A Better WED Beta (and friends)

On my way back from South Carolina a few weeks ago I had some time in the airport to fix the WorldEditor 1.1 export bugs. All of the reports pointed to a single cluster of bugs that are hopefully now fixed in beta 2, and today I finally had time to get the betas posted.

I also cut a new build of MeshTool (2.0RC2) while I was doing builds; this fixes a bug when using orthophotos with varying physics.

So first: you can get the new WED 1.1 beta 2 and MeshTool 2.0 RC 2 on the tools page on the wiki.

The wiki? Yeah. Tyler has been helping me migrate the scenery tools to here. At this point I believe that all of the content on scenery.x-plane.com is now duplicated on the wiki (which also has additional articles).

WED Bugs

If you should find additional WED bugs, after you get over your initial surprise, please file bugs in the scenery tools bugbase. Please do not email me bug reports. WED has to take second priority to version 10 work, so I don’t have time to process bug reports now, and I will lose them. The bug base keeps your bug safe, keeps a record of what happened to it, and can take attachments.

Please do provide the minimal materials to reproduce the bug; simple packages with an earth.wed file are great. Thanks to all of the WED users who filed bugs with repro cases – this made it very easy to retest the export code.

My Polygon is Poly-Gone

It is illegal to have DSF polygons (or airport polygons) cross themselves; finally with beta 2, WED actually makes this case fairly easy to detect.

1. If a polygon cannot be exported (because it is self-intersecting), an error message will indicate that some polygons were skipped, and those polygons are selected.
2. If you pick “Error-Check Polygons” from the Edit menu, then for every polygon that has a self-intersection, an OBJ is added at the precise point of the self-intersection. Simply select and zoom in on those OBJs – they act as marker pins to show the problem. Delete the OBJs once you have untangled your polygon.

(I did experiment with error checking on the fly, e.g. simply showing red dots in the intersection points as you drag and resize the polygon, but the math is too slow. I am using CGAL to check bezier polygon intersections, and their algorithm is absolutely rock solid, but it can take up to a quarter of a second to recheck the polygon, which is too slow for interactive editing.)

UPDATE: beta 2 hangs when processing beziers. What is very odd is that this happens on the clean release code but not the working copy of WED I fixed the bugs in. Hence, when I checked all of the bug reports, they all passed. I have reopened all bezier-related bugs. I have not yet located the build environment differences causing the problem.

UPDATE 2: the hang on bezier processing was due to a bad compile configuration for a library WED uses, and was Mac specific. Having fixed this, I have recompiled and reposted WED beta 2 for Mac. If you already grabbed WED, re-download it, and make sure you get the version dated September 24th. You can tell you have the right one because the “compiled on” date in the about box will say “Sep 24 2010 19:34:09”.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

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