Well, Blender is sort of forked – because you can’t write a script for both 2.49 and 2.5 there are now two fully functioning separate code streams – the 2.49 stuff – it starts with Jonathan’s script and then there are a few forks – mine, Ben R’s, and I think Dan may have a separate one. Then there is the fully separate, ground-up 2.50 script, which is not forked.

Anyway, here’s the v10 situation:
– Internally we use Blender 2.49. We have new exporters for the AG, road and facade asset formats. We have a mod of my code fork for OBJs with v10 features.
– We will release all of our 2.49 scripts when 10.0 ships. We can’t guarantee support for the non-OBJ stuff – the AG stuff in particular is super-tweaky, but you’re welcome to try it. Some of the scripts are specifically tuned for our work flow, so I’m not sure how generally useful they’ll be.
– I will leave it to others to support v10 OBJ stuff in other Blender code forks including 2.50, but I am always happy to help people by answering questions, and the code is GPL, so anyone can have it.
– I will update ac3d to do OBJ10 stuff when I have time, but I am not planning on setting ac3d up to do other art asset formats (like facades).

No vertical placement of OBJs in AGPs at this time. There will be vertical placement of OBJs in the sim itself though – by MSL. We may add that at some point. Now that we have instancing some of our aversion to modeling with small objects may go away…we’ll have to see. Facades can spawn objs on their roofs, and they can have multiple level roofs for car parks. 🙂

But maybe this is not the case? Conversley, where will the AC3D plugin be at with regard to supporting these?

Yes, the .agp file format has particularly caught my eye. It has some of the hallmarks of a request I made a couple of years back to be able to incorporate objects within objects.

Ben,
Does the .agp format allow the designer to define the vertical placement of an object’s origin with the scene? I’m thinking of the ol’ classic scenario of car objects on different levels of a multi-story car park object.

I assume the DVDs will show 1 airport accurately set out as per LOWI Innsbruck in version 9.

Then by running the update program, a user will get whichever airports have been set out and uploaded by volunteers in the x-plane community up to that time. Over time this will expand.

Note that Robin Peel currently collects volunteer-uploaded flat airport data for use in X-Plane and any other simulator / map maker to use. ie it is open source.

These additional files sound like they will be for X-Plane use only…

Hi Bill! 🙂

It should work pretty well – it’s the same “draping” tech (chopping and then deforming a polygonal shape to the terrain mesh) that we use in the .pol files and runways. The difference is that, because it is attached to an OBJ, it’s way easier to use them – you just model and drop them. And since they are attached to an OBJ, the registration between 3-d and 2-d should be accurate.

?

The file formats aren’t “final” until we go gold, so I’m at least a bit hesitant on how much preliminary info we put out. When v10 goes gold, everything we have internally (our internal wiki with authoring notes, our blender scripts, etc.) will go public. Work on the scenery tools code base is already open source – that is, if you want a DSFTool build that can write MSL-placed OBJs, you can just compile it yourself.

Some file formats have no spec outside the x-plane code. For example, the facade 2.0 format uses 3-d meshes, so it’s only practical to create them with a 3-d modeling tool (we use blender 2.49 for this). So I never wrote a clean spec – the docs are in the code itself. So I’ll have some post-ship writing to do.

Other features come from the published RFCs on the wikis, although some may be changed a bit in implementation.

If there is a particular feature that you’re looking for compatibility with, let me know, but I don’t have time to put together comprehensive docs before we ship – too much has changed! With all of the above resources, finishing that “SDK” once we ship shouldn’t take very long.