We have Tyler working for us again for the summer (last summer he did a very nice and much needed rework of the X-Plane manual), and among his projects is cleaning up the mess that is scenery documentation.

We are moving the scenery documentation from their own dedicated site to the X-Plane wiki. As of this writing, as you can tell, it’s a work in progress. There are a few reasons why we decided to consolidate to the wiki:

  1. The scenery website is the very best of 1995 technology – unmanaged php in a big mess of files. We wanted to get the site under some kind of content management system, and MediaWiki is already working well for us for other docs.
  2. There is a lot of overlap between modeling techniques for scenery and modeling techniques for airplanes, so having all of the third party authoring docs in one place makes sense.

It’ll be a few more weeks before everything is organized.

Tyler is also reviewing all of the documentation. I have had a lot of trouble trying to document the scenery system, partly because I have been working on it for years, and thus I have no sense of what people don’t know. Since Tyler hadn’t done any scenery work before, he was able to read the documents and go “hey Ben, you keep talking about X but you never defined what it is.” The resulting edits should make the docs a lot clearer.

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.

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