Pasted from Page 71/72 of the manual
The SU10 Navdata API Update
With the SU10 SDK, a new API has been added to Simconnect, allowing add-ons to obtain data on airports without having to open the airport .BGL file. This will have profound effects on the way GSX works, since GSX will now work in full on encrypted airports bought on the MS Marketplace, with no need to obtain an alternative .BGL from the scenery developers anymore. From a reliability and usability point of view, there wouldn’t be any need to create and maintain the “Airport Cache” anymore, which required GSX scanning all files in the Community folder, and detect any changes to it. Also, having to read files in both the Community and Official folders sometimes might result in issues with permissions, possible interference from other software (like antivirus slowing down the airport cache generation) and while the airport cache was being created, GSX couldn’t be used and with many sceneries, this process could last up to several minutes, also depending by the speed of the hard drive the Community folder was located on. In addition to that, some users configure the simulator to temporarily disable unused areas before each flight, and this would have caused the Airport Cache being regenerated every time. Using the SU10 Navdata API, all of these issues will be gone, since GSX won’t use an Airport Cache anymore, making it way more reliable and easier to use, with a faster startup time, and with many problems associated to reading the airport .BGL file completely solved.
Navdata API side-effects
There are some side-effects that needs to be taken into account, which affect Jetway detection and GSX Airport Profiles.
Jetway detection
At the time of this writing ( October 2022 ), the SU10 Navdata API doesn’t provide any informations about Jetways other than telling if a Parking Spot has a Jetway associated to it or not. In order to create walking path for Passengers, GSX requires the Jetway Lat/Lon position, and while this information was available in the airport .BGL, when using the Navdata API the airport .BGL is not read anymore, so GSX needs to “find” Jetways in the scene, by looking at all the objects in the airport and, since Jetways don’t have their own specific category like Airplanes, Ground Vehicles, Helicopters, Boats, Humans, Animals, the only way to find Jetways without reading the airport .BGL, is to search for ALL objects in the scene, and use some kind of heuristic based on the object “Title” to recognize which ones are Jetways. Currently, any object that contains the following text anywhere in its title is considered to be a Jetway: “FSDT_WOJ”, “JETWAY” and “JW”. We found lots of 3rd party Jetways usually match one of these naming convention but, if you have an airport with different names for the jetways, or you are a scenery Developer who made custom Jetways using different names, please let us know, so we can add their pattern to GSX recognition code. We suggested to MSFS developers to add the Jetway position to the Navdata API, which will make Jetway detection more reliable, and not depending on their names anymore, if the Navdata API will be eventually improved with the missing data, we’ll surely release an update to support it.
GSX Custom Profiles
Until now, GSX tied a custom airport profile to the .BGL which was in use when the profile was made. But since we don’t read the .BGL anymore, now the only thing that ties a custom .INI profile to a certain airport, is the ICAO code, that is the first letters of the .INI file name. It also means GSX Custom profiles will ONLY work from this folder:
%APPDATA%\Virtuali\GSX\MSFS
Custom profiles which were previously distributed by a scenery developer in the scenery package itself won’t be used anymore, since GSX won’t even know from which package or file the airport data is coming from. With the October 2022 release, we are releasing the SU10 Navdata API as a “Public Beta”, and by Default the feature is DISABLED, until we’ll obtain enough feedback to consider it Final, and make it the new Default. In the Final version, if there are multiple .INI profiles for the SAME ICAO code in your custom profiles folder, we’ll have an interface allowing to manually choose which one to load, with some additional information about how many parking spots in the .INI match the parking spots in the simulator, making more obvious to recognize if a certain .INI file is correct for the airport currently installed. But until the update is still considered Beta, it will be your responsibility to ensure you have the correct .INI file for the airport you installed, since GSX will only look at the ICAO in its name, loading the first .INI that matches the airport code.
