Caltrops - Pinback's Web Central





	[quote name="pinback"]So, there I was happily creating ol' ABQ, which consists of just giving it a name, a location, and a tower frequency, and then adding the runways (all based on data from airnav.com), when I ran into an interesting problem... I couldn't save it. Every time I went to save, I got "AirportEd.exe has stopped working". A couple hours of trial/error and hunting around the internet led me to the answer: THE EDITOR PACKAGED WITH THE GAME CANNOT SAVE RUNWAYS. Which means, if you add a runway to a sector (even a blank one), or edit a runway in an existing sector, you CANNOT use the "save" feature. Which, I think, after airplanes themselves, runways are like, THE MOST IMPORTANT THING in aviation. And "saving" is the most important feature in an editor. That this colossal fuckup happened, and after four years has still not (and will never be) fixed, well, let me just sum it up this way: It's the ATC sim genre. Fuck you. And by you, I mean, the paying consumer. By which I mean me. Anyway, I found a thread on an old dead forum with a guy who supplied a clean sector file that works, and that can act as a basis for new sector generation, and that doesn't immediately cause the editor and the simulator to crash. You still can't use the editor to make runways, for that, you MUST use a text editor and dick around with the XML manually. Which I was going to do anyway to add all my fixes (see previous steps), but Jesus Christ. Wait, let me check something on the product page (http://www.feelthere.com/en/product/567_tracon-2012.html) [quote] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gtG0oHtBZs">-Create new Tracons, schedules and airplanes using the same editors used by the development team</a> [/quote] No chance. Anyway, I was finally able to add a runway that worked. Then of course you need at least one approach/departure procedure for each runway, or the SIMULATOR will crash to desktop, so I created a placeholder one ("CADAT"). Then the MAGIC started. I went to airnav.com, downloaded all of the approach/departure procedures, and then went through each one and made a list of all the fixes involved in all of them. The total number was 112, I believe. Well, I just put those 112 fixes into a file, ran all my fancy scripts, ran ANOTHER script to turn them all into the fucked up XML format the goddamn game wants it to be in, then shoved all that XML into the file, SAVED it (that works with text editors), and BOOM: <img src="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/pinback/abq3.jpg"/> Lookit all them fixes. All in the right place! And the simulator doesn't even crash on it within the first five seconds. And look, it even generated a departure. Look at ol' Tsunami 4 (airline doesn't exist anymore), faithfully flying my made-up CADAT departure. Next steps are: - Adding the rest of the runways. - Adding "navaids", which are like fixes, but only three letters instead of five. - Adding "center" sectors (areas where you can hand off departures to the next guy in the ATC chain) - Adding roads and doohickeys to make it look nice. - Adding realistic traffic. ...and most importantly... - Adding Wayfarer 515. ;) [/quote]