
I'd like to give much credit here to UnicycleBloke, the creator of YAGL. My original code was based on something that RobC hacked up a long, long time ago for a replacement heliport. It was in NFO, and everybody knows what a pain that is to try to modify. It's been so long since I've touched the code that I couldn't even remember what I programmed in or why. UnicycleBloke wrote YAGL to help decode/encode NFO to be more readable (but not a replacement meta-language of it's own, like NML). He also spent a LOT of time documenting YAGL, and his work was immensely helpful. I decided to change the date to make this infinitely available. It will now work with any other airport NewGRF (limit of 128 airports total, not that we're anywhere near close to hitting that 16 years into NewGRFs). I was finally able to get the set name to properly display in the build menu. I still don't have an appropriate build icon displayed (can't figure it out yet). One HUGE benefit is that I set the cachement area to 6, to make it more competitive with trains, and I've set the noise generation to zero... so your local councils are going to want at least one in every city!
With all that, this is still very much a hack. This is a replacement for the Heliport tower, which is a 1x1 tile that helicopters land on top of. The game animation cannot change. The airship will follow the same maneuvers, and will basically sit on the grassy field in front of it. Because of that, there's no rotation available, it would be pointless. The airship mast itself overhangs on the tile to the northeast corner, so that the airship's nose appears to be within the vicinity of the loading platform. You see the windsock in the middle of the field? THAT is what you'll click on to select the station. It's not climate-aware, that's something else that's a bit beyond me right now. And because the mast itself overhangs, it will overwrite any sprits on that adjacent tile. I would suggest using a nice Object to build something on that tile (pavement, park, something) to help it blend in. It looks OK at 1x zoom, and an awful mess at 2x/4x zoom. The graphics I'm working from are much larger, but I haven't figured out how to put those higher zoom levels in yet. I'd like to, though.
Since this is a public domain project, feel free to hack on this all you want. I've included my original YAGL source code. If you want it in NFO, you can decompile with grfcodec to get it. If you want it in NML, you'll have to write it yourself, sorry! For now, here's a few images to keep you fed.