Will you release – with the beta version – a "What's new" documentation with a few screenshots for making beta-testing a bit easier?

Thanks for your effort here!

Cheers,
Aykey25

Mesh _editing_ in WED – probably never…WED’s not the right tool to edit an existing huge pile of 3-d triangles.

Mesh _editing_ in Blender of ac3d might make more sense. DSF editing in ac3d is not a high priority for me at all, but…the source code is available including an experiment at this I coded a while ago…I got import working, and export would be much easier to write now due to improvements in DSFlib.

Mesh _creation_ is where I’m looking at more heavily…that is, if your mesh is broken, you go back to real data sources and rebuild the mesh from originals.

(Think of it like this…if you have a lemon cake and you want it to be chocolate, you don’t just put it in a blender with chocolate and try to reshape it once it’s been cooked..you get new eggs, new flour, new sugar and make a new cake. The baking process is sort of “one-way” — so is making a DSF!)

So you’ll be able to create a new mesh a little bit more easily in MeshTool in weeks. For WED…I’d say _months_ if people start using “in-development” versions of WED (now possible since the source is readily available) and less than a year for a final binary build from me.

For example, you could go get the SRTM tile and use photoshop to “clean” the area under the airport, and/or fix the airport boundary (in WED), then recut with MeshTool. You could use the OSM coastline file or Tiger data for water.

I’m asking this because I’m eagerly awaiting better tools that give me the control I’m demanding in regards to mesh editing. Right now I’m holding off releasing any new sceneries due to the lack of control over the mesh surrounding my airports; I just won’t release a product that doesn’t measure up to my own and others expectations. I’ve got a lot of cool stuff I wan’t to do, but my motivation is rapidly declining the longer it takes. I’m just hopefull that the tools needed will someday be available to the public and easy to use…

I like you’re idea of drawing polygons that define an elevation, it should be easy enough for most scenery designers to figure without having to learn hard to use GIS tools…

I’m looking forward to WED 1.1 though. It’s a joy to work with, very well done!

– I don’t know how to write plugins for it, but I know how to make MeshTool accept just about any kind of GIS input.

– Someone else may not know how to code MeshTool, but might know how to do something trivial (like script the saving of layers as shape files and pass them to a tool).

I think there will be a “more userfriendly” way to make meshes…I think it will be much more practical to use GIS tools to make large amounts of global scenery than a UI tool like WED, but we will have users with more time and less GIS expertise who want to make meshes too.

Andras

(And – how the @#$#@ am I going to hit that July date for the first MS-owned release of X-Plane? 🙂

Anyway, WED 1.1 is real – to verify, grab the code out of the public repo and try it!! no April fools in anything posted.