Beginner wants just to add a runway

[Guest]

Hi all,I've never dabbled in scenery creation for MSFS before, so I am an absolute novice in this area. I'm only interested in adding a new runway to an existing US airport (and maybe moving some taxiways around). Is this task difficult?I've looked at the various freeware scenery editors, and it looks like Airport for Windows is the best free candidate to use for this. The problem is that the tutorial/help doesn't really give you very good instruction -- especially regarding how to edit existing airports, as opposed to just creating a new one.If I understand the process correctly, I need to use BGLAnalyze to disassemble the BGL file, edit it with Airport for Windows, and then use SCASM to reassemble it. The main problem is that I'm not really sure which BGL file has the scenery for the airport in question.Can anyone offer me any sort of brief overview of how to add a new runway to an exisiting airport? As far as using the scenery editor, I'm usually pretty good at figuring things out; as I mentioned though, I'm not really sure how to find the BGL file I'm looking for and/or how to open up the existing airport. Is Airport for Windows the best free program to use to do this? Are then any tips/tricks anyone can offer? Am I going about this the right way, or is it much more complicated than I think? :-hmmmThanks!

[arno 1]

This is an often made thinking error, but you do not modify the existing scenery.You just make a new BGL that contains everything you want to add. You can use Airport for example to do this.If there is anything in the default scenery you want to get rid off, you can make an exclude BGL and that will remove those things you don't need.This works much better, just assume that everybody would change the default files to add there new things. Then it would become a complete mess when everybody tried to share their work :).Arno

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Member Netherlands 2000 Scenery Team[a href=http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen]http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen/banner.jpg[/a]

[Guest]

Ah ha, well that makes sense. :-)Thanks very much for the response. Time to take another crack at Aiport again, then.

[Guest]

Well, I was successfully able to add the runway (hurray!). However, if I want to add/move some of the taxiways around, I know I have to make an exclude BGL. In this case, it seems like the easiest thing to do would be to take a copy of the default scenery, and use that as a model for what should be excluded (I can imagine it would be hard to precisely lineup all exclude taxiways I create with the exact position of the real taxiways). In this case, don't I need to figure out which BGL file contains the original airport so I can use it as a model?Thanks!

[arno 1]

You can not load a default BGL in Airport, so I am afraid that will not work.But you can make a screenshot in topdown view in FS and use that as background image. If you also have the runway on the screenshot you can calculate the scale (pixels/meter) and then place it with the correct scale in Airport. Then you can draw over this image.Arno

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Member Netherlands 2000 Scenery Team[a href=http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen]http://home.wanadoo.nl/arno.gerretsen/banner.jpg[/a]

[wsieffert 0]

There are several ways to do the exclude with airport or FSSC. One way is to take a screen shot of the airport from above (CTRL-S), adjust the view distance (Views, View Options) to include your entire airport. Place yourself in the aircraft in slew mode (Y), hit the spacebar (will align you to North), make sure the brakes are off (.), then use FSScreen or one of the other screen capture programs to take the picture. Take a couple different pictures, depending on your airport's direction and use the best one to use as a background picture in Airport or FSSC.Once you have the background picture correctly sized in Airport or FSSC, you can do the exclude. One way is to use the exclude function to cover the entire airport. Another way is to find the Airport reference point (Thanks, Dick aka Rhumbaflappy) and exclude it. If you are using Airport, visit the airport forum at www.flightsim.com for a discussion on the reference point exclude.The background picture helps you also to align all the new stuff you might put in your new design.