The ScruffyDuck Blog

We have just released the installer for 1.50. This replaces the current manual install file (still available if required). This installer will update versions of ADE from 1.47 to the latest version. It includes an updated version of the ADE Environment Checker and can be downloaded from the Downloads page at ADE Web Site

I would like to thank Martin Gossmann for all his hard work preparing the installer

We have had several reports of project files failing to load. Investigation shows that the airport itself is missing from the project.

We have traced this to multiple selection and delete. It should not be possible to delete the airport reference point but the code protecting against it is not working if the ARP is part of a multiple selection - rubber banding is the most likely cause. If the ARP is in the selection and delete is called the airport itself will be deleted from the project. This will cause a lot of problems.

We will issue a fix shortly. In the meantime please make sure that the ARP is not part of any multiple selection for delete

We apologize to those folks who have already lost work in this way.

Jon

We have been asked several times about changing the name and other details for an airport.

First Note that you cannot change an Ident without creating a second airport.

For most things FS will take the information from the last file read. So we can 'exclude' things like runways, aprons, buildings and so on from the stock airport and replace them with our own provided that our airport is in a file at a higher priority than the stock. This does not work for Airport Properties such as Altitude, Name, State etc. In this case FS takes the information from the first file it reads and ignores any other changes.

So to change these we need to create a small bgl file for the airport that loads before the stock file. These bgl files are added to the Scenery\World\Scenery folder since this is read before any stock airport folders.

ADE provides a way to create an altitude change file. Tools > Change Airport Altitude.

ADE does not provide a method to change the other properties. However with a small 'fudge' this can be done with the Change Airport Altitude Tool:

Go to File > Airport Properties and change what you need to change and save it
Go to Tools > change Airport Altitude. Make a note of the current altitude
Change the altitude (does not matter much to what)
Now compile the airport. ADE puts a Bgl file into Scenery\World\Scenery with the changed data
Go back to Tools > Change Airport Altitude and put it back to the original and compile again
The changes to your airport descriptive data should now be available

We are looking at having this work without forcing an altitude change. This will be in a later version.

As part of my investigation into FlightGear. I realized that I needed to understand a bit more about Cross-Platform applications. This in turn leads to creating applications that work in Linux. This post is being made using Firefox in Ubuntu. I have installed Ubuntu (a flavor of Linux) as a virtual machine using VMWare. So I thought well - see how I can post on the Blog from Ubuntu - and here it is. I will post some more on this as I get a bit more into it.

The title of this blog refers to Flight Simulators - though in truth is has always been about MS Flight Sims. Maybe that ill change. FS Developer (www.fsdeveloper.com) has started in a small way to talk about XPlane and FlightGear. It will be interesting to see how this develops.