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Sounds like a great idea! As an optional add-on, if there happens to be some missing airports/helipads/seabases in the area in question those who are comfortable in WED could coordinate getting these put into the gateway as well.

Unfortunately, the gateway is not really meant for download (although you can certainly do that). It's main purpose is for upload for future Xplane updates. If you manually download an airport from the gateway, you will need to keep track of that and remove it when it is finally included for everyone. If you don't remove it, it will take precedence over any further updates that may have happened at the gateway. I don't know of any way to tell if you have duplicates. Maybe they will include something in a future update. I'm hoping we can assume that all approved airports will be included in future updates so that after an update, we can remove ALL airports that we manually downloaded and put in Custom Scenery. You could always just put them temporarily in another folder outside of the Xplane directory and if they dissappear put them back. Vince

Yes, the map is getting updated. I'm not sure if it's automated, but seems to be as my submissions show up on the map soon after. The first push of gateway airports will be happening with 10.35. See here: http://developer.x-plane.com/ Vince

Agreed, before you know it you'll be spending all your time creating scenery instead of flying. Or you'll try and do both and your family will only see you when you get hungry

Yes! Check this out: http://developer.x-plane.com/manuals/wed/

I understand the point of view of "why should we have to do this?". Well, you don't. However, the reality is that LR is not going to do it immediately so we can either all sit here and stew or some of us can use the provided tools and try to fill in the gaps. Speaking only for myself as someone who contributes to the gateway, I don't feel others are obligated to contribute. However, I have tried to gently persuade others that it's not that hard to do if you are upset about a missing airport or some missing buildings at your favorite strip. That's basically how I started. My local airstrip that I soar out of every summer was nothing by a patch of trees in Xplane. I knew there were tools to create our own airports, but I thought for sure it would be really complicated and I didn't want to waste days trying to figure it out. Finally I gave in an fired up WED. Well, without reading any documentation (who does that!) or looking at the great tutorials online, I muddled around a bit and managed to create something, but there were issues. The first being trees all over my runway. I almost gave up at that point, thinking this is junk. However, the fact that I had just created something that I could instantly fly around grabbed me and I decided to suck it up and go read the WED manual and do a few searches online. Once I found the 'exclusion zone' and my runway popped out all nice and clear I was hooked! If I had taken the time to read the manual first and check out a few basic tutorials it would have been a smoother experience I guess what I'm trying to say is that I don't think everyone is obligated to jump in and learn how to use WED. However, I am trying to say that if you are upset enough to maybe give up on Xplane due to missing airports/buildings, learning to create one yourself may keep you simming in Xplane and you may also find yourself a new aspect of the hobby. It's not for everyone, but it's also not as hard as it sounds and many may be surprised how easy it is once they give it a go - and read the manual

Well, we can argue whose job it is, but it's very simple using WED to add just the runways for a missing airport if that is all you want to do. It would probably take all of 15 minutes to plop down the runways in the right spot, set the ICAO, elevation, a quick exclusion zone, and submit it. I find it only takes me about 4 hours total to create a single strip, small community airport with everything. Most people might not want to go to that level, but I actually find it quite fun to create something that wasn't there before and then go fly around it. I would rather LR spent their limited resources on more complicated coding tasks. Sure it would be nice if they could do everything, but at least they've provided a way for us to fill in the gaps. Creating simple airports is not that hard. Give it a go, you might be surprised how much fun it is once you learn the basics of WED.

Hmm, maybe the gateway was down when you tried? I can see that scenery just fine. I used the link from the map and also went there directly. It shows a 2D scenery added by the WEDbot. Hopefully you can grab it by trying again. Vince

I have the physical version and use Daemon Tools Lite to create a virtual drive and no longer need to leave the CD in the actual drive. I'm curious if the Steam version will let you play if you are offline (i.e. internet goes down, Steam goes down, etc). I know there is an offline mode for some games in Steam, but does it work for X-Plane? Being connected to Steam would be a form of verification that you own the game and would replace having the physical media

Thank you so much Tony, that did the trick! Vince

Thanks for the link Tony! I gave the program a try, but unfortunately I couldn't get it to download anything. It started up fine, I selected an area, then hit Start. It showed a download dialog, but no progress bar or any indication of what was happening. Your description gave me a light bulb moment though: If I use google maps to pinpoint the 4 corners of my image (by using the build in "What's here"), I can move each corner of the image in WED to that location! Not quite as slick as the program would do for me probably, but way faster than my initial method of changing zoom levels and stretching the image by keying off things I've already put down. Can't believe I didn't think of that before! Cheers! Vince

For a poor mans ortho photo I use Google maps Satellite/Earth view and the Windows snipping tool to take a screenshot. This image will not have any location data or size information so it takes some tweaking to use this method. Note that this method will only yield rough results that will need to be cleaned up. You also cannot leave the image as part of your submission. 1) Zoom in/out in google maps so you can see the area you want to work on 2) Open the snipping tool. For Windows 7 this is under Accessories. You can probably use other screen capture software if you don't have this particular tool. 3) Outline your image and then save as a .png 4) Place some key items around your airport first so you can line your image up. i.e. all runways and a few other items that you can use to line things up. Use google maps to get a precise lat/long for these intial items using the "What's here" after right clicking on a spot. 5) Now the trial and error part: in WED, zoom in/out so you can see the area you want to work on. Import your .png using import orthophoto and drag it over your airport to position it. The zoom setting of your image and your airport will likely not be the same. zoom in or out in WED a little, delete the image you just imported, and try again. 6) You will likely not find an exact match in zoom settings so once things are close, you will have to manually stretch your image while it is selected so that the image items line up with your initial WED items from step 4. 7) Trace out and place all your items 8) Use google maps "What's here" to get precise lat/long info for key verticies to clean things up. I've had pretty good success with this, but it is a fair bit of work as you have to go around and fine tune/cleanup the end result. Hope this helps.

They are free and will hopefully be part of the base airports delivered with future updates to xplane. The scenery gateway is here: *edit* Weird, it chopped everything off after I tried to post a link to the gateway. Anyway, you can download as yet unreleased airports from the scenery gateway, but you will have to remove them later when the are finally released as part of a future xplane release. Look under the "Airport Scenery" tab to search for particular airports or by artist. I'll try to post the link again: gateway.x-plane.com/airports/page

Hi all, Something's gone terribly wrong, I'm having more fun creating airports and submitting them to the gateway than I am actually flying Who knew it would be so addictive to create an airport? I'm slowing learning (and likely abusing) WED and building up to more complex airports. I'm also probably driving Tyler Y. nuts with my constant ICAO requests as I try to populate everything you can land on in my region (Ottawa, Ontario, Canada). I think one of the most fun so far was a parking lot, rooftop helipad for the Casino du Lac Leamy. Gotta make sure those high rollers can land Does anyone happen to have a link to what all the standard facades (.fac files) look like? I've mulled over the idea of creating a grid of building with all the facades so I can quickly find one that looks like what I want. At this point, I've just been randomly guessing and perhaps not finding the best fit when there is something better. Cheers, Vince