Last weekend I was in Columbia, South Carolina for the second X-Plane developer’s conference – that is, the US meeting. I’ll try to write that up later, but first a quick note on WED 1.2. We had Tom Kyler on site, and his demonstration of WED 1.2 with the new lego brick objects turned out to be the surprise hit of the weekend. It’s one thing to say “we’re going to crowd-source airports” – it’s another to show the pieces in action.
WorldEditor 1.1 is released, and WED 1.2 is available as a “developer preview” – it’s that developer preview we showed at the conference. A real “beta 1” will be out shortly.
What’s a developer preview? It’s an incomplete beta. In this case we didn’t have all of the features of 1.2 in place, but I wanted to get it out there for people to poke at. Tom set up Seattle using the developer preview, so clearly it’s “usable” – albeit with a heavy dose of caution.
My plan is to get WED 1.2 beta 1 released some time this week, with every planned feature except for “submit-to-Robin”, which he and I should probably test internally a bit while we make sure that WED’s output is solid.
Note that if you are making custom scenery, there’s no reason why you can’t use WED 1.1 for now – it’s finished and stable. WED 1.2 has usability and v10 updates, but overlay editing has been available in WED 1.1 for a while.
After WED
After WED, the next scenery tools priorities will be:
- Getting ac3d and Blender 2.49 caught up for version 10 technology. For Blender 2.49, I am trying to merge my
hackingchanges with Jonathan’s, so that users of the public scripts can use my v10 mods without having to rework content. I will send these to Jonathan, and also post some of our newer scripts (e.g. autogen-editing). - MeshTool 2.x will write v9 meshes, but a new 3.0 version will be needed to make “v10”-style DSFs; this is on my todo list.
What About That Program That Simulates Airplanes?
It’ll take a bit to get through the scenery tools because we are also mid-patch for X-Plane. 10.10 will be the next “patch” with new features. It looks like we will post a 10.06 first with some new translation files that have come back to us from a number of sources.
Ben, I know you’ve answered this before, but it bears another visit. The various data sources that are used to provide terrain meshes are robust and clearly provide a great place to fly. But in both the V9 and V10 scenery packages, there are many locations that have maverick data, and this produces completely unnatural terrain glitches. We’re seeing even high resolution scenery meshes becoming available, and I get the feeling that we’ll see this across the whole planet eventually. Wonderful stuff too. But it would be great to have a simple tool to open a DSF tile from either V9 or V10 that is able to correct the vertices of the errant polygons using only what’s already present in the file.
This has already been thoroughly covered in the blog – if anyone third party wants to provide an in-place DSF editor they are welcome to, but I am not putting this into LR tools road map – it just creates a way to do work that will inevitably be destroyed every time anyone recuts a DSF.
That’s pretty much what I expected, Ben, and I understand your position. It would really be a pain to carefully edit the mesh on my own only to have it undone.
As a counter thought, since I really don’t have the chops to be that third party….is there any hope in the idea of identifying these glitchy terrains so that the tiles can be recut in Laminar’s normal workflow?
We could take bug reports, although frankly I am drowning in bug reports – if I had a nickel for everyone who has reported that Sydney hardware is hosed…
My long term thought is that setting up DSF renders in some kind of “service” model may help us automate DSF maintenance….
If the corrected DSF is placed in “Custom Scenery” it will not be destroyed. And DSF recuts have not been very common so far.
I wonder if Ottawa River will ever be done properly…
If a DSF is recut it leaves users in an impossible position: keep the old DSF with the manual edits, or the new DSF with the latest data from OpenStreetMap.
No, I don’t plan to do HD Mesh for the entire planet. That makes not so much sense for many regions (especially flat regions). You need to realize, that even the default Global Scenery is not too bad … in some (especially flat) areas, many users have a hard time to see a difference at all 😉 AND you need to be aware, that until now (end of April 2012), the HD mesh uses exactly the same raw data as the default Global Scenery!
“Jonathan”=Marginal? So he’s back?
Wait, is there a program that simulate airplanes also with WeD? What a nice surprise! 🙂
I’ve been using this flight simulator called X-Plane – one of its cool features: it serves as a visualizer for WED scenery. 😉
Actually, the past months I have spent more time trying to figure out the new features of WED 1.2 developer preview than flying. X-plane is a great visualizer for this kind of work 🙂
Hi Ben,
Very much enjoying the WED 1.2 developer preview. After using it for a couple of months, I yesterday discovered the blank button that actually provides the option to create roads. Will this be feature be further developed in the beta?
Thanks,
Al.
LOL you know a feature is not quite done when the icon is blank. 🙂 The feature is being _pulled_ from 1.2 and moved to 1.3, because it is still only half done and thus its only real use is to induce crashes. We’ll put it in 1.3, but I don’t want to delay 1.2!
At which point I can release 2 projects I’ve been working on for over a year!!!!!
That heading cracked me up Ben! Why does Austin waste time on flight models and that other fiddly stuff ? 🙂
Hope the Columbia conference went well!