I get a fair number of emails where users send me a link and say “can you make X-Plane/WED look like this?” I’ll beat you to the punch this week…I wish WED looked like this.
Unfortunately it probably never will for three reasons:
- X-Plane’s time to create the structures you see is slow enough that editing the real world in real-time would be difficult. We try to load things on another thread while you fly to help smooth this.
- Our scenery creators do a lot of work to build the DSFs before you fly – minutes per DSF…again, from the time the raw data changes, a lot of computation happens.
- We’re trying to keep our tool set open source, but the X-Plane rendering code is closed source, so it would have to be rewritten (a huge task), e.g. WED would need an alternate editing engine.
(Of course if it was rewritten, it could be done so to fix points 1 & 2.)
Still, we must all dream. 🙂 🙂
It all looks very impressive and the approach is no doubt great as a tool for creating ad hoc or fictional scenery but, personally, I would not like to see such WYSIWYG, in-sim editing as it aids and even encourages detailed but imprecise editing and that is something of debatable value in a sim that is trying to recreate a real world activity.
– Cormac
I know it’s not strictly part of the editor, but I still think the “shadow” implementation is cool. Adds no-end of realism.