WorldEditor 1.2 beta 2 is now available for download here. First, a few notes about WED betas:
- WED 1.2 is in beta – be sure to back up your work, as it has been known to crash.
- The scenery tools are open source – you can view the WED source code here.
- The scenery tools have their own public bug base. So please report all WED bugs here.
Please be careful to report X-Plane bugs to the X-Plane bug reporter page and WED bugs to the scenery tools bug base. Moving bugs to the right place just burns time that could be spent fixing bugs.
What’s New?
Pretty much all of the changes from beta 1 are in the area of exporting scenery.
WorldEditor now has the concept of an export target – the version of X-Plane you want to export. It currently knows about four possible targets:
- X-Plane 9.70 (that is, the final version of X-Plane 9)
- X-Plane 10.00 (that is, any version of X-Plane 10 back to the earliest)
- X-Plane 10.21 (that is, the current latest version of X-Plane 10)
- Robin’s database
Changing the export target can change how export works to optimize for that version of X-Plane; it also programs the “Validate” command to detect possible problems specific to that version. Examples:
- If you set the export target to X-Plane 9.70 and export a DSF overlay with forests in “line” mode, validate will catch the error – line-based forests are new to X-Plane 10.
- If you set the export target to “Global Airport Database” and use your own custom OBJs, validate will catch the error – for sending data to Robin you must use our library objects.
“Export for Global Airports” is now available on the File menu – this exports a single zip file that you can send to Robin. The zip file contains an apt.dat and one .txt file per airport with the DSF overlay data.
The exporter itself has been heavily rewritten (view the git logs to see what a blood bath it was) – this should hopefully fix all crash-on-export bugs, particularly on Windows.
So the hope is that this beta will (1) let people send their airports to Robin and (2) let custom scenery authors work without crashes on export.
I’ll file a formal bug on this but just a heads up to users who incorporate draped polygon orthophotos into their scenery. When I export to scenery package, all of the orthophotos textures are just one solid color in X-Plane . Reverting back to WED 1.2b1 and saving with it corrects the erroneous texture display. Not sure if its a texture paging thing or what, but it only seems to affect orthophotos. I’ve tried this and it’s repeatable, but so far, reverting to 1.2b1 always fixes it.
Use with caution
Please file a bug in the WED bugbase — and please be sure to include some tiny project that repros this, e.g. a WED proj with one orthophoto tile.
Note that for WED, users can just look at the open bugs to see how good/bad it is. 🙂
Is there a page that shows the limitations and features for each export target?
Not yet – it will be part of the docs when they catch up.