EBCI (Charleroi / Brussels South)

for X-Plane 11
by Péter I. Pápics
http://papics.eu

Version 1.6 [2021/10/09]

Introduction:
EBCI (Charleroi / Brussels South), or Aéroport de Charleroi Bruxelles Sud (IATA: CRL) is an
international airport, located in Gosselies, a part of the city of Charleroi in the Province of
Hainaut in Wallonia, Belgium. The airport is 4 nautical miles (7.4 km; 4.6 mi) north of Charleroi
and 46 km (29 mi) south of central Brussels. In terms of passengers and aircraft movements, it
is the second busiest airport in Belgium having served 8,226,572 passengers in 2019 (and
2,559,372 in 2020). It is also a busy general aviation airfield, being home to 3 flying schools
(among which NewCAG, where I am a student pilot).

Features:
- Terminal buildings, hangars, etc. recreated with the combination of existing library
objects and custom objects, but always matching the actual buildings’ scales, window
and door positions, colours, styles as close as possible (without actually creating custom
 models for everything. The iconic facade featuring endless tilted windows of the first floor
of Terminal 1 is custom modelled in detail, along with its roof floor and the small tower
above the first floor. Large warehouses (plus supermarkets, petrol stations) are also
added outside of the airport boundary, especially under the glideslopes. Large parkings,
fences, etc. A 3D logo for the airport’s name is included on the main terminal, and a
custom sign for the Executive terminal on the Southern side too, plus some custom
lights, stand signs, and railings here and there.
- Runway, taxiways, aprons, and stands recreated matching the actual situation of the
airport at the end of 2021 (many features are not even visible in the latest satellite
images), being up-to-date with AIRAC cycle 2110. Apron markings (taxiways, lines,
stand markings, no smoking signs, ground vehicle speed limits and drive directions, etc.)
99% matching the real life situation where satellite imagery is available, or the AIRAC
data and my own observations where no imagery is available (runway extension and
new taxiways). Runway markers (touchdown zone, edge, centerline, arrows, skidmarks)
are also hand placed for maximum accuracy.
- All real life taxiway signs are modelled, without exception, and expected new signs are
placed and will be refined as data becomes available around the new taxiways and
extended runway. (Illuminated signs cast light at night.)
- Runway and taxiway lighting is recreated as close to real life as possible, including
custom retroreflective markers along taxiway N (active taxiway edge lighting is generally
only present at curves along taxiways at EBCI), and each and every runway light (edge,
center, approach, touchdown zone) hand placed exactly at the real life position - not
using the default X-Plane runway lighting at all.
- 25 cm resolution ground textures in and around the airport (in an approximately 4-5 km
radius circle, masked to merge nicely with any other ortho texture by placing imagery
edges always under roads or along river banks, and masking the groundworks around
the now more-or-less completed runway extension with a custom draped polygon).
- SAM marshallers are available on stands 51-72.
- Stands 1-4, 17-18, and 19-27 are available with both East and West facing positions
(just like in real life).
- Detailed custom mesh patch for Ortho4XP, including an exact recreation of the runway
topography, a very good recreating of the taxiway and apron topographies (to within 1-2
meters of accuracy), and recreation of the topographical features inside and around the
airport (including ground walls north of P10-P12, south of P5, some of the parkings and
rams around the airport, and recreating the different ground levels north and south of the
main terminal, etc.)
- Radio frequencies matching real life (with ATIS info available on both a COM and NAV
frequency, etc.).
- Native ground handling objects following the real life routes across the aprons, available
both North and South of the runway.
- Compatible with the native “draw parked aircraft” feature (when checked realistic sized
aircraft will appear randomly on some stands, when not then there are no static aircraft).
- Detailed apron, road, and parking lighting in and around the airport.
- VFR points, including a few water towers, a church, all wind turbines inside and near the
CTR of Charleroi, cooling towers, etc.
- Vegetation including some forests, hand-placed trees in and closely around the airport,
3D grass (colour - and area - matched to the included orthos), etc.
- Flows and ATC Taxi flows are defined, addons like Global Traffic should create proper AI
traffic, and the runway selection (communicated in the ATIS info) will take into account
the exact real life preferential runway system’s rules (including tail and crosswind limits).
INSTALLATION GUIDE (AND LIST OF DEPENDENCIES):

Required libraries:
- Airport Environment HD
- MisterX_Library
- OpenSceneryX
- RA_Library
- HungaryVFR-Library
- BS2001 Object Library
- CDB-Library
- NAPS_library
- ruscenery
- The_Handy_Objects_Library
- R2_Library
- SAM_Library
- FlyAgi_Vegetation
- ALES_DEV_LIB

Should you get errors in X-Plane 11 when loading the scenery, make sure first that all your
libraries are up to date.

Recommended sceneries:
EBCI will in practice work without these being installed, but for optimal experience, they are
recommended, especially the first one:
- X-Plane 11 HD Mesh Scenery v4 [Very strongly recommended, some roads, and
buildings around the airport will definitely not look as intended without this. We will use it
in Ortho4XP.]
- Global Forests (Europe) [will be fine without, but it is a really nice addition]
- HD Forests from MisterX [will be fine without, for better default forest textures]

EBCI package installation:

You will need the Patches, Tiles, and OSM_data folders later on (see Ortho4XP step-by-step
guide below). Without Ortho4XP the scenery will not work as intended!
Ortho4XP step by step guide:
THE SCENERY WILL NOT WORK PROPERLY WITHOUT THE ORTHO4XP PATCH!

For those familiar with Ortho4XP this guide will likely be way too detailed, but the description is
aimed at people who have never used Ortho4XP before (like me before creating this scenery).

Ortho4XP is used to create ortho sceneries (satellite imagery or orthophotography covering the
ground), overlays (roads, built up areas, etc.), and custom meshes (including the option of the
application of manually edited local patches).

Step 1) Install Ortho4XP 1.3 (https://github.com/oscarpilote/Ortho4XP) for your platform (in this
example we will look at the Windows version, get it here:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1PWgp33gDUQbY3uZmYbTi3ccMPLIJMQAQ/view).

Step 2) Copy (and merge if prompted) the Patches, Tiles, and OSM_data folders from the EBCI
download to the Ortho4XP folder. (The - likely advanced - users who have defined a custom
output folder in Ortho4XP, the contents of the Tiles folder should go in there.) The Patches
folder contains the definitions for the custom mesh of EBCI (and actually EBNM too), the Tiles
folder contains the configuration file for the ortho tile (it contains definitions for Zone level 17-19
coverage, with ZL 18 under the circuit areas of EBCI, EBNM, EBGB, and EBCF, and ZL 19 for
these airports), and the OSM_data folder contains hand corrected OSM street data to make
sure that the custom mesh is created properly. If you want you can overwrite these settings (as
a seasoned Ortho4XP user you will know what to do), but for normal users it will be a good
setup.

Step 2) Start Ortho4XP (in Windows, the Ortho4XP_v130.exe is in the Ortho4XP/Binary folder)

Step 3) Configure the Ortho4XP tile. There are 5 icons on the top (right) of the Ortho4XP user
interface. We will need to set things up in two of these.
- Clicking the first icon (wrench and screwdriver) opens the general configuration window.
Here you want to change only one thing (everything else will be read from the custom
configuration file in the Tiles folder), the custom_overlay_src. Click on the blue folder to
the right of the empty field, and navigate to the folder where the Earth nav data folder of
the HD Mesh Scenery v4 is. In my case, it is C:/Users/papic/Desktop/X-Plane 11/Custom
Scenery/zzz_hd_global_scenery4 - this will be the source of the extracted overlays.
OrthoXP will create the mesh and the satellite images, and it will extract the objects
(roads, buildings, etc.) from HD Mesh Scenery v4. Without an overlay source, you would
not have roads, forests, objects, etc. You can click Apply at the bottom and then go back
to the main Ortho4XP user interface.
- Click the 3rd icon (the globe). This opens up the tile selection interface. You can drag the
map while holding the right mouse button, so drag the map until Belgium becomes
visible, then double (left) click on Brussels. This should select the tile +50+004 (Active
tile, top left corner). Now hold shift and click one more in the yellow rectangle, this will
add the tile to the batch build list (and fill the inside of the yellow rectangle with a grid of
red dots). Now select all boxes under Batch build tiles on the left, and click Batch Build.
(When done, these screens should look like the image below.)

- In the main Ortho4XP window you can follow a log of what is happening. Very
early on you should see “Patching EBCI.patch.osm”, which means that Ortho4XP
is using our patch file. If you don’t see this, you probably did not copy the Patch
folder as instructed. (There will be one error saying “Wrong number of nodes or
non closed way for a altitude_high/altitude_low polygon, skipped.” - this is
“normal”, don’t worry about it.)
- The whole process will last quite some time depending on your internet speed,
up to half hours or more. What happens is Ortho4XP creates a mesh from
publicly available high resolution elevation data, smoothens the mesh around
airports, then applies our custom mesh from EBCI, then downloads the
orthophotos from (in our case) Bing, and finally exports overlays from HD Mesh
Scenery v4.
- The result of the process is two folders:
- The folder zOrtho4XP_+50+004 in Ortho4XP/Tiles
- The folder yOrtho4XP_Overlays in Ortho4XP
Step 4) Move zOrtho4XP_+50+004 and yOrtho4XP_Overlays folder to your Custom Scenery
folder.

Step 5) As a last step, we will apply decals to the created tile. Download the software
ApplyDecals from https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/25147-apply-decals/ and start it
(ApplyDecals_v101.exe). Click the Select button, and navigate to the
zOrtho4XP_+50+004/terrain folder, and select all .tef files that are not water_overlays. The
easiest to do is use the "*1?.ter" in the file name field, and then click in the resulting filtered file
list, hit Ctrl+A, which selects all these files, and then click open. This will select these files for the
application of the decal. Then select decal 32 - grass_and_stony_dirt_1, and hit Apply. This will
apply the selected decal on these files, making the ortho imagery look good on ground level too!

Scenery order:
Make sure that in your scenery_packs.ini file (in the Custom Scenery folder) the order of the
main EBCI scenery, global airports, the Ortho4XP tile, and the Ortho4XP overlays is the
following (in parentheses the position of other recommended packages):

- SCENERY_PACK Custom Scenery/EBCI_HDmesh4/

So to sum it up: Global mesh on the bottom, then local mesh and ortho tiles from Ortho4XP,
then Ortho4XP Overlays, then Global Airports, (then optionally Global Forests or any other
forest add-on), and on the top the main EBCI_HDmesh4 folder. Typically you will have all airport
sceneries above the Global Airports line, and libraries below that (actually the position of
libraries does not matter, but it is good practice to organise them together).

Every time you add a new scenery or library to your Custom Scenery folder and start up
X-Plane 11, the simulator will automatically put the new entries to the top of this file, that is why
you need to rearrange things manually afterwards (only once, then X-Plane does not rearrange
things until you add something new again), to make sure things are loaded in the right order.

Release notes:
- 1.6:
- The runway extension works on the East side of the Airport are coming to an
end, in mid October 2021 the extended runway and taxiways M7 and N7 became
operational. All changes are included in this version! Just like in real life, N6, and
N between N6 and N7 are not yet operational, and not even connected to the
junction at M6 - this gap can also be seen in the scenery, along with some
workers being busy in that area. These new areas are recreated as precisely as
possible based on the charts in the new AIP, orthophotos from early 2021
(showing most of the runway and taxiway outlines already very precisely), and on
my own observations (as soon as new satellite or ortho data becomes available I
will refine them if necessary). As part of this update runway center and edge
lights were changed and added, taxi lines and lights were added, taxi routes were
updated, taxi marks have been added (at expected positions and with expected
contents based on other markings around the airport, as there is no footage or
documentation on the actual new signalisation yet). The slope of the extended
runway also matches the real life approximately (again, no public data on it yet,
based on my own observations, and photographs), and included in the new
Ortho4XP patch. To remove the groundworks from the ortho background, I used
a custom grass texture over the affected areas - as soon as new ortho becomes
available, this will of course be updated, but for now this is much more realistic
than leaving the old ground works around the now completed areas.
- Custom models were added for the two prominent water towers North of the
airport around VFR point NA (and the models were reused for the water tower at
VFR point S and for another water tower at the Southern edge of the CTR), and
 for the blue spherical metal tank at VFR point N (along with a few default
warehouses to make this point also better recogniseable).
- Tire marks have been added along the most used taxi routes on the North side of
the Airport.
- Red marker lights have been added around the red dashed areas on the
Southern apron to match the real life situation.
- 1.5:
- Fully updated the stands on Platform 5, with correct line markings, etc., based on
the latest AIP and satellite imagery from mid 2020.
- Also added the new passport control building on the southern edge of Platform 5.
- 1.4:
- Added the small tower of Terminal 1 - another custom model for the building.
- Replaced the roof floor of Terminal 1 with a (simple) model, with realistic extents
(the default was a bit too tall), two antennae, and a red anti-collision light.
- Added the yellow stand position signs (one by one fully matching the real life
situation) on the sides of the apron light posts on Platform 10-15.
- Added the yellow back metal barriers around the aforementioned light posts
(painstakingly handcrafted), so the view from a parked aircraft is even more
realistic.
- Added a custom modelled “sun-roof” to the firefighters’ building on the South
Apron, now the view from the GA apron is much more realistic. (Also moved the
firefighter truck from a pretty hidden position to a more prominent place.)
- Replaced the pretty hacky original hangar/building lighting along most part of the
GA apron, creating a more realistically (and therefore better) lit Southern apron,
and also placing the lights hanging from the “sun-roof” of the firefighter building at
their actual position.
- Some other minor corrections. (I do not expect any large updates in the near
future, until the runway extension is completed in 2021...)
- 1.3.2:
- Added one texture that needs to be installed on top of the full 1.3.1 package
(Unzip file and copy to the EBCI_HDmesh4/Objects folder, overwriting the
existing file). This will fix the 3D letters' colour on the facade of the main terminal,
that got messed up under Vulcan.
- 1.3.1:
- Slight correction in the orthophotos over the edge of the custom ground textures,
to correct for minor alignment issues introduced during the masking of these tiles.
- Updated Ortho4XP config file as EBCI does not need high resolution orthos
anymore (since we cover it now with custom high resolution ground textures),
saving around 1 GB of tile size.
- Custom mesh patch included for EBNM too (and an extra folder to be placed in
the Ortho4XP folder to make sure patches are created correctly).
- Added a prominent custom modelled and textured water tower between VFR
point SA and the runway.
 - 1.3.0:
- Instead of using the default runway lighting of X-Plane, I added custom hand
placed edge, centerline, approach (beyond the already hand placed RWY 24
approach lights) and touchdown zone lights, exactly according to the real life
positions.
- The custom runway was made even more precise by adding the result of recent
surface works (mainly two darker stretches of asphalt in two stripes along a
significant length of the runway), that are not even visible on the latest
orthophotos (but are covered by my training flight videos ;D).
- 25 cm resolution orthophotos (that will display independently of the chosen
Ortho4XP tile source during the installation procedure) were added in and around
the airport (and some vehicles were moved around accordingly), which were
taken in 2019. The textures were color corrected to look as close to reality in
X-Plane as possible, and were masked so no hard edges can be seen between
the 25 cm resolution ground textures and the ortho used in the creation of the
Ortho4XP tile. The textures have decals applied so close to the ground the
perceived resolution is even higher.
- The 3D grass was redone to match the state (tall grass colour and extent) of the
new ground textures.
- Improved tree and forest areas around the airport with better colour, density, and
height.
- 1.2.0:
- Added custom runway (all runway markers, touchdown zone, centerline, arrows,
etc. are hand placed to reflect the real life situation much more accurately than
the default runway did).
- Added a few exclusion areas over the aprons to remove unnecessary roads for
users of X-Europe.
- 1.1.0:
- Added a detailed custom model for the first floor of Terminal 1 to bring the iconic
facade of the endless tilted windows to the sim
- 1.0.0:
- Added speed limit signs, aircraft type markings at stands, no smoking signs
- Recoloured the 3D grass to match the latest Bing orthos better
- Other small fixes and changes
- 0.9.0:
- Initial release for Beta testing

Acknowledgements:
- The red asphalt texture is a modification of a texture from MisterX6’s MisterX Library.
- The 3D grass, shrub, and some forest objects/textures are modified versions
(colour-matching with ground textures, adjusted density and height parameters) of
assets from the FlyAgi Vegetation library.
 - The High resolution ground textures are provided by the Service public de Wallonie
(SPW).

License:
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
International License. For the licence of the high resolution ground textures see the included
documentation within the download (in the Ortophotos/licence folder).