If you want to submit an airport layout to Robin in time for the X-Plane 10.0 scenery render, please submit it to him by October 1st, 2011. See http://data.x-plane.com/ for more info on the apt.dat file.
(And yes…my previous estimate for when we’d be cutting the scenery was off by a lot. I apologize to everyone who crunched for that deadline. For what it’s worth, I told Austin that if we didn’t get X-Plane 10 out this year I’d cut off one of my fingers.)
We will not be accepting ground traffic flow layouts for the new ATC system or user-submitted building placements before the sim is released. Once the sim is out there we’ll start working on that process. Our intention is to collect and redistribute airport building layouts and ATC data (using X-plane 10’s new airport element art assets) the same way we do for apt.dat files.
You cannot be serious, we’ve had all this time and now you tell us with a month to go…..
Not cool Ben. 🙁
The deadline was announced at least twice and then moved forward both times by several months.
You would have every right to be upset with us if you raced to meet the last deadline only to wait for several more months but I don’t think we can be accused of not giving ample notice….
http://www.x-plane.com/blog/2010/09/airport-layouts-your-cutoff-is-101010/
http://www.x-plane.com/blog/2011/02/from-robin-submissions-for-v10-still-accepted/
I worked to the first deadline, and then added a few more before the second, and then, wrongly, assumed that was it and the terrain was in the process of being made.
A month isn’t really ample notice for me, but whatever, no big deal, I’ll just try and complete as many as poss in that time.
Cheers.
“Our intention is to collect and redistribute airport building layouts and ATC dat the same way we do for apt.dat files.””
That’s the way to go! I liked this.
And by “building” you mean only hangars, terminals and general airport buildings or it also includes other landmarks, like water towers?
Will they be restricted to airports only or we will somehow be able to, for example, populate a city by placing custom buildings?
Tom’s airport lego kit has a bunch of stuff: ramp equipment, buildings, jetways, static aircraft, ramp markings, cones, lights, water towers…it’s a pretty good list. I’ll post some test pics later.
The system is particularly targeted at airports; we are not attempting to collect and share general building placement. At this point our buildings are algorithmically generated from OSM roads; we’ll figure out buildings via OSM. We don’t ever expect individual users to place buildings in a city – there are too many.
(Mind you, you always _can_ take the default buildings from X-Plane and place them using WED – they’re in the library.)
airport lego kit contents sounds awesome! cant wait for pix soon!
Do you have warehouses as a generic building type? They are very common in the vicinity of airports.
Will this be handled via an extension to the apt.dat file format?
That would keep the relevant data local, with only a small increase in data size.
Will there be a new central upload tool of airport data, perhaps like wikipedia, to simplify things for Robin….? Though it would be good to keep him as an editor to ensure quality control.
It won’t be apt.dat – it will be overlay DSFs – the storage requirement will still be very very small, perhaps smaller than apt.dat, since DSFs are binary.
Robin and I have not worked through the logistics of submission and distribution yet – we’ll work that out after 10.0 is out the door.
“Our intention is to collect and redistribute airport building layouts and ATC data (using X-plane 10′s new airport element art assets) the same way we do for apt.dat files.”
Absolutely, Its going to be a fun toy box, could you add to the list?,
could you also use the apt.dat system for cites (landmarks), at the moment apt.dat is for airport areas so could you create cit.dat say for certain roped off city or building areas (warehouses?) to place significant .obj with the OSM in place as a guide, think of Las Vegas and its unique skyline……pics would be really great Ben when available.
This is strictly for airports. Cities will be a different system that we’ll work on some other time.
I have been building scenery files for Beta testers on http://www.pilotedge.net and have a growing archive of over 40 airports in the California area of coverage (Eugene has already been submitting the apt.dat files to Robin.)
My questions are:
Will these XP9 scenery files import into XP10?
Many of the scenery files contain custom apt.dat files, will these conflict with XP10?
Yes. V9 scenery will work in v10.
If there are other scenery packs like default airports, they will conflict unless you use an “exclusion zone” in your overlay to exclude what is below your scenery. Generally you should ALWAYS use an exclusion zone in custom scenery, to be safe. Exclusion zones have worked for a while in v9.
Not fully related with this post, but since you will use OSM data to create the road layout, is there a big probability that we will have roads crossing the runways (like in KNGU) and aligned highway strips (where the road is represented in OSM and where we have the runway in apt.dat)?
Or the automatically generated exclusion areas will remove the roads for cases like these?
The DSF generation process deletes roads that are too close to the runway – this has been the case since 820. In some ways this is a shame – OSM is often accurate enough that a road that is IRL very close to a runway will be correctly placed.
“For what it’s worth, I told Austin that if we didn’t get X-Plane 10 out this year I’d cut off one of my fingers.”
Don’t forget to upload on YouTube!
I am a MSFS user and I am thinking about switching to X-plane. Do you know if X-plane 10 will include heliports or hospitals for helicopter simmers? Thank you.