EXPERIMENTAL USE ONLY!!! -- [What?] -- Login to add public annotations [How? >>YouTube].

It’s official:

August 28, 2014, Columbia, South Carolina. Laminar Research is pleased to announce the release of its Airport Scenery Gateway, as well as an updated and improved version of its airport scenery tool, World Editor 1.3. The Airport Scenery Gateway can be accessed on the internet at http://gateway.x-plane.com and the new and improved version of World Editor is available for download at http://developer.x-plane.com under Scenery Tools.

The Airport Scenery Gateway was created to facilitate the populating of X-Plane with 3D airport sceneries that are consistent in quality and appearance, error-checked, and will work with a standard installation of X-Plane 10. During the past several months Laminar Research has received hundreds of airports designed by World Editor users. World Editor is an airport scenery creation and editing tool for Laminar’s X-Plane 10 that allows the typical X-Plane user to create airport scenery.

By establishing an internet gateway for scenery submission, it is now possible with World Editor 1.3 for users to automatically submit airport scenery contributions directly to the Airport Scenery Gateway. X-Plane users can visit the Airport Scenery Gateway to search for airport scenery submissions. The scenery can then be immediately downloaded into X-Plane 10 before it appears in a scheduled X-Plane update.

Read more from this press release.

A few notes:

  • If your airport is not already in X-Plane 10.30, please use the Gateway to share it via WED 1.3; do not send it directly to Robin.  At this point Robin should only be getting navaid patches.  You must use WED 1.3 to upload to the Gateway!
  • The airports that are already in 10.30 are uploaded by ‘WEDBot’, which is an account we used to transfer our existing collection into the Gateway.  As users share data, we will start to get good attribution; I think this is important because we will know who to contact to sort out issues with airports.
  • If you could not upload an airport due to a missing ICAO, we are working on this now.
  • We are working on a Linux build of WED 1.3 and will post it as soon as we resolve the chaos of shipping a working app on multiple distributions.  mroe has done great work to make Linux happen.
  • We will periodically ‘roll’ shared airports into X-Plane via point releases to the sim.  I do not recommend collecting a huge pile of Gateway custom scenery packs; they will simply conflict with newer data from X-Plane when it comes out.  The ability to download a pack directly from the Gateway is meant for authors who want to view the state of a pack and possibly modify it.  The gateway is not meant to be a scenery file sharing site.

Finally, I think this has been discussed before, but…custom scenery authors:

Always put exclusion zones around your custom airports!  Even if there are no 3-d buildings at an airport today, they may appear in the next update.

With the Gateway open, 3-d is going to appear quickly!

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.

22 comments on “The Gateway Lives”

  1. Great!

    About “We are working on a Linux build of WED 1.3 and will post it as soon as we resolve the chaos of shipping a working app on multiple distributions. mroe has done great work to make Linux happen” I’ve downloaded WED for Linux via http://dev.x-plane.com/download/tools/wed_lin_130r1.zip link and it works perfect in my Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit.

    And yes, I could not upload some airports due to a missing ICAO.

    Cheers,
    C.

    1. 1. Good to know that RC works – we may rebuild it with libpng linked statically to cope with various distros.
      2. Please re-try the ICAO – 6000 were missing.
      3. If the ICAO is -still- missing, we are adding a bug tracker for airports where you’ll be able to request new ICAOs.

  2. Hi
    Glad to know that the gateway is finally gone live, got one question though. Has Wed been updated with additional art assets?
    I got a few airports I would like to submit, however, all currently rely on 3rd party libraries. I would like to make the changes so my work would rely only on Wed art assets.
    thanks

    1. – WED never has art assets – the art assets come from X-plane and WED simply shows them.
      – X-Plane does _not_ have new art assets.
      – Third party assets cannot be used.

      So you will need to redo your work using the existing library – sorry, that’s the rules of engagement for the gateway. WED 1.3 gives you some ways to easily FILTER the library to see just what is in x-plane.

  3. this is a really cool feature, the airport gateway. Very easy function to search and download.

  5. Will there be more frequent patches now just to add more airports from the gateway (so that we don’t have to wait several months to get new airports)?

  6. Nice to see the Gateway up and running!

    One question; If I download airports off the Gateway that have yet to be included in a release, and then they are rolled over into a future release of X-Plane, is there an easy way for me to tell which airports I should go back and delete from my Custom Scenery folder or does it matter since the scenery in the Custom Folder “should” overwrite any recuts of the dsf’s, even if they are the same scenery?

    Cheers

  7. So does this mean the “Core” airport data will no longer be updated with new info if needed, it will all be only in the “Global Airports”?

      1. But then if your one of the ones that disables global airports,you will not get any updated airport data? is this correct?

        Ricardo Rementería Troncoso I think is hitting on the same question

  8. Great news, have uploaded a few so far, roughly 100 still on my harddrive waiting, because ICAO identifiers not recognized.

    We desperately need:

    1) Ability to add airports for ICAO identifiers that exist in real life (like EDKD, for example).

    2.) Ability to add airports for ficticious ICAO identifiers (because the real life sites don´t have ICAO identifiers), like many small glider fields or helicopter landing sites in Germany.

    3.) Ability to upload for ICAO identifiers already present in X-Plane, but tagged with [H] or [X] in the airport list, [H]KJRB would be an example. Gateway currently rejects uploads, even if these are correctly tagged as “HELIPORT” in WED.

    4.) (Not directly related to GATEWAY): Ability to change and upload new nav-data – the set currently in X-Plane is woefully outdated, and renders many new airports useless for IFR flying (EDHI would be a good example).

    Thanks again for setting this up, I believe it will further X-Planes cause tremendously. I hope folks will soon discover the joy of building lego-brick airports and sharing with the community!

    All the best, Jan

  9. I am not sure, thus I ask it…
    Sceneries downloaded from the Gateway must go in “Custom Sceneries”. Just download sceneries are not in “Global Airports”.
    With the normal X-Plane’s update the users get “Global Airports” with new sceneries from the Gateway. After that the user may delete those sceneries from the “Custom Sceneries”.
    Is this correct?

    1. Right – they are scenery packs and go in “Custom Scenery”. And when you update X-plane, “Global Airports” gets even more stuff and you can then delete those packs.

  10. Thanks for your work!

    Is there a way to submit feature requests? Specifically, I’d like to see some “geometric” tools in the next release of WED (the ability to draw a parallel/perpendicular given a taxiway and an external point, which would help scenery builders when drawing stands), as well as the ability to delete existing gateway submissions (to withdraw old scenery versions when we upload new ones).

    2. In case you weren’t aware of this little trick:

      -draw a ‘horizontal’ (east-west) line in WED (doesn’t have to be perfectly horizontal)
      -draw a vertical line in WED (same)
      -go to vertex mode
      -select both individual vertices of the horizontal
      -hold alt, while selecting one of the latitude coordinates (bottom right pane), press return (still holding alt)

      -select both individual vertices of the vertical
      -hold alt, while selecting one of the longitude coordinates, press return (still holding alt)

      both lines are perpendicular now and can be rotated (in marquee mode) to any angle you need.

      It looks like a lot of work when you read it like this, but it’s actually pretty fast, especially if you use keyboard shortcuts 🙂

  11. Nice to see the Gateway going live and filling up!

    It would be nice to have another search option available: “ICAO Code Begins With”

    This would give a quick overview what’s available for a specific region or country, should be easy to implement as search for partial names and full ICAO is already there.

    Great work x-plane team!

    Cheers,
    coobah

Comments are closed.