PilotEdge X-Plane Gateway Scenery
Useful columns:
- has_scenery Whether or not any 3D scenery exists for the location in the scenery gateway at all.
- scenery_released_version The first version of X-Plane the scenery was released in. Scenery that has yet to be released will have a YES for has_scenery but empty for scenery_released_version.
- scenery_score My own secret source formula for determining how "important" an location is.
I and I know some others have been creating scenery and uploading them to the Gateway on an ad hoc basis. If you want to help it's not that hard to get started. This topic on the Org is a good place to start. The official manual for WED (the World Editor) is also good. WED is pretty straight forward to use once you get used to it and the newest beta (1.4b1) allows you to import directly from the Scenery Gateway, which makes making quick fixes to existing airports super easy. The most difficult part of making scenery is honestly just at the beginning: getting orthoimagery to use as overlays. Thankfully the United States Geological Survey makes high resolution orthophotos of the entire US available without restriction (as works of the US federal government, the photos are in the public domain). Resolution varies between areas from a resolution of about 3-meters (each pixel in the image corresponds to 3 meters) down to 0.15-meters (each pixel in the image corresponds to 15 cm). The images produced by the USGS are all geotagged (they include geographic coordinates denoting the exact area the image covers) which WED can use to automatically place the overlay images precisely. Unfortunately getting the images into WED can be a bit tricky. Sometimes the images are too large for WED to support, so they need to be split and tiled. Also, newer images tend to be GeoJP2 (geotagged JPEG 2000 images) rather than GeoTIFFs which WED supports, requiring a conversion. WED 1.4 was supposed to include native support for GeoJP2, but that proved troublesome. If you do decide to give this a go, I recommend starting small, very small. My first airport airport was KEMT, a rather modest class D airport, but even that took me many hours to get just right.
Some questions you might have:
Q: How accurate can these airports be? What do people mean when they say these are "lego brick" sceneries?
A: The airports can be super accurate as far as layout and markings are concerned. And if you're an obsessive pedant like me you can spend days getting the markings just right. As far as buildings and objects you're restricted to the objects that are included with X-Plane. This is fairly limiting compared to third-party scenery libraries like OpenSceneryX or the ability to create custom buildings entirely from scratch. This is why people refer to gateway scenery as "lego brick" scenery, you can only use the bricks you're given. That said, with a bit of creativity you can achieve a fairly high level of verisimilitude just from the default X-Plane objects. And I'm confident future X-Plane releases will include a greater variety of objects to enhance the gateway airports.
Q: Why not just use third-party sceneries?
A: While I adore a lot of third party scenery by folks like JeffN and MisterX6 and use them preferentially (I never tire of the novelty of AutoGate or GroundTraffic); finding, reviewing, installing, and updating third-party sceneries (and any dependencies they may have) is just not a good experience for new or even veteran users. It's nice when a user can just load up and fly into an airport and have decent scenery there already without having to go through the effort of finding it. Imagine how much better it is for a new PilotEdge user to load up KSNA for the first time and have full scenery there (provided by Jan Vogel of IXEG 737 Classic fame, based on an updated version of JeffN's scenery) rather than just an empty flat area.
Q: Is anyone actually doing this?
A: Oh yes, as of today (2015-03-23) there are about 2,100 airports with 3D scenery on the gateway. The aforementioned Jan Vogel even has a campaign to have Germany be the first country to have every single one of its airports have scenery included with X-Plane and they're progressing well with (I believe) only the former East Germany left to do. According to my database, of those 2,100 airports, only 460 are under FAA jurisdiction and only 34 are in the PilotEdge coverage area so there's a lot of work to do!
Q: But even so, why would I work for free to benefit a private company (Laminar Research)?
A: The good news is that in their wisdom Laminar decided to make all submissions to the Gateway available under the terms of the GPL2 making all gateway data Free software available for your own use for whatever purpose, even including inclusion in other simulators if some new hotness were to come along in the future. So your work is of immediate benefit to Laminar and other X-Plane users, but it's also available to anyone else to use freely forever. Think of it as like contributing to Wikipedia or OpenStreetMap.
Q: What if I want to add a second runway to my favorite private field?
A: Sorry, gateway submissions should be accurate to the present day. If you want to make fantasy or historical sceneries I encourage you to do so, but make it available to download on the Org or some other distribution mechanism.