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WorldEditor 1.5 beta 2 is up – you can download it here. Please report WED bugs on the gateway’s bug base.

This version of WED has a lot more validation than past ones did, so expect your previously “good” airport to fail validation. In particular, WED now validates that hot zones have been properly used around all runways in the ATC taxi route network. Getting hot zones perfect is very, very hard to get right by hand; the validation tool is meant to help you find the problems.

Jennifer is working on comprehensive documentation on ATC taxi route authoring; I’ll link to it as soon as it’s done. Our hope is that with the new docs and validation, everyone can understand how to correctly set up ATC taxi routes, and get assistance from WED to get them right.

Update: docs are up!

As some have noticed, we are not accepting uploads to the gateway from WED 1.5 betas. The issue is: if the validation code has bugs, then WED could (due to a bug) force you to upload an incorrect airport to the gateway.

I don’t know when we will allow uploads, but my guess is that within two weeks we’ll have a WED RC or final version that is ready to use.

For now your best bet is to use WED’s new tools to get the bugs out of your taxi layout and flows.

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.

52 comments on “WED 1.5 Beta 2 Posted”

  1. First off, thank you Ben..

    Second to a more philosophical question. I found my self wondering the question on for what this is worth, all the updates and bugfixes and airport updates are made just in time for a new version to come out. For the first time since x-plane started Norway now has most of the airports made with thanks to dedicated persons like tdg and antwob on dot org. Will we then be able to continue to use all these nice additions and submissions through the airport gateway in the next version?

    1. I expect that every airport in the gateway that works in this version will keep working in the next version – we have a long term strategy of curating the gateway airport database; while we sometimes provide new features that require upgrades to leverage (e.g. put in this new meta-data and you get static aircraft) we aren’t going to just go throw everything out – that would be lousy for everyone.

  2. Correct me if i wrong but this line inside ATC Taxi Route Authoring guide “Gates must be connected to the taxi route or AI planes will go off the grid and “go direct” to the gate. In general, if you have drawn yellow lines going to the gates you should link the taxi routes directly to the gates. For a tie down you can also put taxi routes along the exit routes.” is saying that i should create one or more edge that connects the taxiway to the gate thus the end node of the edge will be at the exact ramp position, kind overlapping each other. So in case i get that right, why i always get this error “Don’t send me co-located points” when i do that? I’ve already did in the past and i just tried it again but still it shows the same errors.

    thanks in advance
    ne

    1. One more thing, if i create the route that connects the taxi to the gate with the gate unlocked, thus can be modified, the node gets tied to the gateway. So if i move the gate the edge will move together it. Is this a normal behavior and the expected result that confirms that the gate is attached properly?

        1. I just updated my airports by adding an ATC route leading to the gates but in each case, when I try to export, I get an error message saying “Your airport contains doubled ATC routing nodes. These should be merged”. But when I select the nodes, WED only shows one node and I am unable to merge them. Is this a known bug? I’ll file a bug report if necessary.
          One more question. Does the ATC engine now allow for “Push Back” from a gate rather than taxiing straight through the terminal to join a taxi route?

          1. Just an update. I’ve tried repotting this bug 3 times, but I keep getting an error message and it rejects the bug report..

          3. Please disregard this bug report. I had my head screwed on backward today. The problem was caused because I had a taxi-route designed for use with X-Life included in the WED file. Even though the X-Life traffic route was hidden, WED saw the hidden X-Life nodes and considered them in the validation process. I deleted the X-Life routes completely and the X-Plane ATC routes now pass the validation test. Sorry for the confusion. But I’m still curious if you have plans to include a “pushback” option in the ATC engine.

    2. One last thing, this error message shows up as soon as a gate is assigned to an AI that has just landed.

    3. There is no relationship between the colocated points message and this. You don’t _have_ to put atc taxi routes on your lead-in lines to the gates, but if you do not, the planes are just going to make up a path to the gate.

      1. If I recall correctly, you once wrote somewhere the AI planes enter and leave the taxi network only at nodes, right ?
        Don’t they, after leaving a ramp start, begin to turn as tight as they can (aicraft model dependent ?) and then head straight for the *nearest* taxi node ?
        I seem to see this in my tests, which would explain why they at times seem to end up at the ramp start with a quite different heading as the start specifies. If I provide a taxi node to “hop off the grid” in a suitable location, i.e. so they approach the ramp start from the proper direction, with distance to spare for turning, it seems all fine …

        Maybe a few more words to explain how its intended to work in the guide would help greatly.

        1. Hi Michael,

          Honestly, I’m not sure – Chris wrote that code — a very long time ago. I’ll have to go look at it. I can say:
          – Our original paper straw man was that the airplanes can exit ‘on-edge’.
          – It is VERY likely that the design was simplified to enter/exit at-node.
          Either way if you know the actual route to gate and build it, you make everything simpler. 🙂

  3. Suddenly getting errors that my draped ortho is the wrong file type (it’s 2048 x 2048 png). Did something change with this? I used xgrinder to convert it to DXT1 but even DXT5 fails. Bug report filed.

    Ben, loving the much better performance in the sim…though a couple glitches, one with transparency…looking at an obj (building) through something transparent like a fence (chain link) is like x-ray vision thru the building too…whereas it should show the building, not what’s on the other side of that building (in this case moving traffic and mesh). Figured that one was reported.

    1. Got with another WED user and he’s got a similar problem when trying to export the scenery pack. Export fails with message complaining about draped ortho. Message is “Resource ‘filename.png’ does not have the correct file type”. Thanks Ben.

      — Greg

  5. Typo in the “ATC Flow” doc.

    “…no airports ever land on runway 32 or depart on runway 14.”

    Made me smile 🙂 .

  6. Ben, in Beta 1 I had the colored areas showing up all the time unless I made the routes invisible, and now in Beta 2 I cannot get the colors to appear! The read-me says

    “Segments are color coded when viewed in the ATC Taxi + Flow tab, to provide an immediate sense of the properties assigned to each segment.”

    Where is the “ATC Taxi + Flow tab” located?

  7. in previous post you mentioned how ai planes interact with airport depending on the static planes population, size, how ai are “autonomus” if some rules are met or not…

    I know that you are trying to make realistic situations, but i think is completly unrealistic now,,, in real life planes are not flyng at your own… there are f plans etc, airport shedules

    yesterday im working on an airport im working for years, then when open the sim 80% of planes are static, with 15 ai planes in the air close to airport, 747s, 727s, a320s, and small planes, After 3 hours: 0 lands… maybe they dont match one or multiple rules, but other than that seems like static planes are static forever!!!!
    this reduces the airport capacity, 80% in my case, or.. im doing somthing wrong?

    thx for your work

    1. errata: i mean “atc” no “etc”

      “””I know that you are trying to make realistic situations, but i think is completly unrealistic now,,, in real life planes are not flyng at your own… there are f plans ATC, airport shedules”””

  8. Hi Ben, I have a simple question. Could it be possible for someone at some point to make the buttons, a single row, instead of two? On today’s modern wide screen monitors, it is still a decent amount of space lost for no reason other than the fact the buttons are two rows. Just wondering. and thanks for the rapid upload of Doc’s, thats going to make learning the new features so much easier

    1. Probably not – if we do that the minimum window size to use WED will go up. And if you have a wide screen monitor you have more space horizontally.

    1. I don’t know what that’s about. Another user reported that, and I read the instructions to remove the malware and found NO sign of it on the system WED was built on.

      1. Mine is also deleting when trying to download wed 1.5b2.

        It was working and now won’t let me download it.

          1. Thanks Michael. Might be worth it to wait for beta 3; often when we get this kind of false positive pattern match (and I have -no- idea what they’re scanning for that they found in WED) the small number of bits changing in the recompile is enough to mute it.

            Some scanners also use statistical analysis – so we put out a new version of X-plane and for the first 5 days it’s like “yellow alert – we’ve never seen this before.”

          2. I use Norton, and as Ben says in the post below, if under a certain number of Norton have downloaded the program, of if it is less than a cedrtain number of days old, Norton will block it, unless you over-ride their block and allow it anyway. FYI to Norton users.

    1. I would recommend using beta 2 to -start debugging your ATC routes if you have any. E.g. if it says you have a taxi route problem:
      – You probably do.
      – If it IS a bug in our validator, we want to know ASAP.
      There are validation bugs in WED itself – e..g it’s too picky about ATC frequencies. We’ll have them fixed soon.

      Don’t ship until RC!

      1. It’s nice to debug the ATC routes but if you have orthos, you may not be able to export without hiding them first. I had to roll back to 1.4 to export and hope I’m not going to be in a bind with all the changes I made in 1.5…hate doing work twice. Even still, I couldn’t get any AI aircraft to spawn on any ramp-start using 1.5…what’s the secret??? Thanks.

        — Greg

  11. Ben Supnik, I have a question not related directly to WED tool but rather to WED file. Currently XP stores airport informations in 3 different category of files custom file, global scenary and default apt.dat. So if i have to search for something about an airport i have to look into those 3 level of files where in the worst scenario it would be in the last bunch lines of default apt.dat……after so many lines. I see that SPSDK does not offer any API to retrieve airport information, like flows, directly from the game, so search for this information in realtime can be a pain, can be reduced with async jobs but still.
    Any thoughts about this?

    Thanks in advance
    NE

    1. nevermind, i realized that it doesn’t take neither too much time to load nor memory ram to store base information that i need. Don’t know who are responsible to keep SPSDK but being able to query for valid flow information would be nice. Said that feel free to delete both post, if you want to.

      1. I don’t expect us to have an API around these files…the file format is a controlled, versioned format, so wrapping it in an API would just double our work-load in versioning.

  12. Ben,
    Did we loose our nice little Yellow plane when putting in Tie downs? I’ve tried the others but no preview of how it will look now. Honestly that was one of the single best new features we had. Hopefully it will come back!

    D

    1. go to the “ATC” tab and you’ll get them back. They’re only shown in the “ATC” tab because they are needed for metrics on how the planes will drive around.

      1. OK Well, unless I’ve done something wrong here they’re not. ATC tab enabled tie down in question selected and not getting the preview. I’ll bug report it asap.

  13. Where can I find some explanations on the Taxi Route size definitions ( A -F)?

    And at the same time, can a runway for smaller aircraft’s (let’s say D size) be used as Taxiway for bigger aircraft’s (E -F)? I’m upgrading an airport to 10.50 and this is actually the case that the smaller runway is used as taxiway for the bigger aircraft’s.

  14. Ben,
    Here you state:

    “A ramp start may optionally tagged with a set of valid 3-letter ICAO airline codes, which must be entered as capital letters.”

    In WED 1.5b1, the validation demanded all capital letters, yet in WED 1.5b2 it demands all lowercase. Which one is it going to be?

    And follow up question:

    “A ramp start may optionally tagged with a set of valid 3-letter ICAO airline codes”

    I assume this means it can hold more than one and will be randomly picked?
    S0 do you need just a space between codes or coma or…etc..etc

  16. WorldEditor 1.4, Taxi Routes can draw RUNWAY at not runway bounds
    WorldEditor 1.5b2, why not?

    e.g: WorldEditor 1.5b2 export RCGI
    error message: Taxiroute node_stop is out of runway 17/35’s bounds

    WorldEditor 1.4 export RCGI is no problem!

    1. Do you mean:
      – You put a “runway” taxi route NOT on the runway.
      – WED said “don’t put a “runway” taxi route NOT on the runway.
      – You are surprised why WED said this?

      1. I think he may be referring to the same issue I filed a bug report on

        Unable to simulate intersection departure due to validation of runway coverage

        WED-633 Bug Report

        He may be dealing with the displaced threshold.

Comments are closed.