Robin, Tyler and I have been going through the airports that have been sent in since X-Plane 10.25; the good news is that there are over 350 batches sent in!*
But – I had to throw thirteen of them overboard; they were using OpenSceneryX. For airports that are going to be sent to the gateway and become part of the default airport file for X-Plane, you can’t use third party libraries! Everything you use has to ship with X-Plane.
WED 1.3 has user interface features to help hide third party libraries, but in this case you’d think that having the objects in the opensceneryx/ folder would have been a hint.
It’s not a coincidence that this was the same thirteen entries not sent in the right format; WED 1.2.1 won’t do an export for the global database with third party libraries, and this will be true with WED 1.3 as well, where the export is uploaded directly to the gateway.
Do you have any idea when you will be supplying us with more lego pieces for airport development. If we had more pieces we would be less inclined to go hunting for 3rd party Objects.
Perhaps you could consider allowing the public to submit objects to be included in the stock X-Plane Libraries. People are always uploading stuff for free downloads, so I would imagine that they would be willing to help grow the library.
Mark Hayling
Nassau, Bahamas.
I don’t know when we’ll do more lego pieces.
We are not planning on taking community contributions. I think I’ve commented on this before, but there are a bunch of problems taking community contributions: quality level, IP issues, and perhaps most importantly performance – the library is _planned_ to have high levels of texture sharing for high performance, and consistent authoring for a consistent look. Our priority is not maximal accuracy on the default airports that appeal world-wide – additional accuracy can come from custom scenery that has a lot more latitude to put exactly what needs to be there at each airport.
I understand what you are saying Ben.
I live in the Bahamas. We are an archipelago of seven hundred Islands and Cays. We have about 50 or so airports ranging from packed coral runways with a wooden shack for a terminal to modern multi runway International Airports with jetways.
The vast majority of terminal buildings on the islands are single story cement structures. There is nothing in the facade library that comes close to this style/ scale of building.
Any attempt to create the majority of airports in the islands will have buildings that are way to large scale.
I’m more than willing to submit airports for the Bahamas because I don’t think anyone is going to try to make scenery for these small airports. I’m not trying to make perfect representations by any means but I can’t do it at the right scale with the large scale Facades in the library.
I don’t know if you are takings requests for facades, but if I could only get one new Lego Piece it would be a single story facade with wall options of Entry w/o awning, Entry with Awning, Roll up doors, Windows, Blank walls, in metal & cement.
Thanks.
Mark Hayling
Nassau,Bahamas.
Hi Mark,
We will be looking at what the next lego brick pieces will be, but we are not doing this now, as Tom has other stuff he has to finish up first.
It is reasonable to expand the lego brick list so that you can meet the basic scale and build-out requirements of such airports…we definitely need to distinguish between “I can’t build these one-story structures because everything in the lib is two stories” (we should expand to fix that) and “there isn’t enough variety for me to visually match particular details of my local airport” (time for custom scenery). It’s a line in the sand, but it’s still a line.
Cheers
Ben
It seems to me, that the “lego brick” system now has one disadvantage. Default libraries is already sufficient quantity of the finished amazing objects, but lacked elements of a “designer toy”,except, perhaps facades. In other words, if WED,
in future, could work in vertical plane with “designer’s” elements… We would have “WED_AC3D” probably. My fantasy is caused only by the desire to make the process of airports creating more effective.
Cheers
Youri
For what it’s worth, the vertical height parameter on facades can select from multiple models with different vertical profiles. That’s not a ton of flexibility, but it’s there.
Unfortunately the height parameter for hangars, the building most often used on airports, does not work, as far as I can tell.
The smallest hangar you can make has a height of like 10 meters, making it impractical for all but the larger airports.
I have gotten quite adept at working around this by using other facades, like wharehouse, for example, or putting the medium sized hangars in an overlapping way.
I think that acceptance of the WED-airport contribution process will hinge to a large amount on the availability of “fitting” lego pieces. I understand that initially you are saying that just “some” buildings are better than none, but with every submission the designer puts his ability on display, and we all fear the “I fly to that airport all the time, and sorry, your submission doesnt look like the real thing at all!” comment…
Jan
Hi Jan,
Contributed lego brick airports will be an approximation of the real airport; if you have local knowledge of the airport, you may only be truly satisfied by hand-modeled custom scenery. But clearly it is not practical to ship 20,000 hand-made custom modeled airports with the base sim. 🙂
cheers
bEn
It would seem that there could well be a group of scenery bufs that could embark upon a custom project with the same objectives as those of the Official XPlane leggo developers, that of producing a simpler, smaller set of leggo buildings which would be suitable for local airports in the way that Mark has been requesting.
The most urgent objective would to create the texture set for this more general set of facade structures and make them more predictable in their appearance (by making designs less exotic in transparency, and with limited object binding.) Objects could also be generated which could be added to combinations of these simple facade definitions by laying the objects down using WED rather than as random generations made by the facade object attacher. These could be both facade structures (ex: overpasses, and even roofs) and building parts that could be stacked to provide some of the smaller airport structures typical of private and Small GA Airfields (ex: Tower appendages to single and dual story buildings, and a large selection of simple hangers of greater variety than the present offerings.) I personally have a set of textures (512×1024) 2 total – reg and LIT which can support almost any configuration of
object hanger I have ever needed to design. Experimentation with type 2 facades indicate that a careful redesign of that texture layout would result in the extention of its use additionally to a multiplicity of facade designs in addition.
It is true that this design proposal would probably not allow great flexibility in the generation of .apg structures, but in the cases being proposed, the standard leggo set provides a wealth of addons which can be used for this purpose and for smaller airfields, the need is for size flexibility, not volume.
It is just a seuggestion….
For anyone interested, this could be a custom design activity, which, if proven feasible then could be considered for X-Plane Inclusion. It would provide extra function and improved design variation.
Yes – we don’t have a monopoly on anything other than what goes into the core sim.
Creating a third party projects with the -exact same- objectives as the gateway project would be silly (in that it would be a dupe of the gateway project) but creating a third party project with -slightly different- objectives (e.g. we are going to collect custom artwork for the airports too) would be a totally reasonable thing to do, just like OpenSceneryX is different from the libraries we put into X-Plane and is a totally reasonable project.
I view scenery as being a pyramid, with the base layer having the widest coverage and the least specificity and custom packs having the smallest amount of coverage and near-exact specificity. There’s no reason why people can’t implement intermediate layers too!
cheers
Ben
What’s the chance that WED will be able to nuke any non-conforming objects in sceneries? Let me elaborate..
I built about a dozen airports about a year ago for X-Plane 10. None of them are “Global Export” compatible. They all use some OpensceneryX files or some other objects not native to X-Plane libraries.
Is there a quick and dirty way I can forcibly exclude the non-compatible objects without having to rebuild my airports or worse, go through each one and individually delete/modify non-compatible objects?
Maybe some trigger in WED that says “you have incompatible objects for global export, delete these?” and a click box for Yes or No… Any chance of that being an option for WED?
Hrm – we don’t have that yet, but I could add some kind of “select-by” feature to select, for example, all objects that are not in the default scenery pack.
PLEASE file a bug against WED here:
http://dev.x-plane.com/bugbase/
I just have too many things going on and these days the attention span of a 3 year old (possibly due to having a near-3-year-old 🙂 but if you put it in the bug base, it won’t go away until it’s done. And this is cheap and useful enough that I should throw it into WED 1.3.
cheeres
Ben
Done! Good idea “select non-compatible objects” and allow one to delete them in one step. Then I could add new objects that are “compatible” and export the airport.
This would help anyone who has OpensceneryX installed and still wants to make a compatible airport. If you use an incompatible object by accident, this feature would allow you to select and delete it and fix your airport without having to hunt down every single offending object. Good idea!
Right. Please note that _now_ the validate function selects the offending object. So if you have one or two stragglers you can easily find them now…the new feature will be for “I have an OSX-based scenery and I want to use some of the runways, etc. as a starting point” where the number of objects to be found and killed will be large.
This is exactly what I’d ask for. A few offending objects is no problem. Having the ability to en-mass delete/select offending objects is what I’d like. Then people could save the airports and know they are “compatible” and then further edit them using compatible objects to replace the naughty ones. Thanks a lot!