Howto:Test your airport layout: quick and easy
Thanks to LucMTL in this post this post we can now test our new Layout Easily!
Relatively Simple Procedure to Get a Quick Look at a New Airport Layout Drawn in TaxiDraw :
File Creation
Let's suppose your airport in project has the ICAO code : ABCD.
1- Create a folder anywhere named with any name, and copy the genapts executable into it, from the TerraGear suite.
2- In TaxiDraw, open your project and do the command : Export Airport. Save the export ABCD.dat file into your folder.
3- Open a command line window and go to your folder in it.
4- Do the command exactly as here, including the dot at the end (but put the real ICAO code of your airport of course, instead of "ABCD" at the input parameter) :
genapts --input=ABCD.dat --work=.
5- That command will make a series of data lines pass through the screen. Your new airport has just been generated. We must now manage to put the current scenery out of our way, and place the new airport temporarily at the right place, so we can take a look at it.
Setting Up the Files
1- Go to FlightGear/data/Scenery/Terrain, and go through to your exact scenery sub-folder where the airport is normally stored.
2- In this folder, there is already the official "ABCD.btg.gz" file existing. Rename it by adding the word BACKUP at the end of its name. That will put it aside for the moment.
3- Also in that same folder, locate your exact bucket file corresponding to the place where your airport is supposed to be. For example, the bucket file for the CSK3 airport is 1745385.btg.gz. Rename it by adding the word BACKUP at the end of its name. That will completely deactivate for the moment all the surrounding scenery around your airport (Important ! Otherwise, parts of your new airport layout are likely to be hidden by the old scenery).
4- Now, in your working folder, there are two new subfolders : AirportArea and AirportObj.
5- In AirportObj, go through the subfolders and locate your new airport file : ABCD.btg.gz.
6- Copy the new ABCD.btg.gz file from your working folder to that scenery folder.
7- Now start FlightGear with the UFO and go to your airport. At the beginning you will see nothing but a void. Go up, take some altitude : you can see your airport right there, you were just UNDER it at the start. It floats alone in the middle of the air, but it's all there, you can see what it looks like.
Restoring
When you're done working on the airport layout and you're satisfied :
- Go to the scenery folder and delete the new ABCD.btg.gz.
- Locate the two files that were renamed "BACKUP" at the end, and rename them back to their previous names.