My review of Tweed New Haven Airport (KHVN) by Orbx

Here’s my review of the new Tweed New Haven airport by Orbx. Hope it helps, as a lot of research went into it :smiley:

As usual, criticism is welcome. I know the landing in the video isn’t perfect. Still working on mastering Working Title’s Citation and I didn’t want to use a 320 since it doesn’t usually operate at KHVN. :joy:

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I don’t know if you have any scenery in your Community folder, but I discovered a while back that, while I believe Services and LivingWorld config files are supposed to only act on the airport they are created for, after the November update, I found that those files actually act on the whole scenery base, and are loaded alphabetically.

I had created some of my own versions to reduce vehicle traffic and remove vehicles that would never exist on a GA airport I had created. After the update, all of a sudden the traffic went absolutely crazy on my airport. I found a living world config file in another airport where the author had jacked up the traffic. When I removed those files, it fixed the traffic on my airport.

Point being, it’s possible another addon is affecting the living world configuration and services on this airport. It may very well not be, but, something to check through your addons for.

I submitted the bug to zendesk. It is marked solved, but, we all know what that means… not much. Only it’s not in the zendesk system anymore and has possibly been passed on to the team for work.

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That’s interesting. Definitely worth investigating. That being said, I normally try airports with a completely empty community folder (besides the aircraft mod and livery I’m using), to avoid any kind of incompatibilities.

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Yes, I was pretty sure that you would test it empty, but, I just thought I’d share the info since you mentioned it.

That being said, it’s worth investigating further. I’m gonna try reinstalling the sim fully, just to make sure it isn’t an issue on my side now that you told me that services can be influenced by external elements.

Thanks a lot :smiley:

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Wow. Reinstalling the sim actually solved the issue for this and another couple of airports I reviewed (I had to check them all one by one and make corrections to the reviews :sweat_smile:) . Strangely not all were affected the same way. Even two airports by the same developer had one that was affected and the other that was not. On the other hand, the one that I’m reviewing right now is still misses all services (and ground ATC gives no option to park to gates or ramps) :thinking:

Do you know which airport caused the issue for you? Just so that I steer clear.

I’m glad I don’t usually dock points for simple oversights like missing services. Thanks a lot for helping me find this issue.

fwas is the author, airports 5B2 (which he interestingly called K5B2) and KGFL, both in upstate NY. The way to tell that this is an issue, at the root level of the scenery package, you’ll find two files,
AirportServices\<airporticao>\Services.xml and LivingWorld_Config\<airporticao>_LWcfg.xml

Easiest thing to do is remove the two files from the layout.json and see what effect it has on your installation.

I’m assuming the way it’s supposed to work is those files should only effect the airport they are associated with. I hope that’s what they’re spec is. Unfortunately, they seem to affect the whole installation. I don’t know how to confirm exactly what’s going on, but my experience dictates that the last read files effects at least those airports that have services and living world config files in them. I didn’t study it in detail, but, it fixed my airport when I removed the files from those airports I had of his.

But, for instance, I have them in my airports KASH, and 69NH and soon to come KCON. He cranked up the traffic so I’d have a couple hundred vehicles running around my airport. I turn them nearly off as at both of these airports, I think KASH probably has 5 fuel trucks and a couple of operations vehicles and 1 or two pushbacks at most (you rarely ever see them, only when the big boys show up). So, my airports might negatively affect other installations as well in that regard.

Hopefully Asobo eventually addresses the issue and the files only affect the airport they are associated with, soon.

Funny thing is, 3 versions ago, they introduced a bug where some Livingworld config files caused a CTD if you spawned at an airport other than the airport with the config file. I had two airports with nearly identical files, and one caused this CTD, and the other didn’t. The difference was, one was a replacement for an existing airport, and the other was a new airport that wasn’t in the game (it was torn down in 2005). That bug was fixed in the November update.

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That’s very interesting. I actually downloaded both of these airports, but I don’t remember if I actually ever put them in my community folder lol.

I’ll definitely steer clear from anything with these files for now. Thanks for the help man.

I wouldn’t necessarily steer clear of them, just remove the files from the layout.json files. And check all the sceneries you load, there are many other authors who attempt to control the on airport vehicles and services.

There’s a decent description of how the files work in the SDK. Unfortunately, at KASH, I can’t call a fuel truck, whether I have those files loaded or not. I’d like to better understand how to create a service so that I can call a fuel truck.

I’d love an added feature that allows me to create a fuel truck only parking space. Currently, any vehicle that is allowed to show up at an airport can spawn at a vehicle parking space.

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Yeah. Good call.

Interestingly, none of the payware airports I have seems to have these files. They’re used only by freeware devs for now, or at least, I never ran into payware devs who do.

And indeed, lack of fuel trucks seems to be the most common service gap even in many payware airports.

I get fuel trucks, though, interestingly even though I allow it on my airfield, I’ve never seen the smaller fuel truck that’s modeled, at any airport. The problem is, I think there used to be a “Call Fuel Truck” choice under ground services, but, it seems to have disappeared.

As far as payware vs freeware, I think you’ll find these files at smaller airports, usually to reduce or eliminate ground traffic and push backs which you’d never find at, for instance, a grass field. Whereas the payware airports tend to be larger and are probably happy with the default actions so don’t bother.

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Yep. That’s understandable. MSFS’s ground traffic tends to be… a bit much lol. It’d be nice if it was more proportional to the airport’s taxiway area by default.

Incidentally, since you seem to be very knowledgeable about the topic, when at an airport you land and you literally have no option to taxi to the gates/parking or no ATC taxiway guidance to the runway on take-off (and AI just disappears on touchown or after requesting taxi clearance), that’s a configuration oversight by the creator, isn’t it?

Yes.

  1. all the taxiways have to connect together and to runway taxiways, so the “water” can flow through the whole system. If there’s a break, MSFS won’t know what to do.
  2. all the hold shorts have to be relatively close to the runway and have to be there and in the correct direction.
  3. It’s a good idea to properly label all taxiways. I make sure the whole length of every taxiway is properly labeled. Blank is ok, but, I bet if you forget one link along the length it screws things up.
  4. It’s also a good idea to properly label all parking spots. I’ll create areas on my airports, north, south, etc. I haven’t done any work with an airport with gates yet, so I don’t know much about that.
  5. I’m not sure what effect mixing taxiway link directions does to a taxiway, or if the compiler will fix that order when compiliing. Taxiway link direction is determined by the order of the ends of the link (taxiway points) in the definition of the link.
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That’s great info, thanks!

I think they incorrectly linked the amount of traffic to the number of parking spots. There’s a few hundred parking spots at KASH, but very little ground traffic and basically no pushbacks. So getting a good balance is difficult. It would be better if you could control traffic per spot for gates, maybe have a the ability to create several defaults, which you actually can do, but it would also be good to have direct control over the total number of vehicles at say GA airports. So, rather than controlling traffic based on the percentage of types of spots, have a global number. Having specific vehicle type parking spots would help in this regard, as well as different types of airports for vehicle traffic specification.

Like International, Regional, Large GA, Intermediate GA, Small GA, Private, Grass, Ultralight.

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I wish Orbx would really update this, at least to get the American Eagle planes out of there… Tweed is going to be completely redone in the next decade or so too.

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The chances of that are sadly pretty low. OrbX is more a storefront than a developer at this point. I’d also love to see the houses on the water on approach to runway 2 be something other than melted grey lumps…