Hi Ben,

1. “Turning down” as in the number of aircraft being populated. I have my doubts this would work too.
2. Yar, that occurred to me too. I think I was thinking (it’s been over 8 hours!) that a developer could provide ramp starts that would never be auto-populated by X-Plane due to an exclusion.
3. I hadn’t realised X-Plane would use custom scenery libraries for auto-population (of cars etc). Nice.

We have considered “auto-gen” lego brick airports in the past, but the issue is that (1) it’s _not_ easy to implement, (2) it won’t look that great and (3) most importantly, the more major the airport (and thus the more likely that users actually see it) the more likely the autogen algorithm just places buildings in stupid places and generally wrecks the situation.

I don’t think anyone wants buildings in the middle of real-life accessible ramps, particularly when on PE or VATSIM.

Hi Andrew,

A few things here:
1. How would the sim -know- that a static aircraft is a static aircraft to turn it down? It’s just a file on disk.
2. What would the purpose be of having exclusion zones exclude auto-population? To exclude, your pack must be the higher layer…you can simply include your -own- apt.dat with the ramp spots removed.
3. Under the current proposal, scenery developers -can- provide their own aircraft – no custom aircraft folder necessary; they just add objects to the library the way current “car” packs work now.

If only we could have an auto-gen for the 35k airfields of X-Plane!! It would use the same lego-brick airport approach used now for the gateway.
We could for example reset/regenerate the layout in the airport menu (with restart needed I guess) if someone don’t like it or either reset all K___ or LI__ airports to re-generate them for example.

Now I suppose this would cause a problem with multiplayer as the apt.dat should be the same to have the same specific layout at a random airport… Maybe a separate apt.dat file exclusive for auto-gen fields that could be synced for multiplayer sessions would do the trick?

And when someone make a gateway airport with the “real stuff”, the auto-gen counterpart would be deleted from that specific apt.dat…
I don’t know if it would be easy to implement and I have already asked you that, maybe I’m just dreaming but that would be awesome, no more empty fields, a lot of us would be happy with only auto-gen airports I think.

Have a nice day!
Dave.

*sudden random idea* Maybe exclusion zones could exclude auto-population?
*and another 🙂 * Maybe scenery developers could supply a set of aircraft (if they wish) that X-Plane uses to auto-populate ramp positions? (like a “custom aircraft” folder in the scenery package)

Thanks for the reply. I meant no disrespect to any of the X-Plane developers. I apologize. I guess it’s just something that’s been a bit frustrating to get use to compared to what I’ve been accustomed to in FSX. I want to move over to XPX as my main sim platform. I feel it’s far superior and more advance than any other sim currently on the market. Sometimes my passion to want this migration to work can get the best of me and may lead to some not so choice words. If I didn’t care, I wouldn’t of commented on this subject.

I know I’m also speaking for many other current MSFS users that are looking to jump over as well but are still waiting for certain features/functions to be added/changed. I have a few myself but I won’t hi-jack this particular subject by specifying them here. PM me if you are at all interested in what I’m looking for.

Anyway’s starting to ramble… Here’s hoping the gateway can be used to harness these kind of standards.

Cheers,
Todd.

Hi Todd,

The lack of ramp starts is a question of airport data. Anyone (including you) can add additional missing ramp locations on the X-Plane airport gateway.

I speculate that the average low numbers is due to the ramp start UI in the past being limited in size; this caused authors to try to limit themselves to a small number of ramp starts. Now that the UI scrolls we’re starting to see more “full listings.” (Even then, it has been commented that finding a ramp start in a full list with the current UI is annoying because there is no grouping or filtering.)

Finally, I have to point out that while it’s cute to call everything “implausible”* since our fearless leader used the P word about 1000 times during the roll-out of X-Plane 10, not having all ramp starts is a question of -accuracy-, not -plausibility-. The airport is plausible as long as it has -one- ramp start near a gate. (Airports that have a ramp start on the runway typically have ZERO ramp starts, which is implausible – the sim is doing a bad job of making data up.)

cheers
Ben

* Calling things implausible _is_ an effective way to annoy the X-Plane developers!

That brings up another point that really needs to be addressed with creating airports. That’s parking spots to spawn up at. Being a very long time MSFS user, we’ve always had the ability and have gotten accustomed to choose from many parking spots to spawn at when stating our flight. Of course it’s all relative to the size of the air field/airport but in most cases all parking spots are available as a choice. I know XPX has that capability but it’s usually very limited or completely non-existent at a lot of add-on airports. Sometimes just runways are available. Not too sure as to why this is the case with X-Plane…. Where’s the “plausibility” in that? (As Austin likes to call this sim plausible.)

What I’d like to see are the following:

1. The choice of having AI/Static aircraft at an airport or not.

2. All parking spots available to spawn at when selecting an airport within XPX. ie. a good example would be CYOW. There is only ONE Ramp location you can spawn at when in the real world there’s over a 150 parking spots at this airport. I don’t get it…

These are just a couple of X-Plane quirks or “head-scratchers” that I’d like to see change. Again, being a long time MSFS simmer, it’s always been the norm. Even before the advent of online flying. I don’t understand why this is not the case with XPX. Is it a development limitation or just history of the way things are done?

In any event, it would be nice to see this as a standard for the scenery gateway as it would definitely help attract more users from the FS9/FSX platform who are looking at and evaluating future options for their simming needs.

Cheers!

i dont use wed , if thats what your getting at with OBJs off, i was just surprised to download an airport that doesnt resemble one

Chris, this blog is not for trouble-shooting your installation. The only general things to note is that (1) some airports have changes to their 2-d layouts but not buildings and (2) airport buildings won’t show if OBJs are off.

There’s lots of other ways things can go funny too. Contact x-plane tech support if you need help.