The big difference between the old sectorfile format and the new FIR Definitions is the complete separation between navigational data (airways, vor, ndb, waypoints, ….) used in the processing of the flight plan route, calculation of the flight profile and the visual data displayed on the SDD (Situational Data Display) resulting in a visual display which can be tailored completely to the needs of the local division and users without loosing navigational data processing capabilities.
In other words: the maps shall only contain visual components which will be available for display purposes only and not for data processing.
Please be mindful of the realism of your map elements. Many radar screens are designed to show fewer elements than what you may have drawn in IvAc 1 sector files. We recommend basing all maps on pictures of real radar screens, then tweaking data as required for use on IVAO.
Every FIR can specify an unlimited number of themes. Themes are defined by the theme directory name located in fir/theme/(theme_name)
Each named theme directory groups the following files:
Map elements should refer to a color defined in mapcolors.xml. Wherever possible a generic name for each color element should be used such as gnd_taxiway as this will allow easier management of colors within themes.
Please be mindful of the realism of your themes. Remember many radar screens limit the amount of colour and tone down contrast. We strongly recommend you base your themes on pictures of real rdar screens.
As there is no limit to the amount of themes you can define per FIR each position could conceivably have a different look for each controller position: e.g. Airport 1 uses theme 1, Airport 2 uses theme 2, ACC uses theme 3.
During startup the maps folder is read and all files with a .map extension are processed. The map files are located in the fir/maps/ directory, which can contain one level of sub-directories (example: fir/maps/adxx ). We strongly recommend that you use sub-directories to logically group map files together.
You can also define a groups.xml file on the route maps folder fir/maps/groups.xml this file defines how the maps window looks and contains more information.
You are able to influence the order in which maps and/or map items are drawn on the screen:
Using this principle can simplify the way you draw a complicated airport ground layout.
The drawing order is first defined by the alphabetical order of the layer attribute and secondly by the map id attribute.
The display order in each of the the MAPS selection tabs can be changed by modifying the id of the maps. The map list is retrieved in alphabetical order when the window is created.
Tip: Use the drawing order to optimize your maps by specifying a layer attribute for each map
All maps are defined in XML format. There are a large amount of free/open source tools available on the Internet to edit XML files, we also publish schema files which can be used to verify that the XML files use the correct syntax.
| Root Element | maps | |
|---|---|---|
| Element | map | |
| Attribute | Format | Remarks |
| id | string | unique identifier for the map |
| name | string | map name, to be displayed on the map menu |
| group | string | group which the map is contained within on the map menu |
| layer | integer | layer number which this map is to be displayed at |
| visible | bool | True or False, indicating whether the map should be visible initially |
| text | bool | True or False, indicating whether the map text should be visible initially |
For example:
<maps> <map id="EDYY_BRU_AIRSP" name="EDYY BRU" group="AIRSPACE" layer="110" visible="false" text="false" > .... </map> </maps>
We have included a small chapter at the end of this document to give you some examples of great tools which you could use to create your divisions FIR definition(s).