I have a handful of .zip files from various airports that I didn’t get to do while the World Hub was open because I was busy working on other airports. I’m thinking about doing some of them, so that they’re ready to go next year, although I’m concerned that if they get updated in the November refresh that I might end up wasting some time.
Wondering if anyone else here is contemplating working on some airports while things are shut down.
I have thought about it, but the last message about “closed because aerials might not line up” or something like that concerns me. We had heard that there should be no concern about our airport work but the exact reason why the Hub is closed makes me wary. I don’t want to waste a lot of time, either. As you are well aware, this stuff takes a considerable amount of time and when I go to an airport, I see many more things that need to be changed than the one or two items I thought I’d be changing!
I’m also a little concerned about spending time on airports (like KOSH) that need changing in MSFS but someone has done an add-on for. Even though they may not be up-to-date with the airport layout, they may have buildings placed which means people will use that version before they use the in-sim one. So I’m focused on flying, at least for a while.
Thanks for the reply!
Yeah, this is the kind of thinking I was wondering if people were kicking around.
Oh, indeed, I am well aware. 
This × 1000! Every airport I’ve done has blown out of proportion.
I have to imagine that they closed the World Hub to do work on it (and also so that the team can work on MSFS 2024 without being bothered by us). If they simply closed it because of the November refresh, the World Hub would be open again on November 19th.
And I wonder if the World Hub will go from alpha straight into production or if it will go into beta next. (I hope it goes into beta next.)
I can see a few possibilities with each of the unedited airports I have on my hard drive, in increasing order of pain levels to me:
) buildings. If they do that, they might do a mass update and add all airport beacons, buildings, etc. into the downloadable XML files for each airport. That means that the airports I have on my hard drive won’t have them, and if I uploaded them as-is, I’d pull a disappearing act on all the beacons and buildings at the airport.In scenarios 2 and 3, you could copy over portions of your edited XML into the new XML, but that can result in disaster unless you know what you are doing and are careful.
I may take the risk and do it with a smaller airport. Unfortunately, the airport I stopped working on that I never got to upload is a major class B international airport. 
Good point! I’ve thought some of the new aerials had been introduced even before the World Hub was closed. Some of the airports I had worked on changed during the last two or three months of the Alpha. We’ll see if that is true in 2025, I guess.
I’m with you on this one.
Regarding your four scenarios, I’m thinking it likely that:
Yes, and I need to learn exactly how to do this. I have at least three airports I avoided doing during the Alpha that I have ready if only I could successfully copy over the XML to a new, World Hub compatible file. I had developed them with the full SDK with custom buildings, so maybe I’ll put them up on Flightsim.to or similar (but Flightsim.to recently changed their handling of submissions, so I’m not sure I want to use that website).
Hope you are able to get that class B airport done and into MSFS without too many hassles!
Yes, unfortunately, I don’t think that this closure helps us in any way. Airports will continue to change over time, and they just can’t close the World Hub two months before every world update “just in case.” I am not buying the idea that they closed it because of the November refresh.
Ooh, don’t get my hopes up! I created an idea for double-sided taxiway signs.
If I had to predict, I do think beacons will show up for us. I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know everything about the SDK, but I don’t see a technical reason why we don’t have access to them, as I see them as just another SimObject. Buildings, I’m less sure about. I think that there might be some technical decisions to be made around those. But I’d be very happy to be wrong. And I definitely agree that it would attract more people than the World Hub in its last incarnation did.
I doubt it, too, as they need to make a hub that’s accessible to both 2020 and 2024. I would definitely prefer a 2024 World Hub SDK that’s backwards compatible with 2020 than a 2020 SDK that leaves out features in the name of compatibility with both systems. However, they will also need to consider 2020 users updating the World Hub after the 2024 release.
Depending on how complicated the airports you built were, it may be more painful to port them over than redoing them in the World Hub. Without any documentation on all the elements and attributes that are not supported in the World Hub version, I don’t know how easy it would be to simply lift that XML off of the existing airport and copy it into a World Hub file. Obvious elements like <Com/> and <DeleteAirport/> would need to be removed. But you would also have to look inside <Runway/> elements and find <RunwayDeformation/> elements and remove those. But are there any allowed elements that have attributes inside that are not allowed, or worse, have attributes that are allowed but values that are not? I don’t know. I suppose you could try and see if the XML parser that runs when you submit allows it in.
I also wonder if you were to make a backup copy of your airport, edit your XML, replace the first line of your XML with these two lines:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<FSData version="9.0" source="sceneryHub">And then open it up in the MSFS SDK, save the project, and would it remove all “illegal” values for you? I haven’t tried this.