There’s a real difference between a useless beta (e.g. what we have with WED now) and a useful one. While the purpose of a beta program is to fix bugs, a beta can be useful if the features users must have work. I don’t think I will have time to finalize WED 2.0 this year, but I do think I will be able to fix the really nasty bugs, the ones that make it useless.
To that end I have fixed a number of crash-on-export bugs. To the users who filed complete crash-on-export bug reports: thank you! It was quite an education to see what was in some of these projects polygon-structure-wise.
If you filed a WED export bug, I may have requested feedback if you didn’t include the WED file. Basically I would like the minimal materials to fully reproduce the bug by opening the package and picking “Export to DSF”. For many packs this is just the Earth.wed file, although sometimes textures or text files may be necessary.
A number of the crash bugs are caused by degenerate polygons. For example, if your polygon crosses itself in an X shape, not only is this illegal in X-Plane, but it also drives the exporter crazy. With the next beta, WED will select polygons that failed to export to help you locate such problems.
Hey! Some of my best friends are degenerate polygons!
Crossing polygons illegal eh? I think this will catch a lot of people out in the case of open facades (such as the chainlink fence facade in OpenSceneryX) where the facade is created along a long, meandering route and then ended with the last, open vector crossing back to the first node.
Yeah the rules may need to be relaxed. Closed polygons like facade buildings can't self intersect – doing so will cause the roof to disappear in the sim. But you're right that a fence facade is really more of a line. Line-type assets aren't checked for self-intersections, so I may have to tune the checks a bit.