Unsure on saving a airfield in ADE9

[garysted]

Gents,

I'm after some help if possible. I used to do simple editing of AFCAD's in the old AFCAD programme, and am trying to do the same in this new ADE9 programme. I'm not experienced at scenery, just editing existing AFCAD's to fit in with my own patterns. The editing is easy (only simple stuff like parking code changes, and altering size and position of parking spots), that seems easy enough and similar to AFCAD, the problem I can't solve is when I save them, and add the .bgl file to the scenery folder in FS9 as I used to, the original default FS9 background (trees, buildings) is still there. I'm aware of the 'exclude' files that scenery developers use to remove these from the airfield, although I don't understand how to do them myself. The impression I was under, was that when doing this editing in ADE9, with a airport designed in that program (or another called AFX?), then the 'excludes' would remain part of the bgl, and that was the reason why you could not edit a ADE9/AFX airport in the original AFCAD. Have I got that right? Yet I'm getting the same result as if I was editing back in AFCAD.

I've carefully looked through the manual that comes with it, and it appears to assume a level of knowledge that I don't have. For the record I 'open airport from bgl', do my editing, and then 'compile airport'. It compiles a .bgl file that is not the same name as the original, and also isn't as big, which I assume is the missing info. A current example I've tried is the AFCAD with the Amberely scenery, although others I have tried have had the same problem, so I assume it's something I'm doing rather than anything with that specific scenery. I did use the 'separate Airport and Object Bgl Files' option as well, and placed the two generated files in the scenery as a experiment, and again the default FS9 background was back.

Can anybody help, as I assume that it's something very simple that I'm doing wrong?

Gary

[kungfuman]

Hi Gary,

When you open some AFX files produced by earlier versions of AFX, their excludes do not always work correctly in ADE. What is the name of the file from Amberley that you are trying to open?

Just had a look, and the Amberley file is an "AF2" named file, suggesting that it was produced by "AFCAD". Therefore the only thing it will likely contain is AFCAD-compatible data. This means that any excluding of objects will be due to other files you have active in your scenery folders.

When you recompile your afcad using ADE, you will need to disable the original afcad (unless you overwrite the old file with the new one, by selecting the same name in the "compile" window). ADE produced afcads are like any other afcad in the sense that you should generally only have one active afcad for a given airfield. So when you make adjustments using ADE, bear that in mind.

Now that isn't a direct answer to your question, but hopefully it is something helpful? Please continue to ask, and we'll get to the bottom of the problem

[garysted]

Hi Dan,

You're right, the AFCAD file in the Amberley scenery is called 'AF2_LOZ_YAMB'. I must admit I noticed it was the 'AF2' prefix rather than the 'AFX' I was expecting but the discussion on the Amberley thread here indicated it was made with AFX and could not be edited unless you had either AFX or ADE9 upon it's release. Not knowing if this was accurate or not I can't judge. Looking in the 'scenery' file of the Amberely scenery I don't see any separate 'exclude' bgl's like what I see on older AFCAD sceneries. I'm guessing here as I'm really out of my depth, but if the above file was a standard AFCAD afterall, and I edited just the minor details as before, and then saved to the scenery folder and deleted the earlier file and nothing else, surely that would not effect any excludes that were there, even if I did not know what they were?

Also when I import the AF2_LOZ_YAMB file it is 63k, after any edit, even a small one, and then compiled, it now appears as 'YAMB_ADE9_ADE' and is 51.9k. So appears to have lost data, which makes me think it's not including the exclude data.

I tried various options to see if I could get it to work, and the 'separate Airport and Object Bgl Files' adds another bgl file to the above called 'YAMB_ADE9_ADE_OBJ' which is 56 bytes. I tried the scenery with those two replacing the original single file, and still have the same problem. I don't know if that relevant or not.

I have always deleted the first version of the AFCAD when testing this problem, so there should be no duplicates causing problems. Although my current test is on the Amberely scenery, I have had the exact same problem when attempting to edit David Bernard's various Norwegian Airfields AFX bgl files (AFX_ENOL_DJB.bgl is one example) and the recent ACG release of RAF Marham, also a AFX file - the results in saving the edited bgl's in ADE9 always causes exactly the same problem. With Amberley, it's not a major problem as I can work around the parking, but it's something I would like to solve as most developers appear to be releasing their sceneries with AFX files and to loose the ability to do minor edits would be a real pain.

Is it possible to confirm that I am at least doing the correct process when saving the file in ADE9?

Any further help greatly appreciated!

Gary

[campbeme]

I'm not trying to be smart here, but why don't you just make a new exclude in ADE9?

Mark

[garysted]

I'm not trying to be smart here, but why don't you just make a new exclude in ADE9?

Mark

Hi,

At the moment I don't know how to do that, it's not something I'm familiar with. That said, if there turns out to be no other option then I will have a go at working out how to. But, going back to my original problem, I can't be the only person who's come across this, but I've run a few search's and can't find anything, so that leads me to believe that it's a simple process that can be done in the ADE9 programme, just I don't know what it is!

Afterall, all I'm looking for is to save the AFX bgl in the same useable format as I imported it, surely the programme can do that?

Gary

[kungfuman]

I just want to clarify something first: When you say the file gets smaller after you've compiled it, what are you comparing it to? Are you comparing to the size of the ADE project file - the file that you are working on in the ADE user interface, which has a .AD2 extension? Or are you comparing it to the original unedited "MAIW_AF2_***.bgl" file? If the new file is significantly smaller than the latter, then the problem is deeper. By the way, when you change the parking codes, do you generally end up with more total codes in your parking spots, or less?

Afterall, all I'm looking for is to save the AFX bgl in the same useable format as I imported it, surely the programme can do that?

ADE can do this fine with the majority of AFX-produced bgl files, although an early version of AFX is not fully compatible. Unfortunately some of the MAIW released AFX files, as well as other 3rd party AFX files, were created using that early version of AFX.

[garysted]

I just want to clarify something first: When you say the file gets smaller after you've compiled it, what are you comparing it to? Are you comparing to the size of the ADE project file - the file that you are working on in the ADE user interface, which has a .AD2 extension? Or are you comparing it to the original unedited "MAIW_AF2_***.bgl" file? If the new file is significantly smaller than the latter, then the problem is deeper. By the way, when you change the parking codes, do you generally end up with more total codes in your parking spots, or less?

Afterall, all I'm looking for is to save the AFX bgl in the same useable format as I imported it, surely the programme can do that?

ADE can do this fine with the majority of AFX-produced bgl files, although an early version of AFX is not fully compatible. Unfortunately some of the MAIW released AFX files, as well as other 3rd party AFX files, were created using that early version of AFX.

Hi Dan,

I appreciate you staying with me. I am comparing the compiled bgl with the very first untouched bgl file. As I understand it the .AD2 file is if you save as a work in progress? Saving the Amberley file ('save airport') gives you a .AD2 of 537k, and I understand that file is not a finished bgl file for adding to a scenery file. Amberely as pulled directly from the scenery file is 63k, after a minor edit it compiles to 51.9k.

The changes I've made to Amberely were to just remove 4 or 5 parking codes and add one of my own to the same spots. When I did ACG's Marham I added some new parking. I've tested this on several files and any changes to the AFX file (I even just moved a taxi link slightly with one AFX file and compiled) and the same issue occurs, loss of file size and excludes on the scenery. I'll do some more experiments now and try and see what happens.

Gary

[FlyEF]

You can read in the forum fsdeveloper.com, there is a subforum ADE.
I think you can't do excludes and airport backgrounds with ADE9 (only with ADEX for FSX). You have to do it for FS9 with SBuilder or a programm like this.

Horst

[kungfuman]

If you want to take up Mark's advice and just create some excludes, you can do this very easily within ADE9. But you cannot do airport backgrounds.

The general thrust of the design philosophy of ADE9 seems to be tailored for the creation of brand new "afcads", built starting from the default "stock" airfield elements as a foundation to your project. However, your prime concern is using ADE9 to modify pre-existant non-stock "afcads" (ie. AF2/AFX/ADE files), if I understand correct.

ADE has the potential to work with a much wider set of elements compared to AFCAD. When you start an airfield from scratch, ADE will furnish you with the ability to control all these elements, and therefore an ADE-produced bgl file will contain data relating to this wider scope of airfield elements. But when you "load from the bgl", you are generally loading an AFCAD-produced bgl file that contains a much narrower scope of airfield elements. So even though you are using ADE, what you are working with is equivalent to the same things that we all used to work with using AFCAD, ie. no excludes, taxisigns, scenery objects etc. (If loading a compatible AFX-produced bgl file, then you also get excludes and taxi-signs, if the author of that file included any.) However, as I said, ADE is better set-up for working from stock airfields, and certain stock elements that ADE has control over are suppressed, so that FS9 reads the modified version of that data from the ADE-produced bgl file rather than from the default/stock data libraries.

Now, if you are using ADE to work with the "narrow-scope" of data from an add-on bgl produced by AFCAD or AFX, then you need to "flesh-out" your ADE file, because when you compile it, ADE will have inserted an instruction into the bgl telling FS9 to look for some of this "wider-scope" of ADE-compatible data from within the bgl, instead of looking at the stock data. But because all the data you are currently working with (having "loaded from the bgl") came from these older "narrow-scope" programs of AFCAD and AFX, when FS9 looks for this "wider-scope" data in the bgl, it won't find anything. You can "flesh-out" your file by loading this stock data into the ADE project file. The most certain thing to go AWOL when working with AFCAD/AFX-produced bgl files in ADE is the Approaches: If the original file had AI aircraft performing instrument approaches, then you will need to import these. Go to the "Tools" menu and click on "Load stock data". Tick the "Approaches" box. The file should now be ready for you to edit.

After having loaded an AFX-produced bgl file that seems to be losing its excludes when you compile, you can sometimes sort the problem by loading the stock "Scenery Objects". ADE9 will automatically exclude the stock scenery objects when you do this, in effect telling FS9 to look for this data in the bgl file instead. So now all you have to do is delete all these newly loaded scenery objects from the ADE screen. When you do this, ADE will lose the actual objects, but retain the useful micro-excludes that it created when you imported the stock data. This will also give you the opportunity to keep some of the objects in the file if you wish, or even just move them around to better fit the afcad. Now that you have all the necessary micro-excludes, you can usually delete the faulty excludes that came with the original AFX-produced bgl file, and compile the ADE project-file once you're happy with everything.

Sorry, that's probably gone on a bit of a tangent from what you were trying to find out I apologise if it's all gobbledygook...

[FlyEF]

Sorry - I meant terrain excludes and airport backgrounds.
ADE9 use the microsoft bgl-compiler of SDK2004. AFX use a selfwritten compiler like afcad.

[garysted]

Hi Dan/all,

I spent some time last night going back and rereading the manual and doing some more trial and error. I came across a passage in the manual (must have missed it first time around) confirming, as you've said above, that when using ADE9 on a existing .bgl airport the excludes will not carry over. That was a large part of the problem, as I was convinced that I was making a error, and was trying to correct that, rather than it not being possible.

I jumped in and had a ago with the exclude tool in ADE9, and think I have a solution. If I do my parking edits first, then add a exclude rectangle, to the airport and compile, I get two bgl files, and by adding both to my scenery the stock buildings are gone. I did find that if I carry out another edit to the airport .bgl then the stock buildings are back, so it looks a new exclude has to be done after every edit in ADE9. That's fine though, as long as it works. After I did this I saw your comment about ILS approaches, which was something that I hadn't considered. I checked a few ILS approach's into Amberely and I don't see no unusual behaviour, so am guessing that if something was wrong there, the aircraft would behave differently. I think I understand the other thoughts about pulling in the stock buildings into ADE9 and then manually deleting each one on the screen, but as the above appears to be working for the moment I'm going to go with that. I'll do some more edits on Amberley and a couple of others and hope the above process works ok.

Thanks very much for the detailed help, very much appreciated.

Gary

[kungfuman]

As long as it is working for you, that is good news

[scruffyduck]

Apologies for adding a late post to this thread but the issues raised are important.

ADE works with both FS9 and FSX. We usually refer to ADEX and ADE9 to differentiate between capabilities. ADEX can handle terrain elements such as airport backgrounds, flattens and excludes. The methods used in FSX are different than FS9. At this time ADE9 does not handle these elements and SBUilder may be required.

Excluding autogen behaves differently in FS9 and FSX. In FS9 it is possible to get rid of things like autogen trees by setting an exclusion rectangle to exclude all. In FSX this does not work and a terrain exclusion is required (which ADEX can do.

ADE in both versions handles scenery elements as well as airport elements (unlike AFCAD and AFX which handle only Airport Elements). When starting from a stock airport ADE will automatically load stock buildings, taxi signs, navaids, waypoints and so on. At the same time it creates micro excludes for library objects, taxi signs and generic buildings inside the airport boundary. Removing (or excluding) these elements from an ADE project requires only that the user delete the object in ADE. The hidden micro exclude takes care of hiding the item from the stock airport. This feature can trap users coming over from AFCAD/AFX where exclusions must be created by the user. In ADE manually added exclusions can actually cause problems. We have found in testing that exclusion rectangles that overlap each other and have different flag settings (what they exclude) causes unpredictable behavior. The same thing happens, of course, if you overlap user added exclusion rectangles with different settings.

ADE can read bgl files created by other utilities provided they are compiled for FS9 or FSX. We had some issues with the latest AFX files where a new element code was introduced that ADE did not recognize and therefore failed to load. In all the testing we have done it is very unusual for ADE not to load a bgl created by another utility.

The generally best method to get an AF2 or AFX created bgl file into ADE is to first load the bgl file. Next use the Load Stock Data feature (from the tools menu) to add things like stock buildings, navaids and waypoints that will not be in that file. Doing this brings the project pretty much up to the 'standard' for an airport loaded from stock. ADE can also load items from a bgl file that contains airport elements such as taxi signs and so on. Although this is not perfect and the user needs to take care! When loading stock objects ADE creates the micro excludes referred to above and there should be no need for the user to create their own. Just delete things you do not want and they will be gone from the airport.

The ADE project file cannot be read by FS. This is a particular format that contains a lot of information about the project that the bgl file cannot hold. We took the decision very early on to have a separate format to store the project. We have also noted that continually decompiling and re-compiling a bgl file can result in some drift of values. Utilities such as AFCAD and particularly AFX do add stuff into the bgl file to mimic some things but they are limited in what they can store by what the bgl format will accept. Compiling an ADE project will create the bgl file(s) that are used by FS. This does cause some issues for users migrating from AFCAD/AFX since there is a tendency to open from the bgl file each time instead of the project file. Doing it this way is bound to lose data.

A final point on AFCAD/AFX files in ADE. Both AFCAD and AFX use their own compilers and these do not always conform to the MS standards. Of course FS can read them but there are some features that use undocumented scenery engine elements. ADE uses Microsoft Compilers and therefore has to conform to the limitations etc of them. This generally makes itself felt in compiler limits. AFCAD breaks some limits - like say number of taxiways, special characters in names and so on. These can give rise to compiler failures in ADE - or to be accurate in BglComp. As we find them we do try and add controls in ADE to warn users. Nevertheless we can come up against some that could mean significant modification to the AFCAD/AFX file to get it to compile with BglComp. In these cases it is a moot point as to whether it is worth bringing that particular airport into ADE.

Apologies if y'all know all this and I am wasting forum space

[BadPvtDan]

The community always appreciates input and clarification Jon. Thank you.

[fishlips]

Guy's,

RAAF Amberley (YAMB) is developed on real life co-ords using photo-real ground not FS default so you may find a few things that look strange but are in fact correct.
This is the same or similar issue with that we have seen when using ADE9 afcad on RAAF Williamtown.

Mark