I wonder if it has occured to anyone what tools the FSX development team at Microsoft/Aces Studio use to create the airports and terrain in FSX? They must have to go through all the issues we try to solve on our own and I wonder why they allow us to reinvent the wheel (developing our own utilities) rather than just provide us with the same tools they use. I'm sure even if they charged a reasonable fee for those tools their would be a good market in the FS development community for "official" utilities. Anyone have any thoughts?

Hi,I have never seen their tools, but from what I know they have conversion tools that are hooked up to a big database that contains all the data of the world. And from that they automatically generate all the scenery.So that means that those tools would not really be useful to use, as we don't have that big database with data to feed it. Besides that most FS users are not so familiar with GIS (and GIS data) to be able to work with it.I might be wrong, but I don't think they are editing all the details of an airport or piece of terrain as we usually do. They are more editing the data that goes into the conversion I guess.

I found this post here:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...id=383312&page=

Good Morning Horst:Thank you for providing the link above. I hadn't read the original post and found the comments by the MS staffer very interesting.All The BestTom G, Sr.