Runway or Taxiway? Surface Detection Question

[ali]

Hello everyone,

I have a question, is there any way to understand whether aircraft is at the taxiway or runway?

I know, there is an offset for surface and it says concrete, grass etc. but while on a major airport it always says that concrete or asphalt, but no information for runway, taxiway. Is it something related with scenery, afcad... or is there any offset for this property?

Thanks in advance.

[Pete Dowson]

I have a question, is there any way to understand whether aircraft is at the taxiway or runway?

I think the only way is to build a database of runway positions and sizes and check against that. The data for this is contained in the airport facilities data part of the scenery BGLs (AFD files).

I have a program ("MakeRunways") which compiles a database by scanning all the active BGLs in your particular FS installation -- it scans those sceneries marked as active in your SCENERY.CFG file. This produces the sort of file you will find in my FStarRC package (the .rws file is made that way).

Programs such as Trafficboard and Flight Keeper make their own databases the same sort of way, but retain more of the data in the AFD files.

Regards,

Pete

[ali]

Thanks for your quick reply Pete. Seems like performing all these steps at every user will be hard to do.

[Pete Dowson]

Thanks for your quick reply Pete. Seems like performing all these steps at every user will be hard to do.

Well, what programs which need such data do is ask the user to run a database update (either a separate program or one built into the application) each time they update their scenery. It doesn't need changing otherwise.

Regards,

Pete

[ali]

I have a program ("MakeRunways") which compiles a database by scanning all the active BGLs in your particular FS installation -- it scans those sceneries marked as active in your SCENERY.CFG file. This produces the sort of file you will find in my FStarRC package (the .rws file is made that way).

Hello Pete,

I've made a search fot that "MakeRunways" program but couldn't find anything like that. Can you write any address to find that program?

Thanks for your great help.

Best regards.

[Pete Dowson]

I've made a search fot that "MakeRunways" program but couldn't find anything like that. Can you write any address to find that program?

You won't find it anywhere, it's not released. I provided it only to two folks so far to make their databases. I'll send you a copy, but it is undocumented and unsupported. Just place it in your main FS folder and run it. It makes several files -- a very large text file listing airports and runways, and several database files -- .rws in binary and some .csv (comma separated values) format files.

Regards,

Pete

[ali]

I've got the file, Pete. Thank you very much for your interest and help.

Best wishes.

[ricardoherrera]

Hi Pete.

Can I get the File too? :oops:

[Palithius]

Do you guys know where the specification for the BGL format (fs2004 version) can be found? With that info, a parser can be easily written.