Converting Xplane airport scenery to FG

[oly2b]

I would like to add some airport scenery for my local area airfields, there are some very good FSX and Xplane airports available, but I am struggling to convert these to FG.

I have tried to follow the guide on the scenery portal both under Windows10 and on a Linux PC.
I have run into problems with reps being out of date and missing script files (xplane2fg.sh). See link below

https://wiki.flightgear.org/Howto:Conve ... om_X-Plane

Does anybody have a working method, ideally under Windows, of during this conversion?

[erik]

Good chance it is already available in Project 3000 then:
https://wiki.flightgear.org/Project3000

Erik

[tom_nl]

I've been through this recently too. I found the same - a lot of how to do it is spread across various wikis and it's not so clear.

Here's what I figured out and works for me. This is on OS X Big Sur. and FG 2020.3.6. Should be easily modifiable for other OSses:

1) Make sure you have some prerequisites installed - (Mac only) firstly you need the xcode command line tools - install by opening a terminal and typing

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xcode-select --install

You also need git (which comes with the Xcode tools) and python2 - OS X only comes with python 3 so the easiest way to get python 2 is to install 'homebrew' and then install the python2 cask. For Windows, you'll need to install git and python2 however this is done in windows (apologies - I don't know how to do this).

2) Make a directory for working in and storing the needed executables. Open a terminal in this directory.

3) In this directory, clone the d-laser-fgtools tools

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git clone https://github.com/mherweg/d-laser-fgtools.git

4) in the master working directory, make a directory for the airport - in my case EHKD. open a terminal in this directory.

5) in the airport directory, download the airport you want to update from the X Plane gateway by using the gateway_pull.py script - when in the airport directory:

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python2 /path/to/d-laser-fgtools/gateway_pull.py - i <airport ICAO code>

6) convert the airport from X-plane to flightgear with the dsf2aptdat.py script - in the airport directory

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python2 /path/to/d-laser-fgtools/dsf2aptdat.py -i <airport ICAO code>

7) open the <airport>.dat created by the script in X-Plane World Editor to check it's got everything needed, make any edits, then export to a new .dat if required, making sure to export in X Plane 10.5 format.

8 ) open the resulting <airport>.dat file in a text editor and rearrange the first few lines as follows:
a) First line needs to be a capital letter 'I' (as in India)
b) second line needs to the airport descriptor
c) third line needs to be '1050 Generated by WorldEditor 2.3.1r1' (or whichever version was used)
Example below:

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I
1      1 0 0 EHKD De Kooy
1050 Generated by WorldEditor 2.3.1r1


9) upload the resulting .dat file to the flightgear airport web generator - http://ns334561.ip-5-196-65.eu/tgweb/ and follow the instructions. Then download the zip the site generates that contains the airport .btg file. Put this in the working directory for now. Note i'm using the web generator as i've not managed to get terragear and genapt850 installed locally on OS X yet (still working on it).

10) Copy the .btg and .dat file to your custom scenery folder as described here https://forum.flightgear.org/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=30734 and specify this scenery path in the launcher (--fg-scenery=/path/to/Scenery). Note the part at the bottom of the article 'Technical Details' - this is the key part for making FG pick up the custom airport.dat and the scenery models and then display it correctly - the Scenery/Terrain/xxxxxxx/yyyyyyy/ICAO.btg path needs to be the same as that in the master FG scenery directory. What I did was search for there ICAO.btg filename in the master scenery directory, make a note of the folder names, then replicate the directory structure in my custom scenery directory, then put the custom .btg there.

11) Launch flightgear with the UFO at the new airport and check everything is as it should be,

The key steps seem to be step 6 that converts (or removes) the incompatible X-plane objects. After this, the 'converted' airport can be opened in Worldeditor to add anything that's missing, and then placing the scenery generated in the correct locations as per step 9 so that FG picks it up.

Hope this helps,

Tom

[oly2b]

Hi all many thanks for your relies.

Tom_nl many thanks for your detailed instructions will give a go, is there any reason why it needs to be python2?

[D-ECHO]

Please note that - at least as far as I remember - the airport web generator does not take into account elevation, so the airport will be completely flat and placed at sea level, as it is usually only meant for testing an airport layout. To generate a whole scenery without seams and elevation issues, you need to re-generate the area using TerraGear.

[tom_nl]

Please note that - at least as far as I remember - the airport web generator does not take into account elevation, so the airport will be completely flat and placed at sea level

Thanks - good to know, That will be the reason why the two airports i've done both worked fine - both EHTX and EHKD, being in North Holland. are in fact at sea level!

I need to get Terragear installed and working, then amend the above accordingly.

Tom

[Maerchenprinz]

Aren't areas at sea level being called "mountains" in the Netherlands?
(Sorry, just couldn't resist to make that one...)

[tom_nl]

Aren't areas at sea level being called "mountains" in the Netherlands?

We get scared when we mountains!

Tom

[MrCrow23]

I was trying to use the http://ns334561.ip-5-196-65.eu/tgweb/ website but it seems to be down for the last two years, Do you have any side option for this. I'm a Mac os user so I'm not able to download terragear without a VM.

[merspieler]

Do you just want the up-to-date airports from the xplane gateway or do you want to build airports which you've modified your self?

In the 1st case I could help you... depending of what you ultimately want to archive.

[MrCrow23]

I want to modify the taxi ways of airports that FG already has.

[merspieler]

afaik, docker also runs on macOS, so you could try this container I've built a few months ago which works well for building airports.

[vanosten]

Please be advised that I did do a port of Project3000 to osm2city (runs on Python 3) - but never finished it. The reason is that some of the things generated by Project3000 are not ideal performance wise. If someone wants to continue on Project3000, then please align with me, so it can be part of osm2city and profit for osm2city's other code (e.g. some elevation probing was inherited by Project3000 from osm2city).

[merspieler]

I guess performance could greatly improve when we've finally got general object GPU instancing working.