afcad

[mitchella330 0]

Hello! I recently downloaded an afcad for Wattay Intl. I'm unfamiliar installing it. How do I do it? And what do afcads do? Because I want to put in gates for the airport because the airport has no gates.

[Opa 6]

The simplest way is to place it in your Addon scenery / scenery subfolder.The afcad you downloaded undoubtably has parking spaces added to the default airport layout and may well have other enhancements such as additional aprons etc.An afcad is simply an airport layout with runway(s), taxiways, parking and so forth. You can also get the Afcad program by Lee Swordy (afcad221.zip here at Avsim) which allows you to open any airport and enhance it.Hope this is of help.

[mitchella330 0]

Very well sir.

[tgibson 11]

Hi,If you mean jetways when you say "gates" AFCAD will NOT add these. You need a program like Instant Scenery to add those, along with a jetway library from the File Library here.If you mean parking places for AI aircraft, AFCAD can add those.Hope this helps,--Tom GibsonCal Classic Propliner Page: http://www.calclassic.comFreeflight Design Shop: http://www.freeflightdesign.comDrop by! ___x_x_(")_x_x___

[mgh 89]

We need to stop referring to general airport files as AFCADs. Lee Swordy wrote an excellent program to edit airport .bgl files and made it freely available for which FS9 users should be eternally grateful.It doesn't deal with evey aspect of airport design and we should stop referring to .bgl files in general as AFCADs. In my view an AFCAD file is one created with AFCAD application.

[scott967 62]

Good point. For anyone else reading this thread, in prior versions of FS, there were separate files called "AFD" files which contained the non-visual aspects of an airport, including the information needed for AI and the user plane to interact with the canned ATC. The AFCAD program opened these files and modified them using a very good GUI editor. AFCAD had a neat feature that allowed just the change information to be distributed as a text file that any AFCAD installation could use to update the default files. Thus, it was unnecessary to to distribute any modified default file.In FS9, MS created a new way of defining airports and gave us a compiler using XML format text files for sources. These airports include all the data previously contained in AFD files, plus visual scenery for all the airport ground scenery and scenery objects, as well as navaids. Another important change was that MS gave us a new exclusion mechanism for the airport AFD data, called deleteAirport. This made it possible to modify the AFD data without having to edit the default files. Lee updated AFCAD so that it would continue to modify the AFD data using the new deleteAirport method, and as a side effect, the changes would also change the ground airport scenery (but not the 3d scenery). There were hints that the ability to modify 3d scenery might be included in a future release, but that never happened. (This would have made AFCAD work on a par with other design tools such as FS Scenery Creator and Airport for Windows). Unfortunately, the limitations in what AFCAD can do in FS9 have caused problems for users. Airport modifications completed with AFCAD have proliferated, to the point that "AFCAD" has become a generic term for modified airport. That's fine as long as it is understood that a complete airport design requires more than just what AFCAD can do, and that the intent of AFCAD is to modify the DEFAULT airports using the deleteAirport mechanism, and other uses (such as remodifying already modified airports) is more in the power-user category, as it is necessary to understand the pitfalls in using AFCAD in this way.scott s..

[mgh 89]

I generally agree with you but disagree that AFCAD caused problems for users. In my experince AFCAD does what it claims to do in the readme file. Most of the problems that I've seen reported in forums arise because users haven't read the readme closely.

[mitchella330 0]

Also recently I downloaded the Active APProach - VHHX (Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport). I succeeded installing it. But there is no traffic departing, landing, taxiing or parked at the gates after I installed both the Active APProach - VHHX (Hong Kong Kai Tak Airport) and the Wattay Intl. Afcad. How can I make traffic work?

[tgibson 11]

Hi,You need to backup your traffic BGL files (in case you want the traffic to go back to VHHH someday), and then decompile them with TTools. Then use Wordpad (not Notepad) to change all of the instances of VHHH to VHHX in the flightplans file. Then add VHHX to the airports.txt file (with lat, long and elevation). Then recompile the file with TTools and use the resulting BGL file instead.Hope this helps,--Tom GibsonCal Classic Propliner Page: http://www.calclassic.comFreeflight Design Shop: http://www.freeflightdesign.comDrop by! ___x_x_(")_x_x___

[mitchella330 0]

what are TTools and where do I find the BGL files?

[tgibson 11]

1. Google - search for: download ttools2. FS2004/Scenery/World/sceneryHope this helps,--Tom GibsonCal Classic Propliner Page: http://www.calclassic.comFreeflight Design Shop: http://www.freeflightdesign.comDrop by! ___x_x_(")_x_x___