World's first runway traffic lights

[KarstenChen]

The recut scenery gives us this at NZGS, AFAIK the only airport in the world whose runway is, in real life, crossed by a railway. It happens on the default gateway airport and in a third party version.

Totally nuts. Could somebody shift the signals before an aeroplane or a train comes along?

Update: The signals appear when using XWorld. If this is disabled, you get half a railway line and a set of buffers.

 

Edited February 9, 2023 by KarstenChen
Updated info

[triplemon]

Yep, fully expected.
The tools used by X-World / simheaven are wrt roads & railways are completely ignorant of airports and just dump OSM roads without any filtering into the sim. Thats is what causes this. These conflicts as you show aren't X-Plane's fault - its simheaven that needs to resolve these conflicts.

And don't take me wrong - this is hard even for Laminar to completely handle extreme real world situations like this:

Gisborne Airport: Runway With a Railway Crossing - Unusual Places

[MapleFly]

I believe it's on the list of known issues:

 

[172MC]

28 minutes ago, MapleFly said:

I believe it's on the list of known issues:

But, unfortunately, v2 of simHeaven_X-World_Australia-Oceania is out and the signal is still there

[KarstenChen]

What's curious about this is that until the recent scenery recut, the runway was clear and the railway ran across it uninterrupted. And even without XWorld, we have a newly introduced problem (the buffer and half-built rail track) using the stock Gateway airport. BTW, I am also discussing this privately with Armin of Simheaven.

[triplemon]

Oh boy - there are quite a few rather wrong statements made here.
This is what the X-Plane 12.03 Global Scenery looks like:

The railway is being removed with a reasonable buffer by runways and taxiways present at that airport.
here is WED for clarity - the railway line is white:

The change from 12.00 to 12.03 is as expected (and it didn't get any 'worse'), as the previous 12.00 global scenery was made from an older version of that airport on the gateway, which had a less elaborate shape for the nearby taxiway. And that just by sheer luck stayed a few meters further away from the railway and just by an hairs width didn't cut it back 


In XP11 there was no such buffering for railways and the railway did cross the runway and trains did obstruct the grass runway approach end at times.. But the airport on the scenery gateway had since 2017 (i.e. the very early X-Plane 11 days) an exclusion zone, cutting away a lot more of that railway, some full mile on the left side:


The exclusion zone in the default airport was created for the XP11 default scenery. As the XP12 global scenery has resolved the issue in a better way, this exclusion zone isn't present any more in the XP12 default airport.
So I fail to see how X-Plane 12 and its global scenery would create any problem here.😉

[WalSch]

21 hours ago, KarstenChen said:

The signals appear when using XWorld. If this is disabled, you get half a railway line and a set of buffers.

Just speculating, but could it be because this railway section (Napier to Gisborne) has been out of service in the real world for several years and is marked as such in OSM data? I'm not familiar with OSM, but if that were the case, and Laminar filters out roads and rails at airports, as I infer from triplemon's answer, the buffers in the gateway airport would make sense, a little out of place, but still plausible, though the tracks still exist in the real world.

21 hours ago, KarstenChen said:

AFAIK the only airport in the world whose runway is, in real life, crossed by a railway.

Gisborne is just one of three airports. The runway at Peshawar International Airport (OPPS) is also crossed by a railway line. But this regular service has also been discontinued for years. The XP11 gateway airport represents this very plausibly. I have no idea what the XP12 gateway airport looks like as I don't have XP12 yet.

The only airport whose runway is actually still crossed by scheduled rail operations is Manakara Airport (FMSK) in Madagascar. However, since the LR filters did a rigorous job on the gateway scenery, removing both rails and roads, I relocated my own tracks and roads years ago.

 

Edited February 10, 2023 by WalSch

[KarstenChen]

I do appreciate the science and the history. (As a side note, while the railway is currently unused IRL, it is still fully in place, is maintained, and may well be re-opened.)

The key question, though, is: Can the obstacle on the runway be removed in XP12?

[WalSch]

Yes, you can create a scenery with WED that only contains an exclusion zone for road networks. This must be in the scenery-packs.ini above the custom scenery of Gisborne and also above X-World.

Edited February 10, 2023 by WalSch

[WalSch]

If you are not familiar with WED, you can take this exclusion scenery. Made in WED 2.5 and exported to XP12.

Gisborne-Railroad-Exclusion.zip

Edited February 10, 2023 by WalSch

[troopie]

37 minutes ago, KarstenChen said:

The key question, though, is: Can the obstacle on the runway be removed in XP12?

As triplemon already suggested, there is nothing on the runway in XP12. It is there because of something you have added to XP12 yourself.

[KarstenChen]

AFAIK, not guilty, your honour. Haven't touched it. And to WalSch: Very many thanks for this solution! It's great.

Edited February 10, 2023 by KarstenChen
Thank you to WalSch

[maxam]

Hello,

So the railway tracks that are not supposed to be at an airport are going to be fixed by Laminar or can I add an exclusion zone?

Thank you,

Robert 

[triplemon]

No, Laminar doesn't blacklist poorly made addons by 3rd parties. Simheaven even in its V2 still does not filter any networks (which is, granted, a lot harder to do than filtering buildings that are now filtered in V2), it still puts roads and railroads ontop of run- and taxiways.
So you still have to resolve that by yourself or use the fix for this addon provided earlier in this thread.

[KarstenChen]

The file provided by WalSch (above) did the trick for us.

[jörn-jören jörensön]

2 hours ago, triplemon said:

poorly made addons

Sorry, I know you don't like X-World for some reason, but calling it a poorly made addon is really questionable.

Sure, it has some glitches here and there, but not more than the default scenery. And of course, you can't expect a global scenery done by a single person (or a handful of people) to be absolutely perfect everyhwere.

[KarstenChen]

The problem I originally raised was not caused by a poorly made add-on. It had more to do with poor OSM data and since OSM is a voluntary effort, there is really no one to blame.

[troopie]

2 hours ago, KarstenChen said:

The problem I originally raised was not caused by a poorly made add-on. It had more to do with poor OSM data and since OSM is a voluntary effort, there is really no one to blame.

Then you must have purchased a totally unique version of XP that was sold only to you. Other people using vanilla XP do not have your issue.

Could you please post a log.txt from a session that exhibits the issue?

[triplemon]

On 5/9/2023 at 10:53 PM, KarstenChen said:

The problem I originally raised was not caused by a poorly made add-on. It had more to do with poor OSM data and since OSM is a voluntary effort, there is really no one to blame.

OSM data is fine here - I'll defend those guys, too 😉. This is a real world active railway line going across that real world runway, so it precisely maps what is out there. And please - don't go on OSM and take the railway out there, OSM data isn't to be changed just to fit any one given use of its data.

Laminar, ORBX and a few other provider of global scenery alternatives spend a LOT of time on these tedious tasks of making raw data to fit the purpose. Laminar has TWO guys working on global scenery stuff, for years on end ...
And all that is only visible to ordinary X-Plane users when someone throws in a scenery for comparision that is made without all that.

Its also not that simheaven sceneries looks "poor" much of the time - "poor" means the guy that makes the simheaven sceneries uses an alpha version of a tool that doesn't have that functionality to clean up the data to fit X-Plane. And he didn't code that tool, so he can't modify it. And he can't use a later version of that tool, as that one isn't freely available anymore, but used exclusivley by one of the most famous and high quality X-Plane scenery addon makers. So yes, it all can be fixed - but it takes a lot of manpower or money to adress of all these issues. For simeheaven, its users have to help out here.

Blaming Laminar or OSM for your misery isn't going to help you in any way.

[jörn-jören jörensön]

I can imagine, that LR receive a lot of bug reports and complaints related to X-World, probably most of them caused by users not installing the scenery correctly and surely also quite a few caused by actual glitches/bugs of the scenery. I understand that this is quite annoying.

But, Michael, I assume you have no idea how much effort the guy who makes X-Word puts into refining the OSM data before putting it into W2XP and how much even more he does cleaning up what comes out of it.

A few examples what his scripts and tools do: Adding MSBF data to fill the gaps of OSM. Removing objects and buildings from roads (where MSBF AI confused a truck or a shadow with a building). Putting vegetation alongside roads. Removing or melting together doubled or overlapping buildings. Optimisation of facades with too many and redundant vertices. Etc.
And, of course, now that airport exclusions are history (that I absolutely understand is a good thing) removing objects and buildings from inside the airport boundaries.

Let's not forget, it is one person in his free time (with the help of a few contributors) who provides a global(!) scenery with billions of objects, that steps up the vfr experience (at least in europe) quite a lot and makes a big bunch of users happy. For free. Imho we all should appreciate that at least a little bit.

[triplemon]

Exclusion zones are not history, they work totally unchanged as they always did. And soon even get upgrades.

Its just - X-Plane never shipped any exclusion zones meant for 3rd party addons in the Global Airports. Those ones on the GW are exclusively for the current generation of Laminar Global scenery. So they get reset with every major X-Plane or global scenery version.

The airport boundary is the "keep out zone" to be used by anyone making overlays/autogen scenery outside of airports, including Laminars own autogen. Run- and Taxiways can be used as a tighter, alternate form of "keep out" for 2D things like networks that are a-ok to be allowed to intrude into airport boundaries.

And yes, I know those contributors to make some scripts for him. I did some, too.

[jörn-jören jörensön]

Yes, I was referring to the exclusion zones that shipped with global airports for XP11 as "airport exclusions". Of course, exclusion zones in general still exist and will continue to exist.

Edited May 10, 2023 by jörn-jören jörensön

[KarstenChen]

Hmmm... that started out as a legitimate question, after which we achieved a solution thanks to a thoughtful and caring contributor, but it also resulted in sometimes patronising or ill-considered comments that took everyone nowhere. Triplemon was prominent in displaying his expertise, expressing lofty criticism, but offering little assistance to a normal user, even after the solution had already been provided.  I'll be very cautious about raising issues on this forum in future. But now, there are no signals or buffers on the railway which crosses the runway at NZGS. Thank you to all who helped, and I support JJJ's defence of Armin at X-World, even though X-World had little to do with the original problem.

 

 

 

[jörn-jören jörensön]

Yes, sorry for contributing to the going nowhere part... ; )

I just can't help defending other people's dedicated work, be it a freeware addon, some payware or (most of the time here) XP itself.
But to make it clear, I very much appreciate Triplemons work for XP and his engagement, expertise and support in this forum!

Please don't get too cautious, Karsten, in the end this topic helped to understand/fix the problem and also some interesting information was shared.
Imho, other topics have escalated quite a bit more, see the current "short term roadmap" topic, for example...  : D

Cheers, Jörn

[KarstenChen]

JJJ, I do appreciate your positive comment, but having looked more broadly around this forum and noted its often toxic content, I'd prefer to occasionally observe it from now on, rather than contribute.