WorldEditor 1.2 Release Candidate 1 is now available here. Please try it! If you have a scenery project you use, please export using WED 1.2 rc1 and report a bug immediately if the export does not work! My thanks to the testers who have helped find the bugs in the 1.2 beta run.
If we don’t find any new show-stopping bugs, WED 1.2 will go final in a week or so.
Update: There is a bug in WED 1.2r1 on Windows that stops all art assets from being found in the library. I think this is responsible for all of the bugs reported against the RC. (This was from a change I made while my PC was down that I should have checked on Windows.) RC2 will fix these bugs.
Update 2: Release Candidate 2 is now uploaded; this fixes the one underlying bug that caused a lot of reports. The bug was that art asset location from the library was broken on Windows. This caused failed previews, facades that were rings and not fences, and red question mark objects. This is fixed in RC2.
I’m not sure what will go into the next WorldEditor release, but X-Plane 10 scenery usability features are on my short list.
The ability to create and edit X-Plane 10 road overlays.
Better options for managing overlay orthophotos for airports. (The current “make orthophotos” command is a stop-gap.)
Possibly the ability to create base meshes (by importing data – WED would then run MeshTool for you, so that you don’t have to write a script).
If your add-on uses LuaJIT (e.g. via SASL, Gizmo, FlyLua, or directly) then this tool may help. It’s a special build of X-Plane 10.21 for 64-bit Mac that can show total Lua memory use. Use DataRefEditor and filter on “lua” to see the numbers.
Since Lua uses garbage collection, you’ll see the number rise up and then “fall” periodically as garbage gets cleaned up. Non-Lua allocations by plugins are not counted.
If you use LuaJIT in your add-on (or a plugin that uses LuaJIT), please try to keep the amount of Lua memory used below 300 MB or so – more is available, but if you use it all, your plugin won’t inter-operate with other plugins.
That got your attention, eh? Sorry, this is not a tip on how to tune your X-Plane system; it’s a tip for aircraft authors to make sure their 3-d cockpits are running at maximum performance.
Prefill is when X-Plane blocks out the clouds that will be behind the airplane cockpit. The biggest cause of GPU slow-down is cloud rendering, so reducing the area that the clouds have to fill is really important.
In the 2-d cockpit, X-Plane pre-fills automatically. But in a 3-d cockpit, the airplane author has to specify which objects should be used to pre-fill.
Aircraft Authors: go watch this video or read this page to learn how to set up pre-fill in your aircraft! If you aircraft has a 3-d cockpit this optimization is very important!
The C: drive on my Windows box died over the weekend. I mention this so that you can ask this question now (when my drive failed) and not later (when your drive fails):
What’s your plan if you have a hard drive failure? Do you back up regularly? Could you rebuild the machine from original install disks? Would the amount of time it took to restore the machine be acceptable?* If you make backups, would the data loss between what you had and the latest backup be acceptable?
The problem with hard drives is that they fail infrequently; my wife has never experienced a hard drive failure in the decade+ that she’s owned a laptop. The result is that I’ve known too many people who haven’t given the problem of hard drive failure much thought until they had already lost data. A hard drive is an electro-mechanical device…with moving parts…that spin really really fast. It’s amazing they don’t fail more. Think about backups now!
For backup these days I like 2.5″ USB drives – they’re fast enough, small, store a ton of data, and they don’t require an annoying power cable. You could use one to back up several computers.
Nag over…WED 1.2 is almost done – the remaining bugs are Windows-related and will need to wait for a replacement C: drive, which is in transit. So perhaps we’ll get an RC1 going this weekend.
Update: when the replacement drive arrived, I used Trinity Rescue Kit to boot from CD and do a drive-to-drive copy using the tool ddrescue. I do not recommend anyone ever have “I’ll rescue my drive” as a data safety plan – it’s a terrible plan. But…in my case I appear to have gotten lucky; the rescued image is bootable. This is a nice-to-have in that it saves me a few hours of reinstalling Windows + MSVC from scratch. (On the other hand, I don’t get that minty-clean feeling of reinstalling Windows from scratch with a clean registry.) So…chkdisk is running now and I should be able to kill off remaining WED bugs “real soon now.”
* For my Windows and Linux setups (two drives that are alternately used in one machine) my approach has been “rebuild it when it fails”. For Linux this has already worked well – my Linux drive died a while ago and a total rebuild from a new Ubuntu install DVD was quite fast. We’ll see this week whether putting a Windows box back together can be done in a reasonable amount of time.
I’ve just uploaded some new videos to the official X-Plane YouTube video channel. These videos are screencast tutorials for airport authors to help them understand the ATC Airport Flow feature in X-Plane v10.
ATC Airport Flows are essentially a set of rules that control how the runways are used for airport operations. An airport like Chicago’s O’Hare (KORD) for example has 7 runways (14 different takeoff/landing directions)! ATC does not simply put aircraft wherever they feel like in the moment or there’d be a massive aluminum traffic jam. They have a set of rules that control which runway(s) are in active and inactive at any given time. These rules are typically based on two main criteria: weather conditions and time of day.
In the real world, at major airports, traffic studies are done to decide which runway combinations are most efficient for traffic flow, safety and workload and those combinations of runways become active when the conditions are just right.
Once the controller deems certain runways active/inactive for the current conditions, there are yet more rules to determine which types of aircraft use each of those runways. For example, if a small Pilatus is flying into KORD, I strongly doubt they’re going to block up their major runways for arrivals for a small single engine turbo prop. They’re likely to put him on a smaller accessory runway. Also consider some airports which only use certain runways for arrivals while other runways are only used for departures. This is often done for noise abatement or obstacle avoidance. These types of rules can be included in the ATC Airport Flow.
Our goal was to give authors enough granularity to closely mimic the way real airports are run so that when X-Plane’s ATC is in action, it’s towers can make similar decisions to the real controllers.
WorldEditor: WED 1.2 beta 3 is now out – see the WorldEditor page for download links. Beta 3 fixes the broken orthophoto exporter from beta 2, fixes jammed file-open dialog boxes on OS X, and has a handful of other fixes.
WorldEditor is open source, so you can see the exact changes made here.
I am hoping that WED 1.2 beta 3 will be totally stable and usable; the remaining open bugs are mostly UI quirks. If we find more work-stopping WED bugs, I’ll try to cut a new beta once a week until they’re fixed; after that WED can sit for a few weeks, then go final.
MeshTool: MeshTool 2.1 is released. This is an incremental update to MeshTool 2.0 with bug fixes and a new “contour” option that lets you use a shapefile to force specific contour lines into your DSF. See the README for details, and the MeshTool page for download.
I have done some work on MeshTool 3.0 but it’s not ready for beta yet.
But if you run 10.20, you probably already know that from the auto-update.
I’m hoping to have a beta 3 of WED this weekend with a fix to the orthophoto exporter and the 10.8.3 file-dialog box problems if we can figure them out.
WorldEditor’s “Make Draped Polygons” feature is a stop-gap and a hack, and someday it will be replaced with something better.
I mention this as I debug it because there are feature requests in the bug base to enhance its operation; I think I will replace it with a more fundamentally useful (and less awkward) interface before adding more functionality.
“Make draped polygons” was born out of a hack to WED to allow Sergio to finish his LOWI custom scenery pack before WED 1.1 was even public beta. In other words, it was a crude attempt to get draping into WED before the real UI work was done.
I am resisting the urge to nuke the feature now because there isn’t something to replace it yet. But in the long term, what WED needs is better tools to work with imagery and manage the text files that are needed to create ground imagery around an airport.
This new UI will be after the 1.2 release; for now the goal is to get 1.2 stabilized and finalized.
WorldEditor 1.2 beta 2 is now available for download here. First, a few notes about WED betas:
WED 1.2 is in beta – be sure to back up your work, as it has been known to crash.
The scenery tools are open source – you can view the WED source code here.
The scenery tools have their own public bug base. So please report all WED bugs here.
Please be careful to report X-Plane bugs to the X-Plane bug reporter page and WED bugs to the scenery tools bug base. Moving bugs to the right place just burns time that could be spent fixing bugs.
What’s New?
Pretty much all of the changes from beta 1 are in the area of exporting scenery.
WorldEditor now has the concept of an export target – the version of X-Plane you want to export. It currently knows about four possible targets:
X-Plane 9.70 (that is, the final version of X-Plane 9)
X-Plane 10.00 (that is, any version of X-Plane 10 back to the earliest)
X-Plane 10.21 (that is, the current latest version of X-Plane 10)
Robin’s database
Changing the export target can change how export works to optimize for that version of X-Plane; it also programs the “Validate” command to detect possible problems specific to that version. Examples:
If you set the export target to X-Plane 9.70 and export a DSF overlay with forests in “line” mode, validate will catch the error – line-based forests are new to X-Plane 10.
If you set the export target to “Global Airport Database” and use your own custom OBJs, validate will catch the error – for sending data to Robin you must use our library objects.
“Export for Global Airports” is now available on the File menu – this exports a single zip file that you can send to Robin. The zip file contains an apt.dat and one .txt file per airport with the DSF overlay data.
The exporter itself has been heavily rewritten (view the git logs to see what a blood bath it was) – this should hopefully fix all crash-on-export bugs, particularly on Windows.
So the hope is that this beta will (1) let people send their airports to Robin and (2) let custom scenery authors work without crashes on export.
Tom asked a good question in the comment section of a previous post: what is the difference between DSF mesh formats for v9 and v10. Here’s the story:
Mesh: In X-Plane 8 and 9, the terrain mesh is stored as a set of triangles in 3 dimensions; each corner of the triangle has a latitude, longitude, and altitude. The shape of the mesh comes from the location of those triangles and the heights of each corner.
Mesh + DEM: X-Plane 10 can also handle a new extended DSF with raster (array) data. In this mode, the mesh contains triangles (just like it did) but they contain only latitude and longitude. The elevation for the entire DSF tile is stored in a 2-dimensional array of elevations (a raster DEM). When X-Plane 10 loads this format, it reads the height for each triangle out of the array of elevations to “rebuild” the 3-d triangles at load time.
X-Plane 9 supports only the original “mesh” DSFs.
X-Plane 10 supports both the original mesh DSFs and the new Mesh + DEM DSFs.
Therefore, old scenery from v9 loads fine in v10. But you cannot load the new v10 global scenery in v9.*
Why Did You Guys Do This?
Moving elevation data out of the triangles and into a separate raster layer actually makes the DSF smaller.** That’s a nice-to-have, but that’s not why we did it.
DirectX 11 class graphics cards can enhance meshes on the fly, on the GPU via tessellation. We wanted to shift the DSF elevation mesh toward raster data so that we would have the full source raster to feed into the GPU. In this configuration, we can make a low resolution mesh, give the graphics card the full data and say “go to town.”
If the graphics card can ‘enhance’ the mesh quality, this solves a problem we have now: there is no rendering setting for mesh complexity. Right now everyone uses the same meshes, so we have to limit mesh detail to meet the specs of low-end supported computers. With GPU-enhanced terrain, users with more powerful systems can crank up the detail.
We’re not ready to code this yet, but one first step was modifying the DSF format to be ready for tessellation. We did this with the X-Plane 10.0 global scenery, and a nice side effect was smaller DSFs.
What About MeshTool?
MeshTool 2.0 writes DSFs with the classic “mesh” format, and it uses the v9 global terrain definitions to fill in land classes where there are no custom orthophotos.
MeshTool 3.0 will write DSFs with the new mesh+DEM format, and it will use the new v10 terrain definitions.
Therefore, MeshTool 2.0 will make v9 scenery (that can be loaded in v10) and MeshTool 3.0 will make v10-only scenery.
* There are also a million other v10 0nly features that the global scenery requires that v9 does not support. Besides not supporting Mesh + DEM, v9 doesn’t support the new terrain shaders, the new draped road system, or the new autogen!
** The space savings come from two places: first, we don’t need to save terrain normals. Instead we calculate them since we have the full DEM. Second, we use 7-zip compression, and it actually gets better compression ratios on less heavily encoded data. So the raw raster DEM compresses better than the highly encoded triangulation mesh. The triangle mesh encoding format was designed a long time ago for classic pk-zip, not 7-zip.
