This is a quick report on my experience using ADE v1.78 to design an airport for MSFS. My desire to try this, is due to the fact that ADE is a standalone app that only takes a couple of seconds to load. Designing scenery in the SDK requires the game itself to be loaded, and this takes three full minutes every time on my system, which gets really old after the 4th or 5th time I’ve had to do a reload just to check on some minor edit. So here’s what I’ve found:
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The File format and syntax for scenery KML files used by ADE and the MSFS SDK are not very different, and the game is quite willing to load a BGL file compiled with the version of bglcomp.exe supplied in ADE v. 1.78.
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What does work: The basic Airport. Runways. Aprons. Edge lighting. ILS and VOR (probably NDB too, although I haven’t tried one of those yet). Wind sock, Fuel Trigger. This last was a surprise. Defining a FUEL-PARKING circle in ADE, then placing a FUEL TRIGGER on it has this effect in MSFS: If you select that parking spot instead of a runway start, when you launch the game, your aircraft spawns with the Fuel and Payload dialog box open. If you taxi onto that spot, same thing happens. So it’s possible to build an airport in ADE where you can pull up to the gas pump in your aircraft and pretend to get a fill-up. Also, the game places a standard small gas pump station there. I’d love to see if MSFS has those big green fuel trigger marking cubes in it like FSX did (you had to enable them in the fsx.cfg file)
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What doesn’t work: the scenery library objects for ADE don’t necessarily cause MSFS to crash when you load the game using a BGL file compiled by ADE, but the scenery simply doesn’t appear. I tried several objects: hangers, control tower, rotating beacon tower and beacon, the VOR building, ILS antenna, airport vehicles, trees, etc. None of the library objects show in the game, no doubt due to the GUID numbers not being part of the MSFS scenery library. But at least, using ADE scenery objects doesn’t crash the game. Some attributes that are used in the SDK, like “SnapToGround”, aren’t backwards-compatible to ADE v1.78, and ADE will almost certainly choke if you try to load a KML originally written by the MSFS SDK “save scenery” command. You can delete those attributes, and then ADE will load an MSFS KML file. But it’s a lot of work.
I’m aware that Jon is working on an update to ADE to make it compatible with MSFS, but I just wanted to put it out there that, until the new version is ready to distribute, you can actually use ADE v1.78 to do some basic layout work for MSFS if ADE is a tool you are familiar with.