Hello and welcome to a new series of tutorials showcasing the features of Overlay Editor, a wonderful tool used in the creation of X-Plane sceneries.

Overlay Editor is the brainchild of Jonathan Harris, known in the X-Plane word as 'Marginal'. His software allows you to create (with relative ease) X-Plane sceneries which range from small dirt strips in the back of beyond to full blown international airports located next to a metropolis.

Over the course of these tutorials, you will discover not only how to create your first basic scenery, but also additional sceneries which contain that added 'wow' factor.

So What Is Overlay Editor?

In basic terms, Overlay Editor gives us (the developer) the tools to either create a new scenery from scratch or enhance an existing scenery which is always located within your X-Plane Custom Scenery folder.

The great thing about X-Plane is that it has a very modular layout in terms of where everything is located. Sceneries, as mentioned, always go in your Custom Scenery folder and aircraft always go in your Aircraft folder. There are no other locations where additional 'user' files are stored (except plugins), but that's a different topic. The upshot however of having a layout like this, is that it's very easy to keep everything under control, which includes your scenery.

To create a scenery, X-Plane first has to find the airport data which will be used as a foundation for our scenery. X-Plane holds this information in the form of a database and this is where the information (apron and taxiway layout) of thousands of airports is stored. The basic layout of each airport is known as the .apt file. This .apt file contains only concrete foundations, taxiways, local roads and taxiway markings. This is our foundation, our starting point, and where the developer can add additional buildings, etc.

Where To Get Overlay Editor

The first thing we need to do is download and install the software. You'll find the download for Overlay Editor here (Windows, OSX, Linux):

http://marginal.org.uk/x-planescenery/tools.html

Once you have unzipped the file a good place to move it to is your X-Plane directory. This keeps everything in one place. When first opening Overlay Editor, it will ask you to locate your X-Plane directory. Once done, it will then load into the opening screen.

To open an unpopulated airport and create one from scratch, we need to click on the menu icon labelled 'Go To Airport' (Figure 1).

Figure 1

With this done we are then presented with a dialogue box in which we can select our desired .apt file either by airport name or by ICAO code. When an airport is selected, you'll see that the longitude and latitude of the airport is also shown (Figure 2).

Figure 2

Once an airport is selected (depending upon the complexity of the chosen airport) you will be presented with a view of the .apt file. This can range from a just a simple grass strip to a complicated tangle of runways and taxiways. Figure 3 shows what a typical medium density airport .apt file looks like.

Figure 3

To zoom in so as to see more detail, you can use your mouse wheel. If you have a clickable mouse wheel, then you can zoom and also drag the view around to suit your needs.

Libraries

To create sceneries you need objects and these are found in X-Plane's numerous libraries, which in turn are located in X-Plane's Custom Scenery folder. Some of these libraries should (if you're an X-Plane user) be quite familiar to you. The most popular are OpenSceneryX, RuScenery, R2 Library, The Handy Object Library and the JB_Library. There are many more but naming just a few keeps things simple for the time being.

X-Plane's default object library comes with the sim, but the ones mentioned above all need to be downloaded. These can be found in the FlightSim.Com file library, under X-Plane Scenery Libraries.

First Steps

For this initial exercise we are going to place our first object. If you haven't already done so, make sure you have selected an airport (.apt) as shown above. Any airport will do, but one with a simple layout is probably best for now.

Right...let's go and place our very first object onto our already opened .apt file. In this case, we want to choose a hangar. Over to the right and slightly under the menu bar is quite a large selection box (Figure 4).

Figure 4

This box is usually empty if nothing is selected in the search box found above. However, if we type 'hangar' in the search field, then you'll see that the selection box becomes populated (Figure 5).

Figure 5

As you can see there are quite a few hangars to choose from (this is the great thing about X-Plane's ever increasing object library).

Lets select the 'JB_hangar 101' from the JB_Library. Once selected it will create an icon to indicate what it looks like. If we now go back to the map we can use our scroll wheel to zoom in on our .apt file. As we zoom ever closer to the ground you will notice a symbol becoming larger and larger (Figure 6).

Figure 6

This symbol shows us where, in the scenery, our object will be placed. Clicking on the green cross in the menu bar will now place our hangar (Figure 7).

Figure 7

As you can see (Figure 8), even though our hangar has been placed in the scenery, it is wrongly orientated. To get it lined up correctly in the 'D' shaped area we need to move and rotate it.

Figure 8

To rotate the hangar we use the following keys (Figure 9).

Figure 9

Before we can move the hangar or rotate it, we need to make sure that the object is selected. To do this we left click on it. You will know when the hangar is selected as it will turn pink (what a lovely color), and only now is it ready to be moved or rotated.

Figure 10

Figure 10 shows our hangar now nicely orientated.

Well, that's it for this, the first in a new series of tutorials based around Overlay Editor.

I hope you found it both informative and interesting. Next time, we'll deal with more advanced object manipulation and views. Thanks for reading.

Regards

Paul Mort
pmort76@gmail.com
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