Airport Beacon Placement Issues

Greetings flight simmers,

 

I have been working on an airport for quite some time now, and I have finally got it to the point that I feel it is decent to release to my fellow flight sim aviators. I was looking at the scenery and realized I forgot to design an airport beacon! So I went into FSDS promply made the beacon pole to the dimensions of the actual airport beacon. Compiled it; added it to Instant Scenery and attached the default Instant Scenery beacon and beacon "light beam". To my surprise I notice the beam stayed visible during the day and did not rotate during night or IFR times.

 

So I go on a world wide web expedition knowing that this problem has been brought up before (which it has). I find in the Flightsim.com forms this write up https://www.flightsim.com/vbfs/showthread.php?213923-Tower-s-Rotating-Beacon in which the late David “Opa” Marshall created a comprehensive tutorial that took all the guess work out of placing an airport beacon.

 

When reading that form I saw that KarlB737 simply changed the " LibraryObject name" with a control tower to get the result of having the airport beacon on the tower. With that knowledge gathered I took the "LibraryObject name" for the pole that I created and attached it to the appropriate XML coding replicating what KarlB737 did.

 

This resulted to my beacon pole that I design being displayed in the proper coordinates, but the beacon was not present. I carefully made sure that my LibraryObject name was correct and read through David “Opa” Marshall tutorial several times to make sure I covered everything but had the same results.

 

To assure that the technique that KarlB737 did worked I took the LibraryObject name that he provided in the form and I had a control tower with beacon. I feel that I have exhausted all of my capabilities, and form search understanding. I have included pictures of my beacon pole to aid in anyone understanding my issue.

 

Thanks

 

I think KarlB737 just got lucky in that the tower object he replaced by changing the GUID must have had a beacon attachpoint. You'll notice in his code there's no placement information for the beacon itself, only the tower that the beacon is attached to, the beacon sticks itself to the attachpoint wherever it happens to be located on the model. If there's no beacon attachpoint the beacon won't show up from my experience. I don't know if adding a beacon attachpoint is something FSDS is capable of, I've never used it, but I assume it would be. You're on your own there I'm afraid. I've done it in gmax and there isn't much to it, you use the attach tool just as if you were attaching a light or smoke effect, or a platform to harden a bridge for example. If you can't do it in FSDS I believe ModelConverterX may be able to do it also. The name of the attachpoint is critical IIRC, it must be "attachpt_beacon". If all else fails I can make you an invisible beacon attachpoint in gmax that you could simply place at the proper coords and elevation near the top of your tower. It's always that ugly default beacon though, you can't do anything about that, lol.

 

Jim

Awesome Jim! You have given me some insight on what I can read up on for sure. I will do some homework on FSDS as well as ModelConverterX. I do have ModelConverterX, but I have yet to use it. Sounds like I will be doing so soon. If all else fails I would certainly like your help with the invisible attachpoint. This was a big help, that had me stumped, thanks again!

I'm happy to help! :) Look around in FSDS' help files about attaching things, I'll bet you'll find it.

I am pretty sure I will. I will be sure to post it to this form so it may help someone else. Thanks again!

I found one of these transparent beacon attachpoints I made in 2007, lol. If you need it, it's here:

 

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1-w_ZufPckbhs3nfRjBtLOL_jROUHlzXb

 

Jim

I use ADE to update airports and make airports and it's a real PITA to add beacons. What I have to do is add the beacon individually and use my small plane to see its center position and height. Sometime I'm still off center a little looking at my airport so I have to do it again, and again until it's set right.

You are the man Jim! Thank you for this, this will certainly speed up me finishing this!

The joys of making scenery; It is a joyful frustration indeed. Thank you for this tip as well. I have not used ADE to place a beacon before.

New development for me here, and I've been messing with this stuff for about 15 yrs now. I did not know this, but I had a play in FS9 this morning and it appears it's totally possible to simply place a standalone beacon in FS9. I'd read that it was possible in FSX/P3D but I took it that it was something new in the FSX SDK and not possible in FS9. Not true however, I tried it and it worked just fine.

 

   version="9.0"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="bglcomp.xsd">

   lat="46.918017818"
  lon="-114.081358118"
  alt="20.0F"
  altitudeIsAgl="TRUE"
  pitch="0"
  bank="0"
  heading="0"
  imageComplexity="NORMAL">
      type="CIVILIAN"
     baseType="AIRPORT"/>

 

Everything I've ever read, and the general consensus among developers, always seemed to suggest you had to have a tower object and it had to have an "attachpt_beacon" in order for your beacon to show up. That code would look like this (which is basically right out of Opa's beacon tutorial with the coords and some formatting changed):

 

   version="9.0"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="bglcomp.xsd">

   lat="46.918017818"
  lon="-114.081358118"
     alt="0.0F"
     altitudeIsAgl="TRUE"
     pitch="0"
     bank="0"
     heading="0"
     imageComplexity="NORMAL">
         name="7f38bfbc4a40e2953c3f5c8482fa2c87"
        scale="1.00"
        />
         attachpointName="attachpt_beacon"
        pitch="0"
        bank="0"
        heading="0">
            type="CIVILIAN"
           baseType="AIRPORT"/>

 

...but, suppose you had a tower that didn't have a beacon attachpoint, you could accomplish basically the same thing like this, which is simply an object placement and a beacon placement in the same XML with the beacon height adjusted to sit at the top of your tower:

 

   version="9.0"
  xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
  xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="bglcomp.xsd">

      lat="46.9180178269744"
     lon="-114.081358015537"
     alt="0.0F"
     altitudeIsAgl="TRUE"
     pitch="0"
     bank="0"
     heading="0"
     imageComplexity="NORMAL">
         name="e411b80f05c45bafaccefcb5b77f6101"
        scale="1.00"
        />


      lat="46.9180178269744"
     lon="-114.081358015537"
     alt="20.0F"
     altitudeIsAgl="TRUE"
     pitch="0"
     bank="0"
     heading="0"
     imageComplexity="NORMAL">
         type="CIVILIAN"
        baseType="AIRPORT"/>

 

 

...where name="e411b80f05c45bafaccefcb5b77f6101" should be replaced with the actual GUID of your tower object

(the GUID I used in this example is actually a tree, so I'm placing a tree with a beacon on top of it, lol)

 

Learn something new every day, if I don't - the day wasn't worth getting out of bed for! :)

 

Jim

Hi,

 

That's the same code that ADE uses to place a beacon anywhere you like. For those airports where we are still using AFCAD, we also use the code you posted above.

Hi,

 

That's the same code that ADE uses to place a beacon anywhere you like.

 

That's what tipped me off Tom. Noticed it playing around in ADE (9) this AM, I thought "there's no way that'll work" so I tried it and sure enough it did, lol. Then after I posted that I started wondering if that's actually documented in the SDK and yep, second sentence on beacons:

 

Beacons can be added as stand-alone objects...

 

Guess I missed it. ...but it doesn't really give you a code example, at least not without some interpretation.

 

Another thing I just tested out is that the name of the attachpoint isn't critical either providing the attachpoint name in the placement matches the attachpoint name in the .mdl. "attachpt_charlie_brown" works fine as long as they match, lol. Probably wouldn't even need the "attachpt_" part of it but the AttachToolGmax script of course adds that prefix automatically.