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| STEP 1: Writing goddamn python and shell scripts by pinback 05/09/2016, 1:38pm PDT | ||||
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| So, the way big airplanes move around is, ATC will tell them to fly to a fix. A fix is a place in the sky with a five-letter name. Before we build out the sector, we need to know where all the fixes around ABQ are.
We'll start here, with the world's most excellent air nav info site, airnav.com: http://www.airnav.com/airspace/fix/ . Here, if we know the fix name, we can type it in, and get information on it, particularly it's latitude and longitude values, which is what we'll need to enter into the Tracon editor. Here's our example fix, COWBY, a fix east of Las Vegas which you'll hear ATC direct planes to all the time if you listen to liveatc.net: 35-55-24.840N 113-54-09.940W Our first problem is, on this page, the locations are listed in degree-minute-second format, and Tracon, because it has to make everything more difficult, only accepts decimal values. The math for converting deg/min/sec to decimal is : deg + (min / 60) + (sec / 3600). So, let's first write a Python script (just because I thought it'd be fun) to convert deg-min-sec into decimal, which I'll call "lldec.py": 
(NOTE: I'm not a Python programmer, please be kind.) This script will accept an argument (or arguments) of D/M/S values you want to convert to decimal, and will display the results, comma separated. I notice that airnav.com gives RUNWAY locations in just degree-minute format, so this will also handle that, using the "divisor" array. Also it searches for "S" and "W", which changes the "dir" value, because west longitudes and south latitudes are "negative" in decimal format. See, it works: $ ./lldec.py 35-55-24.840N 113-54-09.940W Now that we have this, the next step is to scrape airnav.com, grab the lat/longs from there, and then feed 'em into our python script. For this, we have a nice bash script now, called findfix.sh: 
Takes fix names as arguments, calls airnav, grabs the lat/long, converts it with lldec.py, and then outputs it with the fix name, comma-separated. Let's try it with our friend, COWBY: $ ./findfix.sh COWBY Alriiiight. Now all we need to do is grab all the names of all the fixes in the ABQ area, which I have not done yet, throw 'em in a text file, and we can convert them all at once into a big ol' CSV file that will make importing all of these bastards into Tracon much, much quicker and easier than it would have been otherwise: 
And there we have it. That's it for STEP 1, join us for STEP 2 where we actually run the Tracon editor and start building the airport already. |
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Here is the thread where I build out a TRACON sector for the game Tracon! 2012 by 05/08/2016, 4:07pm PDT  STEP 1: Writing goddamn python and shell scripts by 05/09/2016, 1:38pm PDT STEP 2: Create a sector file, fix the goddamn file format, and make the airport. by 05/09/2016, 3:15pm PDT Oh yeah, and here's the full sector file as it exists right now. by 05/09/2016, 3:17pm PDT You'd have to escape all the opening and closing angle brackets, sadly by 05/09/2016, 4:59pm PDT STEP 3: Good Christ almighty is the editor a piece of shit by 05/10/2016, 7:45am PDT STEP 4: Fuck this shit. by 05/10/2016, 11:16am PDT |
