We’ve been making steady forward progress with the scenery tools over the last few weeks; finally there is some stuff to see.

Moving the Website

First: we’re moving the scenery tools into WordPress.  All of the new tools and docs are hosted at developer.x-plane.com; over the next few weeks I’ll try to make the theme less bare-bones.  As I update documentation to version 10, I will move it here.

What about the Wiki?  We are retiring it as our content management system.  MediaWiki makes everything possible, but it makes nothing easy.  Well, that’s not true – it makes it easy to collect link spam.

We can possibly keep the Wiki open on a smaller scale for developers, but my preference is strongly in favor of a mailing list.

New Tools

The first binary tools release is a final version of WED 1.1.  If you have been using a WED 1.1 beta, get the final one – it fixes some bugs and adds control over object density in custom scenery.

I will have binary releases of the base scenery tools pack including DSFTool and a WED 1.2 preview over the next few days.

New Documentation

The DSF specifications are updated – see here.  The DSFTool binary will let you create version 10-style DSFs.  I will continue to update the documentation over the next few weeks.

New Source Code Repository

The scenery tools source code is now natively hosted in GIT – previously it was hosted in CVS and was bridge to GIT for public preview; the bridge broke down during v10 development a few months ago.

Chris and I are now using GIT internally, putting us in sync with the Linux community; if you want to work on the scenery tools or modify them beyond patching, you can clone the repository and merge in changes.

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.

23 comments on “Scenery Tools Update: WED 1.1, Documentation, and Website Changes”

  1. Pingback: Scenery tools update and Specs updated « Xplane10's Blog

  2. Hi, probably a little OT but still in theme with “extending x-plane 10”:
    as far as I can read in the SDK docs there’s currently no API to interact directly with the ATC.
    If this is correct, are there any plans to add support for it?

    I’d love to add support for VFR flights but I don’t want to write an ATC from scratch as we have this new improved version in x-plane 10… the work in my mind should be to “simply” add functionality.

    Thanks!

    1. There are no APIs to interact with ATC right now.

      I don’t know if there ever will be, but honestly it’s not likely. Generally the SDK gives you the ability to _replace_, not _augment_ parts of the sim, as augmentation APIs would be inherently unstable.

          1. As an example, filing a flight plan without a keyboard. A 737 cockpit has no space for a keyboard – but an EFB (iPad) is not alien to flight decks (Boeing has designed a variant of the side panel that accomodates one) and is the perfect interface for all things that can’t be done with a real button like requesting fuel, weather data and pushback – via a web app connected to XP via datarefs – and could work with interfacing to ATC as well if it takes datarefs.

          4. Hi Chris,

            How can I read list of options available via dataref, then? Without knowing available options, any automation is going to fail. Also, can I use the cmd keys even if ATC window is disabled via dataref? And, moreover, how can I know if entry window is enabled or not? Sure “enter” will enable or disable, but I need to know the current state, otherwise I’ll go out of sync soon.

            Thanks!

          5. Hi Fran,

            Wait, what are you trying to automate? Is your goal to:
            – Provide a way to “do” all of the things you can do in the UI from your cockpit hardware or
            – Something else??

          6. Hi Ben / Chris,

            For us people building full scale cockpits (i.e. see http://www.fransedano.net), it’s completely awkward to use any kind of keyboard, mouse, on screen texts… We are looking to replicate a plane, not a computer! So, the goal is NOT to have the ATC text on screen AND interact with it by some other means (i.e. pushbutton on Yoke). It’s fairly easy to map yoke pushbutton to execute any X-Plane command. But it’s not so easy doing it “blind”. i.e. “readback transmission” is going to be always first option in the menu? Can it be moved? How can I know if the controller got the readback or not?

            So, we are asking for some dataref providing us such information. Having a command for every available option (with a dataref telling us if cmd is available or not) would be a solution. Another solution, the one we use for FMCs is to map each of the window lines to a different dataref, so we can read them..

            Thanks again for the great work you guys are doing. Just having this conversation and listening to requests makes all the diference 🙂

          7. I think I understand the problem, but I am still not quite sure how you can solve the problem better than us by replacing our UI. If the proble with our UI is that it “breaks immersion” by putting a menu on screen, where in real life can you possibly put any ATC UI (other than voice recognition) that would be that much better. Having ATC on your FMC isn’t realistic either. To me the only complete solution is to fly VATSIM so you can use strictly voice transmissions. (And even then, if you hit a text controller, you are still stuck.)

    1. It lets you control which rendering setting your objects appear at. In older builds, ALL custom objects appeared ALL the time (as long as objects were not set to none).

      You can now set some of your custom object placements to only appear at higher rendering sttings.

      So for example you can add a lot of static planes to an airport, but set some of them to only appear at “insane” objects. Now your package is not a framerate killer because users can “turn down” the complexity.

  7. Hi Ben,

    I downloaded WED 1.1r1 and have I problem with it (Windows 7 x64): I am not able to select a line segment of a bezier curve. The documentation says on page 19 (“Markings & Lighting”) that one has to select the node at the beginning of a segment in order to apply markings for this segment. Unfortunately, this does not work for me. I can click and drag the single nodes of the bezier curve, but WED does not display the attributes of the nodes/segments. I always displays the attributes of the whole shape. So I cannot add lighting to just one segment of the shape.

    Do you have any hints for me?

      1. Hi. Thank you for this really fast response. I found the problem: As soon as I toggle the overlay image in the background to “invisible” (with the “eye” icon), I am able to select single nodes of my taxiway.

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