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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