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CYNJ Airport not at the right place

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CYNJ Airport not at the right place

Postby Pom_Pom » Wed Feb 08, 2023 5:10 am

Hi Folks,

I recently moved to a new area and started to fly around and it seems that the Langley Regional Airport (CYNJ) is not at the right place.
It is shifted to the East and seems slightly bigger, so that the Runway 01/19 crosses the adjacent road of the airport and has buildings near it (buildings are well located).
Other airports in the area CNYX, CYVR, CYPK.... do not have issue.

How can it be corrected ?

Thanks,
Seb
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Re: CYNJ Airport not at the right place

Postby merspieler » Wed Feb 08, 2023 8:51 am

Either with custom scenery or by waiting for ws3 scenery (assuming it has been fixed in the xp gateway)
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Re: CYNJ Airport not at the right place

Postby david.megginson » Wed Feb 08, 2023 12:32 pm

I'm sorry to hear that. By default, the TerraSync scenery uses a very old version of the open X-Plane airport data, and many (most?) medium and small airports have runways in the wrong place, incorrect taxiway arrangements, etc.
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Re: CYNJ Airport not at the right place

Postby Pom_Pom » Thu Feb 09, 2023 12:14 am

Thanks for your feedback,

I could start looking at that, it will be a good exercise for me but I will need some supports to start it in the right direction.

First of all, I am using Kubuntu 20.04 LTS and I plan to upgrade to Kubuntu 22.04 LTS in coming weeks.
Let me know if my environment is okay for this activity.

Second of all, could you please point to me tutorials or procedures that I need to understand and use to achieve the correction of this scenery.

Finally, this is my high level approach, please correct me or add guidance :
  1. Extract the current CYNJ airport scenery used in FG : where/how can I get it ?
  2. Analyze the scenery to understand where it comes : manually generated or imported from elsewhere. What tool should I use for that ?
  3. See if it is worth it to manually correct it or to import it from an existing external scenery.
    E.G. : CYNJ Airport scenery was redesigned for X-Plane in 2018 and the result is spectacular : https://gateway.x-plane.com/airports/CYNJ/show?tab=gallery
  4. Built the corrected scenery for FG based on the choice above.
  5. Test it locally. I assume by putting it in my local scenery folder, it will replace the base scenery.
  6. Submit it for approval.

Good small project, is not it :D

Cheers,
Seb
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Re: CYNJ Airport not at the right place

Postby david.megginson » Thu Feb 09, 2023 1:01 am

Pom_Pom wrote in Thu Feb 09, 2023 12:14 am:Good small project, is not it :D

The project has made great strides in supporting custom aircraft, but you're right that custom scenery has a steep learning curve.
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Re: CYNJ Airport not at the right place

Postby merspieler » Thu Feb 09, 2023 11:49 am

Kubuntu is the perfect env for this.
All you basically need is podman or docker. You can use my terragear container which includes everything you probably need.
Code: Select all
podman pull quay.merspieler.tk/merspieler/terragear


How to do this is described: https://wiki.flightgear.org/Using_TerraGear

If you wanna skip the .arr and .fit creation steps, you can just use my prebuilt ones, available here (Global, 35GB)

To your questions:
1. You get it from the xplane gateway (requires login or using their API).
2. If you wanna take a look at the airport, open it with WED https://developer.x-plane.com/tools/worldeditor/
3. Start with the one from the gateway and see if that's already fine or you wanna change things.
4. See the wiki page, genapts is the tool to generate the airport.
5. Yes, make a local scenery folder and add that.
6. Not possible due to seams which unfortunately appear when doing this.


One thing I've forgot to mention, If you wanna test that airport AS IS from the xp gateway, I've built that already in the latest version. Its intended to be used with the new WS3 scenery so you can expect seams and stuff.
So if you just wanna test that, let me know.
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Re: CYNJ Airport not at the right place

Postby wkitty42 » Thu Feb 09, 2023 12:48 pm

FWIW: if one takes data from the X-Plane gateway and corrects it to be more accurate, please also be sure to submit those changes back to the gateway so others will also be able to have the updated info... this way when other projects (eg: FG) update their data from the gateway, they, too, will get the latest data needed for their use...
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"Why not?" said Gurder.
"Dunno. It's frightened of heights, I guess."
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Re: CYNJ Airport not at the right place

Postby Pom_Pom » Fri Feb 10, 2023 1:43 am

I tried to understand where the current issue, so here are my findings :
First, I looked at the coordinates in XML files of CYNJ located here : .fgfs/TerraSync/Airports/C/Y/N/
  • CYNJ.groundnet.xml is correct, all coordinates inside are accurate
  • CYNJ.threshold.xml is not good, all coordinates inside are not corresponding to the real runway thresholds
  • CYNJ.twr.xml is not good, the tower is not where it should be
==> so I guess, this is from those coordinates that the runways and the tower is not well placed.

Second, that it is weird for me (maybe because I do not know how FG works under the hood)
When I looked for CYNJ on https://scenery.flightgear.org/static/map/index.html, the runways seem to be well placed.
So how in one place the runways are well placed and not in the other place (just because I am curious, and would like to understand how it works)

Third, I am not very familiar with WS3, never look at it, but if you believe that CYNJ could be accurate, I could check.
@merspieler : Could you explain how to activate it in FG ?

Thanks,
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Re: CYNJ Airport not at the right place

Postby wkitty42 » Fri Feb 10, 2023 1:07 pm

Pom_Pom wrote in Fri Feb 10, 2023 1:43 am:@merspieler : Could you explain how to activate it in FG ?

i'm not merspieler but the process to activate WS3 is easy enough...

  1. you must be using an FG that has WS3 enabled...
    IIRC that would be the NEXT branch/version...
  2. your FG build must be using OSG 3.6...
    this should be already done on the NEXT branch/version IF you are downloading prebuilt binaries...
  3. you can enable it in the F10->View->Rendering options via one click...
    OR
    you can set the needed property so WS3 is used all the time...
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"Why not?" said Gurder.
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Re: CYNJ Airport not at the right place

Postby merspieler » Fri Feb 10, 2023 1:24 pm

what wkitty said... plus you need to add the scenery.
Not that I've got the airports ONLY... so when you enable ws3 in that area, you see the airport but everything else is blank.
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Re: CYNJ Airport not at the right place

Postby portreekid » Sat Feb 11, 2023 9:37 am

Pom_Pom wrote in Fri Feb 10, 2023 1:43 am:I tried to understand where the current issue, so here are my findings :
First, I looked at the coordinates in XML files of CYNJ located here : .fgfs/TerraSync/Airports/C/Y/N/
  • CYNJ.groundnet.xml is correct, all coordinates inside are accurate
  • CYNJ.threshold.xml is not good, all coordinates inside are not corresponding to the real runway thresholds
  • CYNJ.twr.xml is not good, the tower is not where it should be
==> so I guess, this is from those coordinates that the runways and the tower is not well placed.


Actually these things can be easily fixed. There is a workflow to get these fixes back into terrasync. The website https://groundweb.azurewebsites.net/ can be used to upload threshold & twr. This opens a pull request which will be reviewed and will end up in terrasync.

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Re: CYNJ Airport not at the right place

Postby portreekid » Sat Feb 11, 2023 9:47 am

Oh. Classic mixup.

Image

You can see all the data is wrong, but consistent. So moving threshold.xml or twr.xml would just worsen the situation. So WS3 is the only option.
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Re: CYNJ Airport not at the right place

Postby david.megginson » Sun Feb 12, 2023 12:47 am

portreekid wrote in Sat Feb 11, 2023 9:47 am:You can see all the data is wrong, but consistent. So moving threshold.xml or twr.xml would just worsen the situation. So WS3 is the only option.

Right now, my Canada/US scenery goes only as far west as 100°W longitude (roughly to Winnipeg). If I do three more buckets, to w130n40, that would include Langley, and I could fix the airport. I'm not super confident about doing the Rockies and Coastal Ranges, though, because I've never experimented with that kind of scenery, so it won't be right away. I've been thinking of going beyond my current Great Lakes and St Lawrence area to create scenery WS20-style scenery right across North America from 30°N to 60°N latitude eventually, now that I'm hooked.
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Re: CYNJ Airport not at the right place

Postby Pom_Pom » Tue Feb 14, 2023 2:36 am

Thanks for all your good advice !
I am busy this week, I will look again at it next week after my OS upgrade.
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