. When it comes to more library varieties, does that mean more facade and obj artwork, or does it mean taking existing artwork, and applying different variations (e.g. agp hangars – stripping out the carpark, and fences, to provide just the hangar building).

    In the former case, is there any forum where we can make requests? (Is the mantis bug tracker database a good enough place for that?).

      1. Ok… but one request for the future: Red Lines, pleassssseeee !!!

        Either for apt.dat or for dsf files (.lin files in XP10 library).

        PS: Good cleaning!! (using wed 1.2.1b1 with 10.25)

    1. Go to a city like Vancouver (CYVR), rise up to 30000 feet and look down.

      Then compare to XP 10.22.

  5. Hi Ben, maybe you already told about this in the past and I missed it, but could you confirm that when one creates a navaid (such as an NDB, ILS and the like) the X-Plane also places a corresponding object in the scenery? I noticed that there is an NDB beacon near my airport, but this object does not appear when I try to customize the airport via WED, and moreover this object foes not disappear if I create an exclusion zone in WED. Therefore I suppose it was placed there by X-Plane automatically, can you confirm?

    1. Right –

      1. navaid objects are created for the actual navaids.
      2. navaids cannot be altered via custom scenery.
      3. the objects that visualize navaids cannot be excluded via exclusion zones.

  6. I am trying to export an airport to Robin using WED. I get an error – You cannot export airport overlays to Robin if overlay elements are outside airports in the hierarchy. Is this a bug or am I doing something wrong?

    1. You are doing something wrong. Put the airport furnature for each airport INTO the airport’s folder in the hierarchy so that WED knows what belongs to what.

  7. I was wondering if there is any news about the taxiways and airport flows (they are also part of the apt.dat). I have been playing around with it last weekend but got rather depressed. The problems with the taxiways can probably be fixed with better documentation. The problems with the airport flows are deeper. The UI requires excessive clicking (and you really have to give the METAR code for every airport flow *and* wind rule? Aren’t they the same in 99% of the cases?), there is no way to confirm that all situations are covered and there is no way to debug the flows that you created. I think the screencast by Chris illustrates the problems nicely: it is difficult, tedious and error prone.

    The problem is of course that once 10.25 is released “normal” people want to add their favorite airport. They start working with the tools and get either depressed and never try again (you’re losing a lot of manpower there) or they continue and send in the mess they made (at the expense of the sim).

    Especially with regard to the airport flows I would argue that the tools are not ready yet, not even as a beta. I didn’t even know where to start filing bugs yesterday (I did write a rant, but decided to not post that). Instead, I would suggest each of you make the traffic flows for five or so different medium sized airports with crossing runways of different lengths and crazy traffic rules (i.e. a major urban area, or Europe). I’m sure you’ll see some points that can be improved (if you didn’t kill each other out of frustration).

  8. In some airports, trees will randomly appear in the runways and approaches unless I turn off the “render trees” option. Is this an example of something that needs to be excluded at custom airport sites?

    Anyway – what a great way to keep X-Plane growing!

    1. That happens when the airport area was wrong during DSF creation – it results in three problems:
      – Autogen (trees OR buildings) on the runway.
      – Wrong terrain type under the airport (not grass)
      – Crazy slope (because only airport grass gets “smoothing” of the raw elevation data).
      So we want to fix this with recuts.

      BUT! Until the recuts happen, a .pol and an exclusion zone can help a lot – I saw a few people do this in the contributed airports.

      You can always do this and then if/when we recut, remove the .pol. For the exclusion zone, it’s a question of how closely the autogen encroaches on the runways – exclusion zones are slightly blunt instruments, and it can be hard to perfectly capture an airport that is jammed into the middle of a city.

      1. Where can we find .pol files with a good resolution?

        The ones I use in lib/g10/terrain10/* don’t have the crispness that can be seen in general landclass.

        1. Hrm – is it a lack of resolution, or a lack of the second level of detailing? Please file a bug and include a comparison screenshot of the same texture via .ter and .pol.

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