Simple Airport Scanner Released

[scruffyduck]

Mods - I hope this is OK to place here. If not then please move or remove it.

Simple Airport Scanner is a stand alone tool that allows you to scan your scenery files and get a list of Addon airports. It will also help you to understand where you have multiple files containing an airport. SAS does not read stock airports. SAS works with FS9/FSX and P3D. It can be downloaded from http://www.airportdesigneditor.co.uk

[BadPvtDan]

Does Norton go ape shit for anyone else when trying to download?

[scruffyduck]

There have been a couple of hundred downloads of this tool in the last beta and release. I have not had any other reports of problems. What is Norton saying?

[BadPvtDan]

That there was a virus associated with that IP. I shoulda grabbed a screen but I'm getting ready to travel. I wanted to have it to play with when I returned next week!

It's almost certainly a false alarm and the AVs seem to be doing this more and more.

[scruffyduck]

That there was a virus associated with that IP. I shoulda grabbed a screen but I'm getting ready to travel. I wanted to have it to play with when I returned next week!

It's almost certainly a false alarm and the AVs seem to be doing this more and more.

The IP is MediaFire. Sometimes it seems to get reported as a bad site for some reason. If you can't get it let me know and I will post an alternate address for it.

[petebramley]

No probs from here

[RKE]

Thanks Jon.

Looks and feels like a beefed up ScanAFD, mainly in that it catches some scenery files that ScanAFD doesn't (mainly altitude correction files). Sadly also suffers from the old issue that ScanAFD has, whereby it picks up everything with an "airport header" and assumes that it's a dupe. As a result, it lists 172 scenery entries (ScanAFD lists 70) with supposed duplicate files, where most of them aren't duplicates.

Then again, some sceneries are truly messed up, like the "China Airports version 2" scenery by Winfried Orthmann where each scenery file holds the AP/Object data for more than one airfield, or VOZ which I generally can't make head or tail of what they've done

[scruffyduck]

Thanks Jon.

Looks and feels like a beefed up ScanAFD, mainly in that it catches some scenery files that ScanAFD doesn't (mainly altitude correction files). Sadly also suffers from the old issue that ScanAFD has, whereby it picks up everything with an "airport header" and assumes that it's a dupe. As a result, it lists 172 scenery entries (ScanAFD lists 70) with supposed duplicate files, where most of them aren't duplicates.

Then again, some sceneries are truly messed up, like the "China Airports version 2" scenery by Winfried Orthmann where each scenery file holds the AP/Object data for more than one airfield, or VOZ which I generally can't make head or tail of what they've done

As far as I know ScanAFD works with FS9 where SAS works with FSX and P3D as well.

Well it actually reads name records rather than airport headers but the result is the same. As to assuming things are dupes I am at pains to say that it is not finding duplicates but finding addon airports and reporting where they are stored. Perhaps the checkbox called duplicates is misleading and I might change it. There is no way that I know of whereby a scanner can determine if a file is a true dupe or just another copy of an airport. In fact most issues for users are not caused by identical airport files but rather files containing different arrangements of the same airport. Sometimes these are indeed intended and create the whole that the user sees, In other cases they can cause unexpected behaviour and I have lost count of the number of times folks say that their changes do not display only to find another file containing the airport at a higher priority is undoing all their good work. The code is actually part of ADE and the original intention was to provide a specific display covering the currently loaded airport project. This is still the case but in development we decided to give it a stand alone interface as well.

So the order that the entries are listed in the display is very important The one at the top is the last one loaded by FS and is therefore the one that 'trumps' the others. Now if the scanner shows a file listed above the one the user is working on then it is a pretty good indication of where the problem might be. It may be that all the user needs to do is change the priority of their work.

My personal view is that some more information needs to be included to explain what it all means and how to use it.

I am planning to make the display of altitude files in Scenery\World\scenery optional since I do think they can be red herrings and generally there is no problem with them. As I say I really think this is about education for the general user on what they are seeing.


If you can tell me a way to do it better I would love to hear