Today's Dev Q&A - Cold and Dark Starts in the Water....?

[FlyingsCool5650]

I’ve been adding docks since the product was released (NH62 at FS.to, 52B most recently). So the answer isn’t “Can’t” it’s “We need to add docks”. That’s what confused me.

And, I believe there are some default seaplane bases that have docks. Check out the Kenmore docks in Seattle.

They have been adding parking spots now to backwoods airports. For instance ME22, a very small private strip in Maine, has spots interestingly, with no plane outlines to support their existence. Too many spots for a strip that size, in fact, lol (I’m about to release a redo of it. I kept the extra spots, cause, well, who cares ). So, nothing stopping them from adding dock spots with AI as they did here on land.

I like that they are reacting to our inputs

[hobanagerik]

@FlyingsCool5650

For instance ME22, a very small private strip in Maine, has spots interestingly, with no plane outlines to support their existence.

LNM doesn’t see that as a seabase. Or rather no actual water starts:

LUDD seems to be the only one that does have a water start. W55 and 0W0 don’t:

LUDD also appears in italics, which makes me believe its custom in some way.

All the non-italicised seabases don’t, which makes me think this is an issue with Blackshark AI, and its creation of these airports as it has no way of identifying a ramp start. If you have an image of a land based airport you can see where the parking spots are, typically, and the AI can pick these out. It can’t see those on water as they don’t really exist, so it makes sense to me that they would have to be hand tweaked by someone.

Just firing up the sim to see where LUDD comes from.

Here is Port Orchard (4WA9):

And in LNM:

And in the sim:

No hand tweaking, just AI, and it was able to see 4 spots plus the top one which has been designated fuel.

By comparison, here is Lake Union Dock (LUDD):

The AI has literally no clue where to place a ramp start.

So this was tweaked to add ramp start 0A, highlighted:

I agree with you that his wording was…inaccurate. It can be done, but the airport data has to be tweaked to support it.

[FlyingsCool5650]

My only point was, they have started adding parking spots to backwoods strips, so they could just as easily add dock spots. I didn’t mean ME22 was an example of dock spots.

The example of a default seaplane base with docks I understand is the Kenmore docks in Seattle. Might be a bespoke airport, but, still default…

[hobanagerik]

Quick floatplane water start at LUDD, C&D:

To answer my earlier question, the tweaked LUDD gets its data from:

D:\Flight Simulator\Official\OneStore\microsoft-bushtrip-sanjuan\Scenery\bushtrip-sanjuan\Scenery\San Juan.bgl

If you look at the nearby W55, and 0W0, in the same dock, they both use this:

D:\Flight Simulator\Official\OneStore\fs-base-genericairports\scenery\0101\APX15150.bgl

@FlyingsCool5650

Might be a bespoke airport, but, still default…

LUDD was definitely tweaked as its part of the above bushstrip, which is first party content. Further evidence of it being an answer that is not very accurate.

It’s the first one I have ever seen, and for all I know its the only one. I wish there was a way to get LNM to only show custom airports, as that would make it so much easier to pick them out.

[Sonicviz]

Jorg explained the world update process here, which also includes ground/water airstrips:

May 2023 Developer Live Stream

It’s quite an involved process, easy to be critical from the outside but I’m sure from the inside there’s a certain amount of hair pulling that goes on as they tune their processes.

[hobanagerik]

I just found another one, to the South West, except its not strictly a seaplane base, despite its runway being clearly over water.

Lake Cushman Dock (LCMD)

It’s in italics, so is considered an “addon” airport in LNM, and has a single water start.

Change the view to only show Seaplane Bases:

The ones with yellow circles then stand out.

Even stranger, when you select LCMD from within the sim you can’t actually start there. The Fly button is greyed out, no matter which float or non-float plane I try.

But if I spawn nearby then teleport to LCMD:

Must be broken, possibly even the wrong designation, and it should be a seabase and not a soft surface strip as LNM classifies it, which might explain why I can’t spawn there.

And surprise, surprise its from the same bushtrip I listed above:

D:\Flight Simulator\Official\OneStore\microsoft-bushtrip-sanjuan\Scenery\bushtrip-sanjuan\Scenery\San Juan.bgl

I know you get some red text warning you if you try to spawn at a seabase in a non-float plane. I’m guessing that it won’t let you spawn at LCMD in a pure float plane because its a seabase, but thinks its soft surface, and the internal logic doesn’t allow for generating an error on screen for that configuration?

In any case, C&D water starts are definitely a thing, though you may need to go out of your way to find them.

[FlyingsCool5650]

Good point, I tend to use amphibians, so I don’t have to worry about the pure floatplane issues that might arise.

I’ll check out those airports to see what I can learn when I get a chance too. I’ve been working on releasing ME22, a semi-ficitional seaplane base nearby it (you can see airplanes at docks across the way, I’m adding a seaplane base there), 70B Milinocket, and KIWI - Wiscasset, a landbase on the shore of Maine between Brunwick and Rockland.

So it sounds like they created some dock parking spots for bush trips. It would be interesting to check out the definition of the airports. Docks have to have taxiways to the strip, and runway taxiways, and best if you create a taxiway to both ends, but you don’t have to, and have to have hold shorts (for a water runway? whatever, but, fine) when they connect to the runway taxiways or you get warnings, and all have to be marked as water with water material (it usually defaults to taxi concrete). But, otherwise it’s straightforward to get a seaplane base working with dock parking spots. It takes about 15 minutes to create one. Problem is I always have to add more stuff, so it takes me a couple of weeks, lol.

I’ve never done any bush trips, so I don’t know if there’s any SDK weirdness around that. Seems like they’ve never gotten bush trips totally unbroken from all I’ve seen in forums.

The water material is a relatively new thing, the SDK team finally fixed water strips a few sim updates ago. I created NH62 a long time ago, and at that time there were some screwups in the definition, but I figured out how to get it working (common sense stuff). Anyway, I reported bugs, and I’m sure others did and they fixed stuff and it all works now. Enough blah, blah from me.

So, all that said, have you ever tried Airport Design Editor (I’m at work and they don’t let me go to FSDeveloper.com to get the link)? It’s pretty easy to export a project from an existing airport and check it out in the scenery design editor to see how these were all defined.

Might be able to use it to search for airports with dock spots, I don’t know. @ScruffyDuckJon has always been very good at putting very helpful tools in the software like that.

[Steeler2340]

@Sonicviz

There’s 4 good ways I know of to start anywhere in MSFS in the sky or on the ground/water, and even though I wrote one of them (Location Manager) I also use all of them as well as my own.

Thank you for the comparison and the mentioning of Sky Dolly. Full disclaimer: I am the author of it.

Sky Dolly’s Location module indeed just came out as a “side quest”: recording/replay being the main functional area “teleportation” just felt like a natural extension, one that I personally always wanted to have from the get-go.

I wrote a how-to about starting anywhere on ground, including the option to start “cold and dark” which essentially just does what “CTRL + SHIFT + E” would do, that is “shutdown engine”:

Read about it here:

Sky Dolly v0.16 - Free Flight Recorder & Replay, Location Management

For Helicopter Pilots - Create Your Personal Helipad MS Flight Simulator does offer a couple of helipads “out of the box”. But what if you wanted to spawn at your own helipad, anywhere in the world? And possibly even in “cold and dark”? In this tutorial we are going to define our own custom Rega helipad in Zurich airport (LSZH) and store it as user location in Sky Dolly respectively as imported location when importing from Little Navmap. The following simple steps will lead us to our goal: D…

While this talks about helipads the same steps apply to sea locations as well. In fact, Sky Dolly comes with over 100 hand-selected default locations “out of the box”, one of them being the starting location of the famous Spruce Goose, in the harbour of L.A. - and yes, “cold and dark”

Sky Dolly is indeed a “stand-alone desktop application” and I have no intentions of any “in-game integration” (except for a toolbar extension perhaps later down the road that would allow quick access to “record, replay, stop/pause” etc.). So if you are looking for an integrated location management, conventiently accessible via the MSFS world map then Location Manager is what you want:

New Utility Release - Location Manager Free

[LocationManagerWebSlider1024x422V2] Short blog post on the development process: Location Manager for MSFS - Development Overview - Sonicviz Video Guide, with new feature Start Anywhere: [Location Manager for MSFS: Start Anywhere] IMPORTANT: Please check the KNOWN ISSUES section on the page link above. Download from the project page link up top. [LocationManagerMSFSBenefitsComparisonFreeVsPro] Quick Help Guides: Map [Location-Manager-MAP-QuickHelpGuide] Free Version: […

Happy flying!