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Posted a few minutes ago: WorldEditor 1.6 release candidate 1.  RC1 has a bunch of key bug fixes, is gateway-ready now, and can edit X-Plane 11 truck routes.

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.

37 comments on “WorldEditor 1.6 Release Candidate 1 Is Here”

  1. Excellent job, Ben.

    What are your thoughts on the “write signs on surface” technology that Michael has prototyped? Probably one of the most desired features in WED, do you think it can still make it into 1.6 final?

    Cheers, Jan

    1. Hi Jan,

      That tech is fantastic. With that in mind it is definitely _not_ going into 1.6. It’ll be the first thing into 1.7, and if we don’t have any other stuff to do, I’d cut a 1.7 just for this great technology pretty soon. But 1.6 has been in beta while; we need to cut it off and establish it as the replacement for 1.5.1, so that the most modern validations are applied to airports.

    2. Is this for writing things on the pavements? I haven’t heard about this.

        1. Could this be used to manually place runway markers?
          Today, since the markers are automatically placed, sometimes the aiming point isn’t in the right distance from threshold.
          Some smaller runways have the aiming point closer to threshold and vice versa. It would be nice for the authors to manually adjust that.
          (I’ve filed a bug report/feature request regarding that some time ago)

          1. For custom scenery, yes…you have always been able to use draped polygons to DIY runways – Michael’s interface is really a huge improvement for the authoring work-flow – the capabilities in the engine have always been there.

            I do have ideas on how to improve the accuracy of the TDZ markers in-sim, but not based on hand-placement.

        3. Apart from the tech in WED, will there be supporting assets in X-plane (implying Gateway Airports)?

          (“Where’s the beef!/red-paint!”)

          Right now I have to rely on the limitations of polygons, and the stop-gap functionality in WEd-O-Maker (shameless plug)
          https://youtu.be/tnQeov8APLs

          1. YEs – we plan to ship standard ground marking polygons in our library, which work with Michael’s editor and make them gateway-friendly.

        4. Just to illustrate that a bit:
          The editing features required are already in WED 1.6 since beta 1 and fully functional. But you need the right arts assets, too. For full custom airports and 3rd party libraries this can all be used today already.
          In fact, I’m in contact with a library maker and a major full custom airport designer and both might change their current art assets for drawing such ground markings to the new WED 1.6 method – as its easier for artists to use AND saves resources in the simulator.

          But for gateway use – you’ll have to wait for suitable art assets to be included in the laminar library first – which is possibly XP 11.10.
          Plus we need to allow validation to let them go to the gateway. Although thats a minor change to WED (actually – the code exists already) we still need to test all this with the gateway – no point to risk a last minute WED 1.6 change to screw up something with the gateway interface. So Ben opted to open the gateway for 1.6.0 submissions early and we’ll do the validation change separately – but still in time before X-plane is ready.
          Plus I need to write a chapter for the WED manual on how to use all this. And guess who I’m thinking of recruiting for the tutorial video 🙂

          1. Oops – sorry, I stand corrected — what Michael said! WED 1.6 was mostly done by Ted and Michael, so I’ve lost track of what went in and what got held.

            I think we can get art assets in for 11.10 without trouble.

  3. Ben:
    Can you further explain this enhancement: “and can edit X-Plane 11 truck routes”

    1. X-Plane 11 introduces three new apt.dat features to support ground truck operations that are now in X-Plane:
      – Truck parking spots, which tell the trucks where to park and makes them appear.
      – Truck destinations, which the trucks “visit” to direct traffic.
      – Truck routes, which are like ATC ground routes, but for trucks, defining vehicle roadways.

      WED 1.6 is the first WED release to let you edit those.

  4. Hi,
    Appreciated…
    I have played around with ground trafic for a while and actually got it to work fairly OK. But I was wondering. How do I completely disabel the pushback truck in an airport. I am doing EKAH that has absolutely no pushback trucks. All aircrafts enter the gate in an angeled circle and leave the same way out. There is no gates where aircrafts enter straight in.

    /Michael

    1. Only ramps starts with a ramp start type = Gate, have push back trucks.
      So just don’t use “Gate” for any of your ramp starts.

  5. Using the RC1 and I am happy!

    The bug that was bugging me on MAC is now fixed!

    “If you rearrange anything in the hierarchy pane (not just a polygon, it can be an object, a group), you I lose ability to make Bezier curves (on MAC). “
    The bug that was bugging me on MAC is now fixed!

    The only thing I am still trying to figure out (related to the bug) is:
    “Ben Supnik commented: acc23cbb3fa1ba4b331a8f1d8af8df791c740a79 ”

    Please decrypt this for me 🙂

    1. Our bug database procedure involves listing the Git SHA (basically a unique identifier in our source code tracker) for the change that fixes a bug. Any time you see a long hexadecimal string (i.e., a string consisting of only numbers and the letters a through f) like that, it’s a Git SHA. If you’re really motivated, you could look in the WED codebase (which is publicly available) and find that exact change.

      1. Just to add a bit of “nerd-porn”-twist to that comment; Git’s SHA hashes are 160 bits … not only are they unique within a project, they can “basically” be considered unique universally 🙂

        A probability of a SHA-hash collision is *possible* but *so* minuscule that no-one in their right minds even considers that *ever* happening. So – if you have a commit hash – and you google it … the probability that you find something “completely unrelated” … is as close to “zero” as you can get 😀

        1. “probability as close to zero as it gets”
          I guess google has quantified that residual and its not 42. From the wikipedia page on SHA-1:

          On February 23, 2017 CWI Amsterdam and Google announced they had performed a collision attack against SHA-1, publishing two dissimilar PDF files which produce the same SHA-1 hash as proof of concept.

          I think those two documents were the WED and ObjectEditor manuals.

  6. OH ME OH ME OH ME!!!

    waging my tail i found a bug in the new client and it aint good

    aircraft no mater what you change stays the same a “747” in the icon ATC+flow tab

    Plus Chris (cool name) is it possible instead of using a can you not adopt a click and drag option on the model too because i’m finding it really difficult to align my models after correcting rotation

    cheers buddy

    Chris

  7. instead of using a CROSSHAIR sorry missed a word out maybe be because i found a bug LOL

    1. And THAT is exactly the reason why you don´t post bug reports here but file a proper bug report that only Laminar Research will read – save yourself the embarassment! ;-))

      Jan

  10. I would really like to find a way to eliminate roads running through my airports. I cannot “exclude” them anymore. I don’t know whether it is WED or the XP-11 program, but they are persistent. Obviously, I am not a programmer, so I would like to see a simple “erase it” solution. It is not good to have vehicles crossing your takeoff path in default scenery.

  11. Quick FMOD/.snd question (I couldn’t find any other place to post it):

    What happens when one or more EVENT_START_COND are specified? I looked at your Cessna .snd file and found this:

    BEGIN_SOUND_ATTACHMENT
    EVENT_NAME /model/cessna_172sp/impact
    VEH_PART tire 0
    PARAM_DREF_IDX 0
    EVENT_ALLOWED_FOR_AI
    EVENT_START_COND sim/flightmodel2/gear/total_deflection_rate[0] > 1
    EVENT_START_COND sim/flightmodel2/gear/tire_vertical_deflection_mtr[0] > 0
    END_SOUND_ATTACHMENT

    – What’s the trigger logic here (AND or OR)?
    – EVENT_END_COND follows the same logic?

    Thanks!!

  12. Another quick question. 🙂

    Since the .snd format is a bit limited about triggering sounds on complex conditions, I’ve turned into XLua in order to program the conditions there and create custom dataref on which to base the .snd triggers on.

    The problem is, I’m a programmer on other languages but Lua syntax is new to me, and X-Plane is not helping because it “eats” Lua errors :-P. I couldn’t find a way to see any output of the Lua program or even the interpreter pass, so common things like syntax errors cannot be debugged.

    Is there any way to debug Lua programs under XLua?

    1. Right – our assumption was that you’d use a scripting language so that .snd files didn’t have to be Turing complete. And…the more “real” languages you know, the more Lua will drive you insane. Our art guys love it, but from what I can tell it was designed to troll C programmers.

      Right now XLua errors are sent to console (I think) – at least on OS X and Linux if you run from command line you’ll see the errors there. I am not entirely sure where they go on Windows. We could add some kind of sane support.

      If your other programming languages include basic C/C++ you can also just recompile XLua and redirect output…I’m pretty sure we checked in the MSVC projects.

      1. Thanks! I’m kind of a “art gal” myself and my experience doesn’t include C++ so I guess no recompiling from source for me 🙂

        FYI, on Windows, error messages seem to go to /dev/null 🙂 they are not output to stdout nor the log.txt or even the Developer Console inside XP, so it would be super nice to have XLua emit its output *somewhere* 😛

        1. Agreed – our art team is mainly on Mac, that’s how it got this way so long. The long term plan is to have an output log visible somewhere in-sim, plus in-sim on the fly script reload.

  13. Great work on the improved software, thank you very much!
    As it is possible now to do per-airport-flattening does that implies it can also be made possible to add the elevation data of the airport into the scenery doing per-airport-elevation, making the curved runways look awesome and independent of underlying elevation data that is causing the quirky bumps?

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