X-Plane is really growing up currently. Two exciting projects seem to be near to release: a FMC for a Boeing (here) and an A320 version (here) . Let’s see which summer the latter means. September is not really what I call before summer. Anyway better aircraft system simulation is really one of the few things which X-Plane lacks to be a replacement for FS2004. If that is there I am sure a lot of people will switch to experience super smooth graphics in every moment of the flight.

Ajax, Web2.0 and so on are hyped so much at the moment. A prime example is GoogleMaps with its GoogleMaps API. It can be used to build real interactive applications on top of the map display everybody knows.

X-Plane currently lacks proper taxilines for most airports, mainly because there is no proper tool to create them. If you zoom into an airport with GoogleMaps, you will easily see that you can identify more or less every taxiline, parking line and other stuff. So the idea comes up whether one can get these into X-Plane.

Well, I developed a small prototype to learn about the GoogleMaps API. You can place vertices of a polyline directly on the Google map. On “finish” the x/y distance in meters from the first vertex is printed out. Of course there is no reason against creating proper apt.dat format. Not sure if the whole concept is better than proper support in WorldMaker, maybe with GoogleMaps import, but at least it looks interesting I think.

Taxilines in X-Plane 8.x sucht man bisher meist vergebens. Folgendes simples Perl-Skript konvertiert Taxilines aus IVAO-Sectorfiles:

x-plane.org Posting

Hab damit testweise dem LHA EDDS Taxilines hinzugefügt. Sieht ganz akzeptabel aus. Klar fehlen die Schilder mit den Bezeichnungen noch (die man in XP 8.50 ebenfalls in der apt.dat definieren kann), aber lassen sich zumindest nun große Rollfelder schon mal korrekt überfahren, ohne vom Taxiway abzukommen.