A random flight generator for X-Plane.
Upon first starting XPlorer, it will ask you for the root folder of your X-Plane 12 installation (i.e. the base folder, containing the X-Plane 12 executable). This is needed because it has to read the apt.dat and earth_nav.dat files in order to build its internal database. On subsequent starts, this dialog won't show anymore. If you want to create the database again (for example after an X-Plane update), you just need to delete the file airports.db in the data folder of XPlorer.
The user interface should be pretty much self explanatory, but here's a quick "manual":
- On the top left section ("Flight constraints"), you can select if the departure and arrival airports should be random, or you can select to specify the departure or arrival icao (not both, of course).
- You can choose to give values for min/max distance and min/max runway length, or leave any or all of them 0 for random
- The possible departure and arrival airports can be further restricted by checking the boxes in the relevant sections. Of course the departure or arrival checkboxes will be ignored if you specified a departure or arrival ICAO.
- Click "Generate Flight" to start the generator. The result will be printed in the lower section. If you made "impossible inputs", for example excluding all airport types, min distance greater than max or a non-existing ICAO, an error massage will (should) pop up, and you need to adjust the settings/values.
- Normally, a result should be found pretty much instantly, but if XPlorer can't find a matching airport pair, it will show a timeout message and you need to adjust the settings to allow for more options.
There are a few things worth noting:
- Land airports, even if they have heipads, are excluded from heliports
- Land airports with water runways (e.g. PHNL) will also count as seaplane bases
- Heliports with water runways (or seplane bases with helipads) will count as heliports and seaplane bases.
If you want you are welcome to join the Discord server for discussion and bug reports. You can also attach the XPlorer.log file there, which may help me to reproduce the issue.
XPlorer uses the following libs and assets: