Removing airports

[ScruffyDuck]

I know that I can remove the appearance of an airport using AFCAD, but I want to delete all 580 odd existing airports from Florida and replace them with the ones that existed in the 30's

I have been digging around the bgl files which define airports VORs NDBs etc and on the face of it I should be able to decompile the relevant ones to xml, remove the entries related to airports and nav aids which did not exist and then recompile back to a bgl. I could probably also add back the airports I wanted to in the xml and then they should appear instead of the originals.

I am new to this and suspect that I may be about to do something fatal to my sim. If anyone has any experience of working with the new bgl files I would appreciate your views

thanks

Jon

[ScruffyDuck]

OK they are all gone (well except for two from GW3 and two of mine). Now I need to put in the ones that existed in 1936 The surrounding states are still in the original condition.

[fredz]

Jon, A quick question. What program did you use to remove the airports and such?? I want to do a simular thing in the Sacramento, CA area. Thanks for any info.

[ScruffyDuck]

Fred

You need to be aware that you are replacing default scenery files rather than creating add ons. This is how I did it.

Sacramento files will be in the folder scenery\namw\scenery. You are looking for files starting AP. The way I found them was to run FSNav and look at the Florida area. Hovering the mouse over an airport will tell you which scenery file the airport is in. I found the top left and bottom right. All default scenery files in FS9 have two numbers in them after the xx9. For example top left of Florida is 24200 and bottom right is 26230. Thus I ended up with 9 files. (hope that makes sense) You need to be aware that these files are a grid and do not follow state boundaries - some may have multiple states. Also I found a few airports in the files which did not have a state listed

Then I made COPIES of them and used bglxml to decompile those files into xml. I then used an xml editor to remove airport containers which had a 'state' of Florida. You need to get the BGLCOMP_SDK from the FS9 SDK and make sure you understand what the airport container looks like. I then recompiled the files using bglcomp (if you are going to do this then you need to get a corrected bglcomp.xsd otherwise the recompile will fail - there is a corrected on with SceneGenX the FS9 version of Airport for Windows. I used the original file name and added GW3 before the extension '.' to help me identify them and make sure I did not over write any originals by mistake

I finally renamed the bgl files in namw\scenery so that they are not used (I left them in place so that they can be renamed to bgl at any time to get the original airports back) and placed my revised ones in a folder in my Addon Scenery Folder.

If this sounds complicated then it is if you are not used to the internals of bgl files. You can also screw up your scenery if you lose one of the default bgls so most designers do not change the default files.

If this is familiar ground to you then good luck otherwise find the files that need changing and let me know what you want removed - it is a quick job once you have done it so I would be happy to create some revised files for you

I am now creating the new airports with AFCAD - once I have them all I will decompile them and put them into a single bgl. Then I can start o nthe scenery itself ;D

HTH

[fredz]

Jon, thanks for the sequence. I have done some playing in this area and if you make copies, you should'nt get too messed up [ya, right!] I will have to find bglxml and have a go. Let you know the results.
later,

[ScruffyDuck]

Good Luck

You can find bglxml and most other scenery design software here

www.scenery.org/

just click on the design link in the left panel

[fredz]

Jon, Thanks again for the info. I have bglxml after all and actually had tried it befor coming here. Apparently the bgl's in the Sacramento area have some FS2002 and/or FS2000 files in them and bglxml cannot decode them. Oh, well.. It was instructional anyway. I just love computer programs. :-)
Later,

[ScruffyDuck]

Apparently the bgl's in the Sacramento area have some FS2002 and/or FS2000 files in them and bglxml cannot decode them. Oh, well.. It was instructional anyway

Hmmm that surprises me - I thought that all the AP Default files in FS9 are xml. FS2002 has separate AFD bgl files. These can be decoded using SCDIS and something like notepad could be used to remove the unwanted airports and then the sca file can be recompiled.