Anyone working on any airports while the World Hub is closed?

WorldHub Discussions
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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.

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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.

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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. :smile:

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:

  1. Best case scenario: Everything remains the same, and downloading these airports in Q2 next year will result in the same files I have right now.
  2. The November refresh (and maybe a world update or two between now and then) updates an airport I have. Now, the file that I have is out of date with what’s in the sim, for better or worse (it could go either way).
  3. They allow things in like airport beacons or (:scream:) 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.
  4. Worst case scenario: The MSFS 2024 SDK is fundamentally different than what we have now, and the next iteration of the World Hub uses the 2024 SDK, and anything I work on during the break is worthless. (In this worst-case scenario, there is no utility to convert old XML into the new format.)

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. :confused:

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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:

  1. small changes will be made due to the new SDK. The SDK itself will not be significantly different in format, but will provide additional capabilities, such as yellow-on-black taxiway markings, two-sided signs, newly textured buildings, etc. (perhaps some of our suggestions…I believe Asobo/MSFS does listen to our feedback) . Any format change will be backwards compatible, similar to what X-Plane has done.
  2. They may allow us to move beacons and add certain default objects, including default buildings. This seems necessary to get other people involved, which is desperately needed. It seems many have been turned off by not being able to actually add these objects.
  3. They may replace current objects with updated objects, and things may shift their location a little, but I’m not sure they’d completely wipe out the existing layout/objects.
  4. I doubt we’ll see your #4 scenario.

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!