PSX.NET.GateFinder - Accurate Gate Positioning for PSX

[Gary Oliver]

All,

A small addon born out of discussions on the MSFS thread around positioning of PSX accurately to gates.

PSX.NET.GateFinder will position you to the exact gate location based on MSFS/P3D Scenery.

Note: This addon was written in a few spare hours this morning so please report back any issues.

Install

Pre Req Download .NET6 Runtime

Download PSX.Net.GateFinder and extract to a folder of your choice.

Run makerunways.exe, this will take ~10 minutes to scan your MSFS install for Gates.

Take the g5.csv it generates and put it in the root of your My Documents folder.

Usage

Run PSX.NET.GateFinder to choose a position.

The config file is created after first run in your my docs folder which allows you to change PSX IP and Port, and also if you find the aircraft gets positioned a bit too far forward edit the ReverseDistance.  I found 0.01 was fine, but try 0.05 or 0.015.



Cheers
G

[macroflight]

Works like a charm! Thanks Gary!

(My only problem was that I managed to download the earlier broken version. If you get an exception when you try to "Set PSX Position" and no config file generated, make you have the latest version linked to from this post.)

[akatham]

Exactly what i needed for you connector. Thank you very much. Does exactly what it is supposed to do.

[J D ADAM]

Thank you Gary for your efforts on behalf of PSX users.
It appears to me that Gate Finder is for MSFS although you state it will
work with P3D.
Confusion reigns in my mind because it won't install for me. (Are you surprised)
Any advice would be appreciated.

Derek

[J D ADAM]

Gary,

If all else fails READ THE  BL .........!

Now working faultlessly with P3D .

Thank you for yet another fine addition to my sim.

Cheers
Derek

[Takayoshi Sasano]

Hi Gary,

thank you very much for creating this, having just started getting my feet wet with PSX the GateFinder is a phantastic tool. I spent hours creating a small set of .situ files for the airports/gates I tend to start from frequently by adjusing the coordinates in the Instructor and check in MSFS how badly I messed up.

Cheers

Yoshi

[Gary Oliver]

This has been updated to (optionally) allow you to skip through the MSFS menus when using PSX.NET.MSFS.WASM.

Requires Simstack Router.  Its currently setup for a 4K install of MSFS.

[petdocvmd]

Gary,

Will this app work without simstack router (I don't have it and can't get it)?  The app runs, but after entering an aiport (e.g. KSFO), and selecting a gate, pressing the position PSX button does nothing - the aircraft does not change position.  I am using the MS Store version of MSFS 2020 on a Win 11 PC, and testing with PSX on the same PC.  Does it matter where the gatefinder program is located?

*** EDIT:  Closing all and restarting solved the problem :-)

[Aleks]

Any chance to make it run with "," as decimal separator? Using "." makes fuss on my system with other applications.

[Gary Oliver]

Aleks,

I'll add it to the list to take a look at (is this fixed with the WASM module already?)

Cheers
G

[joergalv]

(is this fixed with the WASM module already?)

Affirmed!

[kryten]

Hi Gary,
  This looks like it would be very useful to me. Does it work with FSX?

[Gary Oliver]

Link updated with version which should support different decimal separators.

Cheers
G,a.ry

For future us... the fix is to set the following in the csproj files

<InvariantGlobalization>true</InvariantGlobalization>
<PredefinedCulturesOnly>false</PredefinedCulturesOnly>   

[joergalv]

Tank you G.ar,y 

This looks like it would be very useful to me. Does it work with FSX?

Yes. Just put the Makerwys.exe in your FSX root folder, run it, and take the g5.csv it generates and put it in the root of your My Documents folder.

[joergalv]

Gary, maybe you accidentally have not linked to the new version?
The exe in the provided zip is dated from Jan 15, and still requires '.' to be the decimal separator.

Best regards
Joerg

[Will]

Is this still the best way to find and position at gates? I'm noticing it's looking for scenery in the MSFS (2020) locations... wondering if anything is available for MSFS 2024. Thanks.

[Gary Oliver]

I've not run a new makerwys recently (its on my todo list) against the sim...

Helpfully Pete Dowsons Son has posted the source code

https://github.com/jldowson/MakeRunways/

So looks like a rather trivial change if someone has the time to make it look at the 2024 folders.

Cheers
G

[macroflight]

So looks like a rather trivial change if someone has the time to make it look at the 2024 folders.

Will there be any data to read in the 2024 folders? 2024 streams a lot of its data on demand - is the runway data part of that, maybe?

I made a very quick'n'dirty attempt. You can download a binary here. It extracts gate information from the 2024 Community folder OK, and it finds the default 2024 folders (e.g "AppData\Roaming\Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024\Packages\StreamedPackages\fs24-microsoft-airport-lszh-zurich") but it seems it cannot extract any gate information from the default airports, or there is no information to be extracted.

If we take LSZH as an example, that folder only contains "content\minimal.fsarchive" (200kB).

Even if I move PSX (using the Position tab in the Instructor station) to LSZH and wait for the scenery to load, that folder still only contains the small minimal.fsarchive file.

[Gary Oliver]

Hmmm a conundrum... I wonder if we need to use the simconnect facilities data? Or would the navigraph data set match? Worth trying out some ideas

[macroflight]

LittleNavMap seems to have figured out how to connect to MSFS2024 and read the data we need (at least it displays parking information in its maps, and the position and gate names seems OK). It even has a web server with API. Unfortunately the parking information seems not to be exposed through the API in the current version.

https://github.com/albar965/littlenavmap/blob/release/3.0/web/webapi.yaml

If we could get the parking data from there, PSX.NET.GateFinder would not need MakeRunways. Or we might be able to get some ideas for how to talk to MSFS directly from the LittleNavMap source code.

Edit: the data we need is definitely there. LittleNavMap creates sqlite files with the data it extracts from the simulators, and the 2024 one seems to contain the parking data in a very simple format:

$ sqlite3 -csv little_navmap_msfs24.sqlite "select name, number, heading, lonx, laty from parking where airport_id is (select airport_id from airport where ident is 'EGLL');"   | head -20
G,501,179.65544128418,-0.489662408828735,51.474250793457
G,502,179.175445556641,-0.4890396296978,51.4741325378418
G,503,179.554061889648,-0.488418579101562,51.4741249084473
G,505,179.548721313477,-0.487698405981064,51.474048614502
G,506,269.699279785156,-0.485870718955994,51.4739875793457
G,507,269.86279296875,-0.485870480537415,51.4736022949219
G,508,269.748260498047,-0.486034065485001,51.4731521606445
G,509,269.738861083984,-0.485852092504501,51.4727058410645
G,511,269.811981201172,-0.485856801271439,51.4723167419434
G,512,269.638916015625,-0.486035645008087,51.471866607666
G,513,269.506500244141,-0.486051201820374,51.4713287353516
G,514,269.639862060547,-0.486187219619751,51.4712600708008
G,516,269.457916259766,-0.486063271760941,51.4705924987793
G,518,269.621490478516,-0.48603892326355,51.4699287414551
G,519,359.839050292969,-0.485850840806961,51.4692115783691
G,520,359.719848632812,-0.486595392227173,51.4691963195801
G,521,359.803771972656,-0.487276196479797,51.4691772460937
G,522,359.574981689453,-0.488000065088272,51.4692153930664
G,523,359.783630371094,-0.488719940185547,51.4692077636719
G,515,269.571746826172,-0.485845923423767,51.4708633422852