Delete the underlying airport in compiled World Hub airports

When you compile a World Hub airport and try to view it as a package in the Community folder, you can still see the underlying default airport. That makes previewing and testing your changes difficult.

Here is a road I made. Notice how the road only has a white line on the right, but none on the left?


That road actually does have a white PaintedLine on the left, but in the preview it’s not appearing. This airport was published before, and I made some changes to the road. And my guess is that the white line is not there because it is interfering with the line from the default airport.

Same airport, same road. I altered some of the dashed lines. Notice how there are duplicates? Which PaintedLine is the new one, and which one is the old one? You can’t tell:

Here’s a better example of this pain point. I deleted some taxiway signs that were not needed and added new ones. Which ones are which?

More taxiway signs, some of which I deleted, some of which I moved. Again, you can’t tell. Moreover, that PaintedLine that goes straight over the grass is in the default airport. I know that because I changed the shape of the apron. But it just adds to the confusion:

Want to see more PaintedLines from the default airport? These are from the underlying default airport. The taxiway doesn’t exist anymore, but the default airport’s PaintedLines still show through:

There was also one time when a taxiway sign I edited conflicted with a default taxiway sign on the published version of the airport. It had the effect of blocking off the change. I had to wait until the airport was published and go back and verify that everything was okay:

I don’t know if all of this is because maybe the “delete” flags on the Airport object are set to FALSE, or if there is some other reason. If that is the reason, I hope that they can either be set to TRUE in the compiled airport, or if there is some other technical reason for doing that that this effect can be mitigated somehow.

I agree things can get very confusing at times and there is no way to test the airport in advance of publishing. This has drawbacks. As soon as I finish the airport I’m working on I will be going back to the published airports I’ve done to check and revise them as necessary (and maybe to add some things I missed).

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I also would wish for optional delete-flags if you compile a world hub airport. Would be a huge benefit for testing. If it is just inserted when compiling it wouldn’t hurt the worldhub project file.

Curious if there is a benefit to optional delete flags, as opposed to automatically deleting the entire airport. My understanding is that whatever we submit to the World Hub entirely replaces whatever was there before. (Not trying to push back…just trying to figure it out.)