Hi All..
I have found excluding of individual default taxiway signs very elusive when using the tools that are 'supposed-to' work; ie the BGLComp SDK rectangular exclude using excludeTaxiwaySignObjects = "TRUE" does not work (for me) to exclude individual (or any of the) signs.
The following routine seems to work fine, although it requires:
1) Using Winfried Orthmann's NewBGLAnalyze.exe or similar program, decompile the applicable FS9 AP******.bgl file to yield an XML (text) file. The applicable 'AP' prefixed file is easily located using RhumbaFlappy's TCalc2004 utility.
2) Excerpt (only) the section containing the airport-in-work's runways/taxiways/parkings/taxisigns, etc, by copying/pasteing the applicable excerpted portion to a new notepad .txt file.
3) Revise this 'excerpted' XML code to comment-out code for the individual unwanted taxi sign(s), as in the example:
<!-- exclude this sign
<TaxiwaySign
lat="Your Lat Goes Here"
lon="Your Lon Goes Here"
heading="Your heading for the sign goes here"
size="SIZE3"
justification="LEFT"
label="l[A]m36"/> -->
Note: Another option you might want to consider is simply revising the context of the label for the taxiway sign, ie change: label="l[A]m36"/> to read: label="l[A]m19"/>, which should change the taxiway A to rwy 36 sign to read taxiway A to rwy 19. In this case you would not use the <!-- exclude this sign --> comment-out syntax. You can easily see how this concept can be applied to change other thngs like runway/taxiway choice of textures, correcting MS default errors in taxiway placements, etc.
4) After doing the desired revisions to the excerpted code, you must apply the typical XML header to the top of the revised XML code text file, ie:
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<FSData
version = "9.0" xmlns:xsi='http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance'
xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="bglcomp.xsd" > and add the: </FSData> tag at the end of the revised code listing.
5) I then manually compile the excerpted/revised file by dragging it's text file's icon on top of the bglcomp.exe icon. Unless there are syntax errors in your revisions, a new bgl file is produced which is then moved to the active scenery folder in FS9. In case of errors, the 'cmd.exe' window can be used to troubleshoot them, however, if the standard XML rules are followed, you shouldn't need to use that troubleshooting method.
6) Important: You must 'software delete' all the original airport's runway/taxiway/parking system, else FS9 will end-up still displaying the original configuration with the unwanted taxi sign(s) (or whatever else you decided to edit/revise).
I use SceneGenX version 11 to do this 'software' deletion AND ALSO to apply new Runways. The new runways seem to be required to assure that runways are visible in the sim. However, the visual runways now appearing will take-on the attributes of the runways in the excerpted code -- so if you revised textures or other physical changes to the rwys/taxiways/parkings/taxisigns in the excerpted/revised code, your revisions will appear in the sim instead of the native FS9 default attributes for the airport.
I think this method ends up being a clean way to not only delete taxi signs but also to 'patch-out' other undesired things MS did in their haste to quickly mass-produce all the world's airports -- BTW, thanks MS, for the basic FS9 platform. Also, I think the AFCAD software does essentially the same thing as this routine, automating the processes?
J.R.
