dat2vice is a utility for people doing facility engineering for vice. It extracts video maps from the FAA DAT video map file format and converts them to vice's internal format.

dat2vice takes a manifest file that specifies the filenames of the DAT files to convert as well as additional information about each one:

• "filename" is a string giving the path to the DAT file
• "group" should be either 0 or 1, with 0 signifying map group A, and 1 signifying map group B.
• "label" gives the label that should be used for the map on the STARS DCB
• "name" gives the full name of the map, as is used in vice scenario definition files.
• "id" gives the integer map number associated with the map.
• "radius" (optional) if specified, gives a radius in nautical miles beyond which extra data in the map is culled.

Here is an example:

[
        {
            "filename": "xyz001sgp.dat",
            "group": 0,
            "label": "XYZ RNAV",
            "name": "XYZ RNAV APPROACHES",
            "id": 1
        },
        {
            "filename": "xyz012smvagp.dat",
            "group": 0,
            "label": "XYZ MVA",
            "name": "XYZ AREA MVAS",
            "id": 12,
            "radius": 60

        },
]

Given a manifest file, run dat2vice like this, giving it the filename for the manifest file and the facility identifier for the maps:

> dat2vice manifest.json ZXX

You can also specify a culling radius via the -radius command-line option:

> dat2vice -radius 40 manifest.json ZXX

If -radius is given and per-map "radius" values are present, the per-map value takes precedence.

If successful, dat2vice will generate two files in the current directory, ZXX-manifest.gob and ZXX-videomaps.gob.zst. These can be then be used in vice scenarios.