Vacation

I am away from tomorrow (Sept 19th) until October 4th.  I will not have internet access during that time.

Airport Design Editor Gets it’s Own Web Site

This site has been in the wings for a while but we have decided to make it active now and release a newer version of the program (0.52).  This is still very much a work in progress version.  you can check out the site at http://www.airportdesigneditor.co.uk  and download the new version from there.

Should Tools Restrict Users Ability to Get Down and Dirty?

I did not realize just how long it has been since I posted here.  Time has just flown by.  I had a small accident that kept me from work for a couple of weeks but I am back at the day job again.  I am continuing to work on Airport Design Editor.  The pace of development has slowed down as I take a bit more time on things and I realize how much there is to learn as I go along.  One of the challenges for Airport Design (and I guess scenery design in general) is how much design knowledge to build into the tool and how much it is up to the user to learn what to do.

There are two schools of thought.  The one that says ‘make everything available and let the user beware’  SDE is much like that – it gives no help and does not stop or warn about mistakes.  At the other end is the ‘make the tool so it stops mistakes’  Thus if it is known that certain things will not work or are dangerous to the airport or the Sim then do not allow them.

ADE is right now somewhere in the middle.  It does try to help users avoid mistakes.  There is no separate error checker at the moment (as found in other airport design tools)  The design philosophy is to try and stop mistakes at the time and not later or have the compiler find them for you.  This does lead to some situations in which the user cannot do things they might want to do that are actually OK but don’r make a lot of sense most of the time.  An example is comm frequencies – should the tool allow the user to specify a frequency that is not used for comms in the real world?

I guess however things end up there will be some users who want the added benefits of ‘real time protection’ and others who will want to get down and dirty.  That seems fine to me and is one of the tings that makes this hobby so worth while.

Forum

I have closed the ScruffyDuck Scenery Forum for the time being.  Over the past few weeks there has been a marked increase in the number of spurious spam sign ups.  While each of them needs me to authorize the account it is becoming irritating to spend time each day going through and deleting this trash.  There is no way on the forum to stop new sign ups while maintaining access to existing users.  I am looking around for alternatives but in the meantime please contact me direct if you have any queries or questions.

Airport Design Editor Progress

It has been a good couple of weeks of progress.  ADE is at last beginning to look like a useful utility.  I am now adding things like Add and Delete.  Most objects are now displayed correctly, drag, drop, zoomimg and so on works in the way that I expect it to.

Currently I am thinking about adding and deleting, particularly in relation to taxiways.  Adding points, paths and so on plus what happens when a point is deleted that has several paths attached to it. 

It will be a while yet before everything is in place but the guys over at fsdeveloper.com are a great help.  In the meantime I will try to release one new build each week.

New Versions of SDE Applications Available

I have today released new versions for SDE TestApp, Bgl2Xml Command line and Bgl2Xml GUI.  Each application now uses version 0.95 of SDE.  This version should deal with most problems.  SDE TestApp and Bgl2Xml GUI now both have online update checking.  This is manual and accessed from the help menu.  You will be given URLs to download newer versions of the application and engine library files if required.  It is up to you whether to download or not.  The Updater will also advise you what the update does and how important it is.

Graphical Interface Gets a Name

I held  a small informal poll with my colleagues on fsdeveloper.com and the name of the new application is Airport Design Editor, or ADE – pronounced ‘aid’ in the hope that it will aid users to modify existing and develop new airport facilities.  Currently I am planning the interface and hope to start coding in the next week.

Away from my PC

I will be away from my PC for the next four days enjoying some peace and quiet and, if the weather forecasters have gotten it right for once, sunshine

So for those who celebrate it I wish you a very Happy Easter and to everyone else a happy, safe and peaceful weekend.

Graphical Interface for SDE

Not much to report except that work has started on creating a graphical client for SDE.  It will be a program to edit or create airport and facilities data for FSX.  Over the next few months I hope to be able to report progress here.  Step one is to be able to represent the information about an airport in a graphical form – not very clever – a lot of existing tools can do that – but an important first step for me since I am not really a graphics programmer (well not yet anyway ).

Bgl2Xml Released

Bgl2Xml is a command line program that uses SDE to generate XML from a BGL file.  It has no GUI and carries out only one task – generating an XML file.  As such it replicates BglAnalyzeX.  It uses the latest version of SDE.  Please check the main web site for details.