For X-Plane 860 beta 6 I think we may change the way the airport lights setting works. Since
(despite my previous rantings) there is a lot of discussion of performance based on settings (e.g. “I used to get 40 fps with this menu pick, now I need this other menu pick”) as opposed to based on what the sim is actually doing, allow me to go off in some detail about what’s going on under the hood.
During X-Plane 850 and 860, I tried to fix a number of long-standing “quality” issues, where the sim had small artifacts. There is a fps penalty to fixing these artifacts that I thought was small, but the message is clear:
- Some users are flying X-Plane on lower-end systems and can’t spare a single fp.
- A lot of users really don’t care about the quality issues and would gladly trade back the visual “improvement” (which doesn’t seem like an improvement after living with the issue for 4 years) for those few fps that mean the difference between clear skies and fog.
So…with that in mind, let me explain runway lights for 3 versions of X-Plane.
X-Plane 840 and earlier
In X-Plane 840, lights could be textured or untextured. This was controlled by a simple checkbox “draw textured lights”. A few lights (on the airplane, for example) were always textured because we thought they were few in number and important visually. The rest was decided by the checkbox.
No airport light ever had a 3-d “structure” (e.g. you couldn’t see the light housing and support rod).
No light was ever drawn using hardware acceleration, even if the graphic card had pixel shaders; we simply didn’t have the code. Therefore textured lights ate up a lot of CPU power and thus ate up a lot of framerate. But life was simple!
X-Plane 850
With X-Plane 850 things got a lot weirder.
- We rewrote the lighting engine to optionally use pixel shaders if present. This improves performance of textured lights a lot. In fact, on a given machine with pixel shaders, textured lights with hardware acceleration are faster than non-textured lights without hardware acceleration. (For hardware accelerated lights, the texturing doesn’t cost anything compared to hardware accelerated untextured lights.) It’s important to note this performance fact!
- Sergio created a bunch of 3-d object lighting fixtures for the runway environment. They have a low LOD, but up close you can see the actual lighting structure.
So what to do about that setting? Well, basically with the check box on we did the nicest looking thing, and with the check box off, we did the fastest thing. (The check box’s label doesn’t do a good job of representing this.) We thus have four possibilites:
- Checkbox off, no pixel shaders: we draw untextured lights using software, no objects.
- Checkbox off, with pixel shaders: we draw textured lights using hardware, no objects.
- Checkbox on, no pixel shaders: we draw textured lights using software, with objects.
- Checkbox on, with pixel shaders: we draw textured ilghts using hardware, with objects.
This is plenty confusing if you ask yourself “what is this checkbox going to do” – it depends on your hardware. But the rule is quite simple if you consider the intent: we either give you the fastest (off) or nicest (on) rendering we can.
X-Plane 860
With the next X-Plane 860, we’re going to use this checkbox to control multiple aspects of the sim, but always with two choices: either prioritizing visual quality, or prioritizing framerate.
So this option will not only pick the fastest (or nicest) light code and turn the objects on and off, but it will also, for example, turn on or off per-pixel fog (something that looks nice but is slower than the old per-vertex fog).
I’m not sure everyone will like this, but I think it will meet some important needs:
- It will make it obvious how to set the checkbox. Either you want speed, or quality.
- It keeps the config interface simple for new users.
- It gives us a way to tie in a number of small optimizations that add up when taken in concert.
It seems to me that we’re seeing the haves and have-nots. If you’ve got a Core 2 CPU and a 7000-serise GPU, things like per-pixel fog are chump change. If you’ve got a G4 with a Radeon 9200, you need any speed you can get. So hopefully this change will make the UI clearer and help us meet everyone’s needs.
I think the framerate test may be the best piece of code I’ve ever written for X-Plane. It speeds up my own work checking X-Plane’s performance (and removes the risk of careless error), allows us to easily collect user-based stats, and has changed the dialog on performance in the beta from he-said/she-said (the result of having no precise quantitative measurements) to a fact-based dialog box where we can discover problems more quickly.
Today in a noble sacrifice (using this card is nothing less than torture) I put a GF-FX5200
back in my G5 to look at bugs and performance. (The terrain night lighting and landing lights should be back in all nVidia hardware with shaders in the next beta.) Some things I’ve learned:
Turning off GLSL shaders boosts fps from 46 to 55 fps with my Radeon 9600XT but goes from 22 to 45 fps with the FX5200. From that we can learn:
- The penalty for GLSL shaders is really really high on the FX5200.
- The shader implementation for the FX5200 just doesn’t run at the same speeds we see in R300-based cards…it’s not in the ballpark.
Looking at a profile of the sim, with the FX5200 running shaders, about 50% of the time is spent waiting for the graphics card to chug.
Other things I’ve found:
- GLSL shaders are slower on terrain, but still worth it for runway lights – having those be hardware accelerated is definitely a positive.
- Per-pixel fog doesn’t affect fps on the 9600XT but is a measurable penalty on the FX5200.
- The landing light also hits the FX5200 about 20% – again it’s negligible on the 9600XT.
The moral of the story may be: we need a way to not use shaders for terrain on the FX5200. Between the little things that shaders give us (that we can’t use) that cost too much and the overall lack of performance, GLSL terrain and the FX5200 may not be a good idea.
If you have an FX5200 and OS X 10.3, there may not be any benefit to updating to 10.4 – you’ll have the option of using GLSL shaders but you may not want to.
If you have a G5 and an FX5200 and the option to put a new card in, you may want to consider it – you’ll almost certainly get a fps boost (especially if you use something like an X850).
One user posted this comment in response to my rant on framerate…
“What I wonder in X-Plane and FS2k4 as well is, why there is no better automatic regulation which automatically set object density, object quality and so on based on the current frame rate….”
This is a good idea that has been suggested before. However when I tried it, it worked very poorly for two reasons:
- Because we reduce visibility as well when fps fall, if we also tie object density/distance to framerate, then we have two separate variables responding to framerate. The result was oscillations. Think of framerate and visibility as a (hopefully) dampened oscillator. With two variables, getting the oscilation out is a lot harder.
- the relationship between object density as the sim controls it and framerate is not a static one, because object density (relative to other scenery complexity) varies a huge amount with locale. In the mountains, backing down objects won’t save your framerate. In the city it will. So coding the “spring factor” for that oscillator is very difficult.
That doesn’t mean we won’t try this again in the future – that’s just what happened when I tried my first naive attempt.
Other comments reflected users either hoping for more fps from existing hardware (there’s a lot of that on X-Plane.org) or saying that X-Plane runs well on their modern shiny computer.
Here’s some stats for you:
- Radeon 9200: 1000 MT/sec 6.4 GBi/sec
- GeForce 5200 FX (64-bit version): 1000 MT/sec 2.7 GBi/sec
- Radeon X1950XTX: 10,400 MT/sec and 64 GBi/sec
- GeForce 7900 GTX: 15,600 MT/sec and 51.2 GBi/sec
(These numbers come from Wikipedia – I make no promises.) The first number MT/sec is mega-texels per second and represents how many millions of pixels* the card can fill in. GBi/sec is gigabits per second of data transfer from VRAM to the GPU. Neither of these are perfect predictors of card speed (but they do limit your ability to run with a lot of FSAA) but they do illustrate something:
The difference between the speed of the smallest and biggest graphics cards is over 15x for fill rate and over 25x on memory bandwidth! That’s the equivalent of people trying to run with a 3 ghz and a 120 mhz CPU! Anyone running with a 120 mhz Pentium out there? Definitely not – our minimum CPU requirements are ten times that.
In other words, the high rate of technology improvement in graphics cards has left us with a ridiculously large gap in card performance. (In fact the real gap is a lot worse – the 9200 and 5200FX are not even close to the slowest cards we support, and I haven’t even mentioned the new GeForce 8 series, or pairings of two cards via SLI or Crossfire.)
* Pixel or texel? Technically a texel is a pixel on a texture, at least by some definitions, but perhaps more important is that these numbers indicate fill rate at 1x full-screen anti-aliasing…you would expect them to fill screen pixels at roughly 1/16th the speed at 16x FSAA. This is actually good – it means that FSAA can help “absorb” some of the difference in graphics power, making X-Plane more scalable.
If I could have a nickel for every time a user has asked me “what machine do I have to buy so that I can max out all of the settings in X-Plane”…
The problem is simple and two-fold:
- X-Plane’s maximum rendering settings can sink even the biggest computers. Why is X-Plane’s maximum so “overbuilt”?
- The rendering settings are not good predictors of performance. Why the hell not?
The answers are, roughly in that order, “Because we can’t predict the future” and “because it has to be that way”. Here’s the situation…
The Maximum Limits
Some of X-Plane’s maximum settings are design limitations. For example, your anti-aliasing can’t exceed your card’s capabilities, and the visibility can’t exceed the loaded area of scenery.
Other limits are based on algorithmic limitations – there are as many objects in New York City as we could possibly pack in. We figure you can always turn down object density if there are too many.
Still other limits are based on guesses about hardware. We could have made the mesh or less complex – we chose a mesh complexity for the global scenery that we thought would be a reasonable compromise in frame-rate and quality for the v8 run based on typical hardware. This is just a judgement call.
So…how big of a computer do you need to run X-Plane with maximum objects? I have no idea! We honestly didn’t give it any consideration. Our strategy was:
- Make sure the maximum object density the renderer would produce would not exceed our disk space/DVD allocations. It didn’t…because objects are only in cities, they contribute only a tiny fraction to the size of global scenery.
- Make sure that we could turn object density up and down easily.
- Ship it!
We figure you’ll turn objects up and down until you get a compromise of frame-rate and visual quality that you can live with. If you can’t find a compromise, it’s time to buy a bigger computer, because we can’t give you something for nothing. All those objects require hardware to draw.
And I would go a step further and say it’s a good thing that the maximum density of objects is very high. When Randy (our sales/support/marketing guy) got a new PC, a very nice one, but not even the most ridiculous gaming box possible (and this was months ago) he reported that on the default settings he can fly the Grand Canyon at…283 fps!
My point is that the hardware keeps getting faster and we can’t predict where it will go. So it seems like a safe bet to leave the maximum settings very high for future users.
So How Insane is Insane
The other problem is that rendering settings don’t correspond well to machine power. I can’t tell you that a 3 ghz CPU can handle “tons” of objects. The problem is that hardware performance is a composite of a number of subsystems, and scenery complexity varies by region and even by view angle.
Even the slightest change in camera angle can have a pretty big effect on performance. Combine that with different types of scenery elements (objects in some, beaches in other, mountains in others) in different regions and it becomes very difficult to predict how well scenery wil work on a given computer.
A Good Value
Given all this, we don’t try to come up with correlations between the settings and the hardware. Instead we simply try to make X-Plane run as efficiently as we can, and try to verify that you get a “good value” – that is, a lot of graphic quality relative to the power of your computer. We have to trust that you’ll buy as much computer as you want and/or can afford, and we try to give you the best look we can for it.
So if you are shopping for a new computer, you can go for the “Rolls Royce” strategy, where cash is no object and you maximize every component (even if paying a huge premium for brand new technology) or you can go for a “good value” strategy, trying to find the best price-per-performance points.
I’ll close this off with a few tips on buying:
- If you are buying a new computer, be sure you have a PCIe 16x slot! Any decent motherboard should come with this — if it doesn’t, you’re not getting a good computer. A PCIe 16x slot for the grahpics card shouldn’t raise prices too much.
- Get 1 GB of memory minimum – X-Plane will run with less, but it helps, and memory isn’t that expensive these days. A new computer will be fast enough that the system can use the extra memory. I get my memory from Crucial – it’s good quality and often cheaper than what you pay if you let the computer manufacturer upgrade you.
- In the US for Windows/Linux, look for a graphics card between $100-$200 – that’s the best value range for graphics cards. Get an ATI or nVidia card (nVidia if you’re using Linux). I don’t buy my cards from PriceWatch but I find it a useful listing of the price point of a lot of graphics cards.
- Don’t get a video card with HyperMemory or TurboCache.
- Check the “suffix” of your graphics card on Wikipedia – there are tables for the clock speeds for both ATI and nVidia cards. An nVidia “GT” card will cost you more than an “LE” card, but will be clocked a lot faster and given you better performance.
X-Plane 860 introduces a fundamental change in the way the keyboard is handled in X-Plane.
Before X-Plane 860, keyboard keys are matched to their commands by looking at the character that is prodcued by typing.
For example, spot view is produced by the ‘@’ symbol. On a US keyboard that means shift-2. On an Italian keyboard, the @ symbol is shift + the ò key (ò on its own key, cool!).
But in X-Plane 860, the matching is done on the key itself, not the symbol you get when typing. In other words, the 2 key is the 2 key no matter what. So in X-plane 860, spot view is mapped to shift-2 and shift-2 will induce spot mode whether this gives you @ or ” when typing (on Italian keyboards, shift-2 gives the double-qoute).
One advantage of this method is that the keys stay in roughly the same place…the point of those strange punctuation keys for autopilot modes is that on a US keyboard they’re all top-of-the-keyboard functions. Now that the keyboard bindings are based on the number keys plus the shift key, this will be true on international keyboards too.
One disadvantage of the new system is that if there is no “primary” key for a symbol, international keyboards can’t use it. For example, ; is a key on a US keyboard, but is made by shifiting the , key on an Italian keyboard. So right now in beta 2 Italians can’t invoke free-view (ctrl-;) at all…if they type ctrl-shift-, they get, well, ctrl-shift-,. (Of coures, mapping free view to ctrl-shift-, in the keys file does work.)
For now please just keep in mind that 860 is a beta and is still a work in progress. In the long term once we get the quirks worked out, the new keyboard system offers a lot more mapping combinations, because everything can be mapped with any combination of modifier keys. No more running out of keyboard combinations!
Also for hackers, try X-Plane –cmnds=all to see a list of all possible command bindings in the sim.
X-Plane 860 uses GLSL pixel shaders. But this doesn’t mean you need any new hardware. It does mean you might need to update your drivers. Let’s break this down a little bit.
X-Plane never talks directly to your video card. It always talks to the video driver, a piece of software that acts as a translator between X-Plane and your video card. (That’s a gross simplification – video drivers do a lot of amazing things these days.)
Your video card has certain capabilities – different cards can do different tricks. The video driver tells X-Plane what tricks the video card can do.
So there are really four possibilities for any given trick:
- Your video card cannot do that trick. The video driver will tell X-Plane “I can’t do it.”
- Your video card can do that trick. The video driver will tell X-plane “I can do it”.
- Your video card can do the trick, but the driver is old and will tell X-Plane “I can’t do it” because the driver doesn’t realize what the card can do. (This can happen because the video driver you use might come with your operating system, before you bought the new video card.)
- Your video card cando the trick, but the driver has a bug. The driver will tell X-Plane “I can do it”, but when X-Plane says “go and do it”, the video driver will crash your whole computer. This happens when drivers are buggy and can usually be fixed by getting newer drivers.
Something to note about this last case – we only crash if X-Plane actually says “go and do it”. So when we release a new version of X-Plane that utilizes new video driver tricks…
- Some users have cards that can’t do it and will see no change.
- Some users have cards that can do it, so they see the new feature.
- Some users have cards that can do it but old drivers and see no change.
- Some users have buggy drivers and see a crash for the first time.
GLSL shaders is a certain way to use the pixel shaders built into some cards. (GLSL is an interface and language to talk to those shaders.)
GLSL shaders are definitely not required for X-Plane 860. If you don’t have them, X-Plane will run the way it always did.
But if your drivers are buggy and crash when GLSL shaders are used, you will need a software update to get good drivers. (There is a way out of this…if you really can’t get a driver fix, there are command-line options that will tell X-Plane “don’t use this feature even if the card has it”.)
Traditionally it always has been real memory – system RAM or VRAM – that’s been most important to the flying equation. But recently virtual memory has been a scarce resource. What happened?
To understand this situation, consider X-Plane 6 vs 8. Back in the X-Plane 6 days, a typical system might have 256 MB of system RAM, 16 MB of VRAM, and 2 GB of virtual memory* for X-Plane. That’s a ratio of 8:1 virtual to real RAM and 128:1 virtual to VRAM.
These ratios are actually pretty useful. At any given time only part of the loaded scenery is visible, so only part of it needs to be in real RAM/VRAM. So having that extra virtual memory lets us load a big chunk of scenery at a time, rather than having a lot of complex details to load tiny bits of scenery.
Today’s computers are a bit different. 2 GB of RAM is not uncommon…that’d be a ratio of 1:1! And most gamers cards have 256 MB of VRAM now for an 8:1 ratio with VRAM. 512 MB cards are coming out and nVidia’s monstrous 8800GTX comes with (gasp) 768 MB of VRAM! Insanity!
The problem is: RAM and VRAM are getting larger, but virtual memory is not! This means the ability to have the part of the scenery you don’t see in virtual memory is getting more and more difficult.
Why can’t we get more virtual memory? Well, the problem is to get more virtual memory we need 64-bit CPUs, 64-bit operating systems, 64-bit drivers, and 64-bit applications. That’s a lot of parts that all need to be 64 bit and means a full computer upgrade and motherboard upgrade. Of the 5 machines Apple sells right now, only one is 64-bit, so even some of today’s fastest machines aren’t 64 bit. That’s slow adoption.
So in the meantime we’re adjusting X-Plane’s strategy to deal with increasingly limited virtual memory. Back in X-Plane 6 it was acceptable to leave all objects their textures cached in virtual memory for later use (which sped up reloading of scenery).
X-Plane 860 (coming soon to a beta near you) will change this – unused textures and objects will be fully purged, which will hopefully address the problem of running out of virtual memory during long flights over lots of different custom scenery.
* 2 GB? Well, technically an application can have 4 GB of virtual memory, but the OS keeps some for itself. Some OSes take 2 and leave 2, some take 1 and leave 3, but even if we had all 4 GB of virtual memory for application use (and we don’t – the graphics driver steals some too) we’ll have 4 GB machines soon, so virtual memory is disappearing.
X-Plane 850 introduced some new polygon features that are worth looking at. Polygons are always legal in overlays, which makes them particularly flexible.
A polygon is any DSF entity described by one or more rings of points. A polygon’s look is defined by its artwork file, which also constrains its properties. Polygons may:
– Be draped, meaning the polygon in the DSF does not have altitude information, but instead takes its height from the underlying mesh. A non-draped polygon has altitude information. (Only draped polygons should be used in overlays because a non-draped polygon might not match the base mesh correctly. You can’t know whether a user has the 7-DVD DSF scenery, or old ENV scenery, or the older US DSFs.)
– Be curved (via bezier curves). This is only legal in some polygons.
– Have holes: some polygons can have additional interior polygons cutting “holes” in them.
X-Plane 8 shipped with one original type of polygon: facades. Facades are draped polygons with no holes or curves. X-Plane builds a building along the perimeter of the polygon. Facades were used heavily in the original US DSF scenery, and are useful for airport terminals, and even possibly fences.
X-Plane 820 added two new types of polygons: beaches and forests. Beaches are non-draped, non-curved, no-holes polygons that add a strip of beach texture between land and water. As mentioned above, I don’t recommend using them in overlays because they are not draped. (They are legally allowed in overlays but the chance for ugly results is large.)
Forests may have holes and are draped, but cannot be curved; they fill in their interior with 1-4 polygon trees. We do not have any forest polygons in the current global scenery, but some users have built their own overlays to add trees to X-Plane using these polygons.
X-Plane 850 introduced the new apt.dat format with a number of new features. Rather than make the apt.dat file customizable (which would make the file format complex and change its fundamental purpose), we added new polygon types that let authors use the same facilities as apt.dat files have, but with a lot more control and flexibility. Three new polygon types implement some of the new X-Plane 8.50 apt.dat features:
1. Object chain polygons. You can make a polygon and X-Plane will string a series of objects along the polygon. The polygon is draped and may be curved, but may not have holes. X-Plane 850 uses this for taxiway lights, but this could also be used to plant trees along the edges of fields. (You could also use this to put streetlights along roads, but the road file format can do that already without adding extra polygons to the DSF.)
2. Painted line polygons. You can make a polygon and X-plane will drape a painted line along the ground. These polygons are draped and may be curved, but may not have holes. X-Plane 850 uses this for taxiway lines.
3. Draped polygons. You can make a polygon and X-Plane will fill it in with some kind of texture along the ground. These polygons are draped, may be curved, and can have holes. X-Plane uses these to make curved taxiways, but they have a lot of other possibilities since they provide a way to change the terrain.
I will comment more on draped polygons in a future blog posting, but one immediate note: before X-Plane 850 if you added an airport it was impossible to convert the terrain underneath to grass (from whatever terrain might have been present). With X-Plane 850 you can now make a draped polygon using a grass texture and a DSF overlay with the perimeter of the airport and thus “patch” the texture of the mesh to look like grass.
This technique is not as good as the grass in the native airports for four reasons:
– Draped polygon performance is slower than the mesh itself – I’ll comment about that later.
– Our DSF creation program flattens airport areas – a draped polygon doesn’t so there can be SRTM DEM noise that makes the airport area too bumpy to use.
– The DSF terrain grass can have a soft border, but right now draped polygons always have a very sharp border.
Draped polygons still represent a better option than putting the runways over the existing terrain though.
The order objects are listed in a DSF file (either the OBJ definitions or the actual OBJ instances) is not the same as the order X-Plane will draw them! X-Plane will change the order to maximize frame-rate, and the way it organizes them has changed in 850 (and will change again in futur versions).
Until X-Plane 850 there was no way to control the order of objects (although some packages do rely on X-Plane 840’s behavior and now look funny in 850). But with 850 there is a clean way to control draw order that will work well into the future.
Starting with X-Plane 850, there is a new command ATTR_layer_group…it let’s you override what part of the rendering process your object is drawn in, which is useful in a number of cases. Here’s how it works:
X-Plane draws the scenery in a series of steps or “layer groups”. Because of the way OpenGL transparency and polygon-offset affect Z buffering, X-Plane must draw the terrain first, all decals over the terrain second, 3-d buildings third, and anything translucent (clouds, smoke puffs, etc.) last. Layer groups organize all of the scenery into these catagories.
Objects are normally drawn in the “objects” layer group, which is intended for 3-d buildings, static airplanes, jetways, and anything else you might model with an OBJ. However ATTR_layer_group will let you specify that some objects be drawn earlier or later than others.
The command’s syntax is:
ATTR_layer_group objects 1
Where the name (“objects”, but others are allowed – see the OBJ spec) specifies a group, and the number makes the object be drawn after (positive numbers) or before (negative numbers). Objects with the same group and number are drawn together (in an unspecified order), but X-Plane goes by the numbers.
So for example if you want to ensure that a transparent hanger is drawn after a static plane, use ATTR_layer_group objects 1 on the hanger to draw it after all other objects. To draw some apron lines before the terminal, use ATTR_layer_group objects -1 to draw before buildings.
A few other tips:
- Try to use as few offsets as possible – e.g. try to put all “draw last” objects into the group objects/1 – rather than using a different number for each.
- Avoid using layer groups when they are not needed – they inhibit X-Plane from optimizing framerate.
- If you do not use a layer group, but do use polygon offset, X-Plane sets the layer group to objects with a negative number. This is inhibited when you specify the layer group yourself, so be sure to use a negative offset layer group for polygon offset!
- Try to organize your textures so that one texture is not used in multiple layer groups. For example, if you have translucent buildings that must be drawn later, group them in their own texture.
- Related – try to keep polygon-offset geometry (pavement markings) in their own texture and objects. Share one texture for all markings, but don’t put the markings and object together.
This is a description of what I am planning for the anatomy of the “full scenery tools”. Until now we have only published small utilities (ObjConverter, DSF2Text, etc.). The next scenery tools release should cover a lot more, including the first versions of WED.
First of all, WorldMaker is not part of the next-gen scenery tools. WorldMaker is slowly going away, as functionality in WorldMaker is either moved directly into X-Plane for “live” use (navaid editing) or into the scenery toolset.
The new scenery tools will be a single distribution for all tools. In other words, instead of a download for each tool, you will download one archive that contains all of our tools and support files. They will live together in a single “install” folder.
The distribution will not be based on our installer – more likely they will just be a zip file. The scenery tools total size should be small enough that there is no need to do incremental installs. There is no need to put customized files in the scenery tools folder _ever_, so simply replacing it should be a non-issue.
The scenery tools will be completely separate from X-Plane itself and will have their own release schedule and versioning. The scenery tools contain no x-plane code and will also be available in source.
Some undecided issues:
- What to call the main visual editor. The working name has been “WED” (WorldEditor) but that’s so similar to WorldMaker that I fear total confusion. I am open to naming suggestions.
- Whether to make a distribution or each platform or simply put all the EXEs for all the platforms in one download. I don’t think code size will be so huge as to prevent this.
- Whether to allow the scenery tools to be installed in any folder or to require them to go in /Program Files (Windows), /Applications (Mac) or /usr/local/bin (Linux).
One more change: currently I provide a GUI version and a command-line version for some converter apps. With the new scenery tools, I will provide a command-line version for each converter (like now) and a single GUI tool that can do ANY of the conversions that ALL of the command-line tools do.
In other words, for users who want a UI, you will be able to do model->OBJ conversions, ENV->DSF Overlay conversions, OBJ->OBJ conversions, and DSF<->TXT conversions in a single application. This “swiss army knife” GUI application will be extensible and will be our “master converter”.
So the new scenery tools should include:
- Many command-line tools for low level operation.
- A swiss army knife GUI converter tool.
- A visual scenery editor (WED).
- The AC3D OBJ export plugin.
I do not know what the release date of all of this will be, and I do believe that the tools will come out in stages – that is, the first WED will not edit meshes, the AC3D exporter may not be included in the first release, etc. I don’t want to hold up the availability of useful code (like a WED that can edit apt.dat 850 airports) because other parts are missing (like an AC3D exporter version 3.0).
Please do not email me to ask about release dates; now that X-Plane 850 is final, I am working on scenery tools today. I will post more info as I have it.
Posted in Tools
by
Ben Supnik |
