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Topic: prefab airports by MH1212

Hello JAR,

I'm in a conversation with Matthijs (MH1212) about his great 25.000 prefab airports and your great X-Life.

It works together very well (only small GA planes of course) and it is quite easy to generate the files for XL from his prefab apt.dat and then setting all stands to small planes with your gate eitor.

Now I am thinking about writing a little script that generates [ICAO].dat and [ICAO].txt files for XL for all prefab aiports automatically. Should not be too hard, as all needed information is there and all files are clearly readable (I really love X-Plane for that).

That would be around 5.000 airports I guess. (Only airports that have procedures in the GNS430 Proc folder, as Matthijs pointed out it would be no use for the others without procedures.) I would then like to share them to the community, of course.


Do you think that would work and make sense?

And, if so, would it be possible to organize that many airport files somehow?
Could be a big mess, when copying 5.000 x 2 prefab files to XL airports folder, then replacing some for custom airports, then maybe updating prefabs and so on...


Would be happy to hear what you think!
Best regards,
Jörn

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Re: prefab airports by MH1212

Great idea!! Plz, do it!

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Re: prefab airports by MH1212

Would be great..really!

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Re: prefab airports by MH1212

WoW! Super!

“The universe is big. It’s vast, complicated and ridiculous. And sometimes, very rarely, impossible things just happen and we call them miracles.”The Doctor
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5 (edited by captbullett 2016-06-28 16:17:17)

Re: prefab airports by MH1212

Good day,

So, very cool if you need anything Please let the XL community Know as I am sure you will get help.

Thank-you for you help and work on the project.

to the 5,000 airports I would say the Gateway that is in place for X-Plane would be the best way to organize this project. Why the gateway will be able to handle the full load of Airport files. so then we only have to work with the XL files that go into the Airports File i.e. dat and txt files ... and this is a JAR question as I do not know.

I use the GNS530 often to test but to bring it up to speed so it can be a regular part of XL is going to be the next level of XL... and JAR will need to work on coding the XL for GA aircraft I think no?
But starting the project is a good Ideal that way just like when the train track was laid in the US they started at two ends and meet in the middle. Thus by starting to get all the airports ready when JAR gets the XL ready you will have a jump on the GA airports.
Way to go!

Here is the link to the gateway: https://gateway.x-plane.com

Happy Flying,
Brian

6 (edited by jörn-jören jörensön 2016-06-28 21:36:56)

Re: prefab airports by MH1212

About organizing the files:
I would put all .dat and .txt files together in a zip and upload the zip at x-plane.org (and/or here of course).
In don't see any problem here, around 10.000 files is not a big number these days and it won't be more than a few MB, so everybody could download, unzip and copy all files together easily.

What I meant: How can the users organize their X-Life airport files on their computers, when there are not more 80 or 100 but suddenly a few thousend?

We know, how it works in the custom scenery folder:
If you have a custom built airport installed, that is also included in the prefabs, your custom airport will not be affected when you install/update all the prefabs (because your custom airports should be in higher position in your custom scenery.ini and therefore the prefab is ignored).

I'm afraid some similar mechanism would be needed for the X-Life airport files then. So that you can install/update (=copy) all few thousend prefab files, without overwriting the airports you already have.

Maybe a sub-folder would help, but of course I don't want to interfere with JAR's software design. (That is obviously quite good, jugded by the outcome!)
Just an idea...  : )

7 (edited by captbullett 2016-06-28 22:51:51)

Re: prefab airports by MH1212

jörn-jören jörensön wrote:

About organizing the files:
I would put all .dat and .txt files together in a zip and upload the zip at x-plane.org (and/or here of course).
In don't see any problem here, around 10.000 files is not a big number these days and it won't be more than a few MB, so everybody could download, unzip and copy all files together easily.

What I meant: How can the users organize their X-Life airport files on their computers, when there are not more 80 or 100 but suddenly a few thousend?

We know, how it works in the custom scenery folder:
If you have a custom built airport installed, that is also included in the prefabs, your custom airport will not be affected when you install/update all the prefabs (because your custom airports should be in higher position in your custom scenery.ini and therefore the prefab is ignored).

I'm afraid some similar mechanism would be needed for the X-Life airport files then. So that you can install/update (=copy) all few thousend prefab files, without overwriting the airports you already have.

Maybe a sub-folder would help, but of course I don't want to interfere with JAR's software design. (That is obviously quite good, jugded by the outcome!)
Just an idea...  : )

Good day,

I hate saying this but MicroSoft came out with a cross-platform .NET; I do not know if this can help but server platform is the only way to go with this much data you are talking about.

"Microsoft has announced the release of .NET Core 1.0 and ASP.NET Core 1.0, the open source, cross-platform fork of the .NET Framework, letting people know at the Red Hat DevNation summit in San Francisco."
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/06/28 … nux_event/

Now I am heading to Cali Santa Monica to meet with my engineering friend  and I will talk to him about this I will be there on or about the 8-9  of July.

Brian