With X-Plane 8 and 9 we had a perpetual problem: the airport layouts ship with X-Plane and are updated frequently by Robin; if an airport layout is changed significantly or a new runway is installed, the airport layout may conflict with the base terrain and autogen from the underlying DSF that was cut when the sim was first shipped.

This resulted in a huge amount of stress for users who were building airport layouts.  When is the cutoff for new layouts? What if I don’t make it?  It will be years before the DSF is fixed.

I think the solution for version 10 is actually quite simple: we will recut individual DSF tiles and “push” them in sim updates.

In fact, we are already doing this.  Five tiles, including the tiles containing Paris and Denver, rolled off the production line broken and we didn’t detect the problem until after we burned the DVDs.  The patch is already online, and if you are running with current betas and installed Denver and Paris from DVD, you should have the corrections.

I think we’ve reached a point in X-Plane’s development where we need to evolve the global scenery from a static product that never changes to an ongoing one that can be updated in pieces, on the fly.

The History

I have been involved in X-Plane since version 6; for as long as I’ve been around, the product has been updated frequently with frequent patching.  Starting with X-Plane 8 we developed a proprietary installer that let us easily push patches to three operating systems, with users downloading only the changed bits of the sim.*

The problem with the update strategy was that the global scenery was always too big.  And what we found was that if we perpetually recut the global scenery, it made everyone who had already bought the scenery crazy mad.  The last thing you want to do is buy the sim and discover it would have been better if you waited.

The idea of the “update” strategy is that you can  buy into a major version run as soon as you want or late, and if you jump in early you get all of the future updates for the version run for free over the net.  So we would update the sim and leave the global scenery alone.  Thus there was never an update to the version 9 global scenery.

The Brave New World

The problem with not updating the scenery is that it takes us years to fix bugs, share improvements with users, and integrate changes from users (e.g. better airport layouts).  Using OpenStreetMap raises the stakes: anyone can improve raw vector data using OSM at any point.  How long do we wait to ship the improvements to everyone?

So I think it’s time to start recutting tiles and shipping them in updates.

Now to be blunt: I have no idea how we are going to go about doing this.  So far recut tiles come down in free updates to users who have them installed, but this is just a beginning; we don’t have scalability problems yet because we have recut only 5 tiles.

Airport Anomolies

In the long term I don’t know how many tiles we will recut, when we will recut them, or what percent of the Earth we might recut in a given version run.  We are not promising to recut any particular area or set of tiles.  Please read that sentence twice.  Don’t come back to this post and say “but you promised me free global scenery.”  I don’t know how much recutting we can do or what the terms will be.  I just know that it is the direction we need to investigate and move in.

With that disclaimer in mind, I do think we will be able to recut tiles that have airport anomalies.  For example, I have two bug reports on class B airports.  KSFO has an incorrect coastline, and KORD has a collision between autogen and runways.  In both cases, I don’t know what went wrong and will need to investigate.  And in both cases, pushing the fixed tile in an update seems like a reasonable solution.

* As far as I know, no commercial solution would give us three operating systems, deltas from any past version, while making it quick to cut a patch.  Since we use the installer for every beta, the initial development time was worth it to make patching quick for users and for us.

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.

16 comments on “The Shady Side of Chicago (The Road Map For Airports)”

  1. Honestly, I’d be happy with any scenery delta solution, but have a couple of suggestions based around the Amazon S3 cloud storage offerings that might be attractive in the long run (I don’t work for Amazon – my company handles 3D scan data, which presents a similar issue, so I feel your pain).

    First, I think you’re correct to be concerned about the logistics side of things; the bandwidth would quickly get out of control in a self-hosting situation. A service like S3 provides essentially unlimited scalability. The downside is of course cost, which with a fixed-price model as is currently employed, would be unsustainable. This would be an issue even without a cloud storage system like S3, but might be less noticeable if the updating scheme were based around something like bittorrent (which has it’s own problems with unpredictable QOS).

    Second, I really think you’re onto something with the idea of (potentially) committing to more regular updates. This is a service that I, and I suspect other simmers as well, would be willing to pay a subscription fee for. Checking the S3 pricing structure, a complete reload of 20 GB of data is approximately $2. Presumably, a complete reload would be exceedingly rare in a delta-update situation, so a fairly modest “scenery subscription” fee of $5-10/yr should cover things. If there’s concern over user backlash, the up-front pricing could be tweaked.

    I would also LOVE to see the option to install everything from a cloud instance to begin with. I rarely fly outside the Eastern US, and over decent broadband this is at worst an overnight download. In a “premium account” situation, allowing a license key check against a remote server would be divine, to avoid having to have a DVD drive. For non-connected machines, DVDs are still perfectly viable, and I don’t think users should expect much beyond a fixed experience without a decent network connection.

    In any case, based on my company’s experience, it’s very viable to share large multi-gigabyte datasets between machines over home broadband. With regards to implementation, systems like S3 allow you to deploy canned Linux server images which should allow you to retain the current update server codebase (if that’s the route you went). There’s the additional complexity of managing “premium” accounts for billing purposes, but this should be a minimal amount of additional development. The developer of Minecraft ran into a similar scaling issue a year ago, and had (apparently) a very good experience moving things over to virtualized servers.

    Anyways, just my 2c. I really wouldn’t mind paying extra for ongoing scenery updates. I realize that bandwidth costs money, and I’d be happy to cover the costs. I flew Cessnas for a couple of years, and 5 years of scenery updates at S3 prices would buy you… let’s see… about 20 minutes minutes of Hobbs time at a flying club.

  2. Hi, I’m just wondering whether the houses and buildings that get displayed are “set in stone”? (are their positions and types a part of the scenery when you release it, or are they chosen and placed at runtime?). If they are placed at runtime, then it looks like many of the city’s could benefit from having some taller buildings in the middle. Otherwise, looking spectacular! (although, Melbourne, Australia where I live seems to be missing houses where the roads are, perhaps this is a lack of osm data I don’t know!? If so I would be happy to devote time to improve osm in melbourne)

    1. Some data is “in stone” (well, in DSF) but some is at runtime. I haven’t gotten to a post about this, but some of the most visible artifacts in cities currently are all a question of more art assets.

    3. Sorry to be OT, but Luke you’ve received your discs in Australia? I ordered on opening day and still waiting… How long did they take for you to come?

  3. You can add Sydney International, YSSY to the list of bad coastlines. The large bay (water) south of the airport is completely filled in with farmland. It was correct in XP9.

    1. Please file a bug. A good bug for this would include a pic of the airport in the sim (full res), a link to the real thing on OSM (you can make an OSM permalink) and the ICAO code.

  4. Wow, I’m going to have to take back some of that! After a reboot, the buildings have started appearing in Melbourne! (Still, some more highrise in the cbd would be nice)

  5. Pingback: Xplane 10 : scenery et aeroport - Page 4

  6. This is great news.

    There were a number of issues in v9 scenery which were frozen for 4 years.

    This opens the global scenery up to the same feedback / improvement cycles as the rest of x-plane.

  7. I know this is not the right place for this type of comment, but I have been all over the forums and no one has responded. Will any of these computers be able to run x-plane on extremely high graphics (too many objects, AA, HDR, etc.)?

    //www.jr.com/dell-computer-corp/pe/DEL_X83003577NB/#productTabDetails

    //www.jr.com/hp/pe/HP_H81040/
    or
    //www.jr.com/hp/pe/HP_H81050/ ?

    Thanks for your help- they all have i7-2600 processors, 1.5 TB HDs, and from 8-10 GB RAM. The GPUs are different: Radeon HD 6750, then NVIDIA GeForce 550 TI, and the ultimate Radeon HD 6850.

  8. Quick question about how your autogen works. I’ve filed several bug reports about exclusion zones not excluding some of the autogen objects. Now I’m confused because from what you wrote in one of the first paragraphs, the autogen is baked in to the def. does this mean that exclusion zones will not affect autogen? or is the exclusion zone not working correctly in X-Plane? or is it the fact that I’m using WED 1.1b4 the reason.

    Just curious because I don’t want to waste my time (or yours) filling bug reports.

    Thanks.

    1. I think there are probably bugs. The autogen are defined as blocks (baked into the DSFs) and the buildings are dynamically fit into the blocks by X-Plane. But that’s moot – whether part of the process is x-plane or it’s baked, exclusion zones should remove buildings. I’ll pick up the bug report when it comes through and fix it.

  9. I can only comment that the move from an ATI 4870 512Mb to a GTX560TI 1Gb was sufficient to push my PC into consistently 20+FPS on reasonably high settings at KSEA. 560GTX TI is marginally more powerful than the radeons you mention. The high ram levels will not be of massive assistance at the moment – see the recent posts on the projected move to 64bit Xplane. I know that i7-2600 is considered the bee’s knees at the moment & I cannot see you doing better, but just make sure you go with 64 bit windows 7.

  10. I think you should go with the third. I think some more input is better, though- I don’t have much experience. Any help?

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