I just posted WorldEditor 1.4 – “WED”, as we seem to call it most of the time – release candidate one for Mac, Windows and Linux – see the WorldEditor page for download links, report bugs on the gateway bug reporter.

Besides fixing a few bugs, this build has a new certificate so uploading/downloading from the gateway will work.

WED has a validate function that finds authoring problems in your scenery packs; two notes on this function:

First, I have been trying to improve the validation every time an issue comes up with a scenery pack. Therefore WED 1.4’s validation is quite a bit more strict than 1.3’s validation.

Once WED 1.4 goes final, it will become the required version to upload to the gateway. This ensures that we have the strongest validation, and saves Julian from having to hand check authoring issues.

This means that when you go to make a modification to your existing work, you might not be able to resubmit it until you fix existing problems. Your project didn’t change, the validation just became tighter.

Second, I have added the ATC layout error checks to the validation step. These checks (select crossing routes, select doubled nodes, select degenerate route lines) have been available since WED 1.2, but you now have to have a ‘clean’ layout to build your project. I’m hoping that this stricter validation will help fix layout bugs; when the layout is wrong, the AI aircraft’s taxi routes become even weirder than normal.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

4 comments on “WorldEditor 1.4 Release Candidate 1 Posted”

  1. This is excellent news! I have been holding a few airports back waiting for the updated 1.4 – I will test and report back any findings.

    I welcome tighter validation checks – it would be awesome if these could also be extended to “checking the airport name” with the Gateway database (warning: Your airport name differs from the database airport name!) and maybe add some warnings regarding exclusion zones and airport boundaries “warning: your design has no exclusion zones”, “warning: your design has no airport boundary”… I will add these suggestions via the Gateway suggestion system.

    Thanks for making WED better continuously!

    Jan

    1. Hi Jan,

      The naming thing is a little messy. The problem is that the scenery packs are stored in a mostly opaque form on the server – WED has the brains to understand them, but the gateway relies on meta-data that WED passes in. This makes the gateway itself much much simpler; if it had to be a full scenery editor it probably still be in development. But it means that when there’s a problem like names we can’t do “simple” things like mass-rename every single pack – the name is baked in.

      I’d say any validation warning you think should be in there, file a feature request. For exclusion zones, that one’s tricky – it’s usually a bad sign if you don’t have them but WED can’t know the author’s intent, so it probably shouldn’t stop someone from exporting.

      1. Would perhaps an “Are you sure?” message before exporting a scenery without an exclusion zone be reasonable? It will at least serve as a reminder.

  2. hey Ben, seems like you have been crazy busy with graphics bugs and such thus a delay, but any word on 10.40 yet?

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