Moving Airplanes

[TARPSBird]

Last week I purchased a package from the Simmer's Sky series of Japanese airports by Overland. These are very nice airports for those of you who enjoy flying around Japan. This is a screen shot of Naha Airport (ROAH) on Okinawa. Notice the JMSDF P-3's are parked very close together so the wings are merged together. I would like to correct that if I could so the aircraft are more realistically parked. Where do I start?

 

[Mick]

I can think of one way that might work, but it depends on how the planes are placed in the scenery. If the planes are individual models it should be possible to push them further apart. If each group of planes is one model, I don't think anything can be done. I don't see why a modeler would deliberately make a multi-plane model with overlap like that, so they are probably separate models, or actually separate copies of one model.

This method requires that the scenery modeler made a model of one plane and placed numerous copies in the scenery, using the model as a scenery object. They may not have done it that way.

If each plane is a BGL file of its own, this should be fairly straightforward. If the planes are in one BGL file it will look more intimidating but it won't really be different.

First, look in the scenery folder for the BGL that contains the planes. You can probably tell by the file name. Otherwise you'll have to look inside each BGL and what you see might not be enlightening.

To begin with, lets say that each plane is its own BGL file.

I would open the bgl files with BGLxml (by Alessandro G. Antonini). There may be other programs that can open bgl files but if there are, I don't know of them. BGLxml will present the BGL as an XML file that wants to open in Wordpad. Paul Clawson warned me not to use Wordpad to work on these XML files, he said it would scramble the context. He said to always use Notepad, and I always follow that advice. (I never liked Wordpad anyway.)

If BGLxml won't convert the BGL file, I would be stymied at that point.

If you can open a BGL you'll see inside it the geographic coordinates where the model is placed. You change those to relocate the model. You can get the desired coordinated from FS, but AFCAD or another scenery program will give it to you to more decimal places, so you can be more precise.

Once you've edited the coordinates, save the XML file, then use the BGLcomp SDK to convert it back into a BGL file. Do that for each plane you want to move.

If the planes are all in one BGL file it could be a chore to identify them. Maybe the BGL's file name will tell you which one you want, or maybe you'll have to look inside each of them to find the planes. Inside the BGLs the plane models won't be identified by names like P-8 #1 or anything else that makes sense. The models will have those gazillion character randomly generated alpha-numeric names that scenery programs assign to scenery object models. Look for sections of the file that have the same model in them. If there are, for example, ten P-8s in the scenery, and you find ten sections all in a row with the same object identifier, those are probably the P-8s. Adjust their coordinated i the same way you did with the single-plane BGLs.

This is a very tedious task but it should yield good results. But it's also possible that the scenery modeler made the scenery in some completely different way that doesn't use an airplane model in this manner. In that case, when you look inside the bgl files you might not see anything that makes sense and this method won't work.

Good luck!

 

[TARPSBird]

Mick, thanks for the info, I turned that into a text file for future reference. Shortly after I made my original post I discovered that the aircraft are all AI's and populate the airport at different locations as the time of day changes. First thing I noticed was a P-3C on the taxiway that was a Jake Burrus AI from my MAIW NAF Atsugi. How the sim knows to fly them in and out of Naha as well as Atsugi is something I have yet to figure out, but now I know I just have to change the AFCAD file to correct the close parking issue. So I'm a little bit smarter... just a little.

 

[Mick]

Mick, thanks for the info, I turned that into a text file for future reference. Shortly after I made my original post I discovered that the aircraft are all AI's and populate the airport at different locations as the time of day changes. First thing I noticed was a P-3C on the taxiway that was a Jake Burrus AI from my MAIW NAF Atsugi. How the sim knows to fly them in and out of Naha as well as Atsugi is something I have yet to figure out, but now I know I just have to change the AFCAD file to correct the close parking issue. So I'm a little bit smarter... just a little.

Augh! I never thought of that! It's so simple and so obvious now that you mentioned it, but it never dawned on me!

It never occurred to me that they were ASI planes, located in parking spots on the AFCAD file. I thought you meant static models. I should've at least thought to ask!

I'm glad you figured it out.

As for flying that AI P-3 from Atsugi, there are two possibilities. Most likely is that the Atsugi AI plan uses Naha as another airport for flight origination or destination. Alternately, the Naha AI scheme uses the same P-3 model as Atsugi, but that seems less likely since the model is from MAIW and Naha is not. The second possibility seems slim because whoever made out the Naha AI plan would have had to assume that you have the MAIW plane. The first possibility assumes nothing, since Naha presumably exists as a stock airport in FS.

 

[Desert Rat]

I'd do a search on the developers forum's (if they have one), MAIW forum's, or some of the big sites. Someone may have already adjusted the afcad already. But you wouldn't gain any knowledge from that I guess.