WED Tricks & Shortcuts

General

Preferences Menu

You can access the global preferences from under the File (Windows) or WED (Mac) menu option. Here you can change between meters or feet, and how coordinates are displayed. (Note that Moderator mode is only useful if you are a Gateway Moderator so always leave this turned off.)

Preset METAR ICAO

WED will automatically create meaningful wind/time rules names based on the airport METAR ICAO and time a relevant properties for any Wind, Time or Runway Use rules is changed. This keeps the flow rules more legible, the flow rule name itself has no relevance outside WED.

Updating old data

Smart runway rename

When a runway is renamed due to magnetic variation changes, not only the runway name, but also all ATC taxi routes, flows and taxi signs need to be fixed to match the changed designation. WED will detect such edits of a runway “name” property, find all these references, update them and let you know. This greatly helps when the runway validation tells you it’s missing some runway at that airport – which usually means some existing runway was recently renamed due to magnetic variation changes.

After changes of the runway name property a popup windows will announce the number of changed ATC taxi routes/ Flow rules / 3D Taxi signs to confirm the smart rename action.

To change a runway name without invoking the smart renamer, first change the runway name to some illegal name, then in a second operation to the desired new runway name.

Align Airports

Select an airport, then go to Airport menu > Align Airports. This function can be used to mass-move the currently selected airports to bring runways into CIFP compliance. It will also select only unchanged airports after the operation completed, to facilitate deletion and re-submission of only the changed airports to the gateway.

Explode special AGPs

Edit > Explode Special AGPs takes certain scenery .agp group objects (such as lib/airport/Ramp_Equipment/ 250cm_Jetway_Group.agp) and replaces them with the individual .obj components included in the group. You can further modify that “group” by moving or deleting the individual objects that make up the group.

This only works for a few predetermined public .agp groups, mostly these jetway groups. It also requires that all items in that .agp group are available as individual .obj items for placement in WED.

Replace Vehicle Objects

Edit > Replace Vehicle Objects takes X-Plane 10 sceneries and replaces all .objs depicting ground service vehicles found on all airports in the scenery and replaces each one with the equivalent X-Plane 11 Ground Service Vehicle start definitions. E.g. it turns the static Belt_Loader.obj into the X-Plane 11 service vehicle that actually moves around.

This function can be used in conjunction with the previous one to first break up the jetway groups into the individual .objs (Belt_Loaders, Baggage Trains, GPUs etc) and then convert those pieces into Ground Service Vehicle starts if applicable.

This feature sounds nice at first, but the Ground Service Vehicle starts really need to be placed strategically near a Ground Vehicle Route to really “work” right. But it’s a quick way to create lots of strangely behaving ground vehicle traffic.

Upgrade Ramps

Airport > Upgrade Ramps takes pre-X-Plane 10.50 sceneries with ramp starts and adds useful defaults for the X-Plane 10.50 properties that were added to those starts. Also deletes certain .obj known to depict static aircraft in the vicinity of these ramp starts, so as to eliminate conflicts with the X-Plane “Draw Parked Aircraft” function.

E.g. all ramp starts of type = Gate start get Operation type = Airline added, all type = Tiedown turn into either Airline or General Aviation operations, depending on the ramp start size parameters.