WED 1.5.1 is now out – this is a quick bug fix patch to 1.5. Besides fixing a bug where the downloadable preview packs from the gateway were missing static aircraft info, there’s a nice usability enhancement:
When a polygon fails validation due to a zero length side (two adjacent nodes on top of each other) the validation command selects the second vertex in each pair. Just hit the delete key once and your polygon is fixed! (Thanks to Michael for submitting the patch to this.)
We already have some working WED code to support X-Plane 11’s dynamic ground vehicles; Ted is working on it and we’ll get it moved to the public servers at some point. I am aiming to have WED in public beta condition by the time X-Plane 11 ships.
Austin and I are back from Cosford (thanks to Scott, Richard and the JustFlight team for hosting us!) , and the cat is out of the bag: X-Plane 11 is coming this year. Austin and I gave a presentation on some of what’s coming in v11, and it’s up on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPyydyyu3zE
Because of the size of the auditorium, we actually gave this talk twice; I believe this video was taken from the first talk, but there may be video of the second floating around. The content is not quite the same; in particular the Q & A went in separate directions.
Over the next week or two I will post some useful information about v11 for third party developers.
In the meantime: please do not email me asking for early beta access. We will be doing a beta program, and like X-Plane 10, we will try to get third party developers some early access to X-Plane 11 so that we can collect compatibility information and they can get oriented on how to update their aircraft.
But for now, please wait. Please do not post comments asking to be in the beta program. Right now my in-box is flooded and we’re not quite ready to triage these requests.
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by
Ben Supnik |
WorldEditor 1.5 release candidate three is now the official WED build; you will need to use it to upload to the gateway, and you can now upload WED 1.5 projects to the gateway.
WorldEditor 1.5 supports the new static parking and ATC features of X-Plane 10.50, and adds a visual taxi sign editor. WED can be downloaded here and has full release notes with the app.
You can get X-Plane 10.51r1 by running the installer, picking update, and checking “get betas”. Here’s a full bug fix list.
10.51 brings in a bunch of airports from the gateway that were built with WED 1.4.1 during the 10.50 beta process. It also has a few key fixes:
- If your aircraft’s airfoils have goofy values, it’s an error but you can still fly the plane.
- External visuals should be smoother when rolling the plane.
- Various window positioning and mouse clicking bugs are fixed.
- No more “colocated points” errors for ATC routes ending at ramps.
- Turbulence reduced when using real weather.
WorldEditor 1.5 release candidate three is posted. Hopefully this one is a keeper. The show-stopping bug was: the error margin for near-but-not-connected taxi routes was too large, causing it to incorrectly flag parallel parking spots for aircraft. Two other minor bug fixes went in too.
If you find a bug in the release candidate, please report one ASAP on the X-Plane Scenery Gateway bug reporter.
I just posted WED 1.5 release candidate 2. If you grabbed RC1 and hit the crash on export on Windows, please grab this ASAP and file a bug if your crash is not fixed. Of the four or five crash reports I received, two contained reproduction materials and both were the same bug – a crash when exporting a ramp position with no airliners, Windows only. This is now fixed.
WorldEditor 1.5 release candidate 1 just went up today. Please try it soon; we’re going to make this the official version for uploading to the gateway if no one finds any problems. This build fixes the last known validation bugs and has a bunch of improvements in the validation text messages; Jennifer, Ted and Julian did a complete review of the error messages (there are over 75!).
X-Plane 10.51 release candidate 1 should go up Monday or Tuesday; it has new airports and a few hot fixes for problems we found after shipping.
If you are the author of payware that won’t open due to an airfoil self-check failure, this is just a warning in 10.51, so your users won’t be frozen out.
But you should also fix the problem, as the self check fails only if you enter physically impossible values for the airfoil.
Update: a number of users have reported crashes on export in the release candidate. If you see a WED crash on export or validate:
- Please include a link to the scenery pack causing the crash.
- If you are on Windows and can provide a link to a minidump, that would be really useful. (You’ll have to do a link – even zipped, the minidump files are huge.)
- If you see a crash on a Mac, include the full text of the Apple crash report.
- If your pack requires tons of libraries, please indicate what libraries are needed.
Update 2: WED 1.5 release candidate 2 is out and fixes this crash, which is a crash on validate of a ramp start with no airlines, Windows only.
WorldEditor 1.5 beta 4 is available for download. The only major change here is that we seriously backed off the requirement to have hot zones off of the approach and departure ends of runways; this requirement is now only 100m.
I believe that with beta 4, our validation requirements are now correct; please attempt to validate your WED airport in beta 4 and file a bug ASAP if you find a problem. Otherwise, our plan is to make WED 1.5 beta 4 the required version for Gateway upload.
The only other remaining task to finalize WED 1.5 beta 4 is for Ted, Jennifer and Julian to go through the 75+ (really!) validation messages and review them for clarity and helpfulness. If WED tells you it can’t upload your airport, you deserve to know why!
WorldEditor 1.5 beta 3 is now available on the WorldEditor download page.
Besides a number of new features, WorldEditor 1.5 has much stricter validation checking; our is to get to a point where, if WED will export it, your scenery pack doesn’t have problems. This has two implications for the beta.
You’re Not Validating My Work!
If you haven’t tried a WED 1.5 beta, you may be surprised by how many validation errors WED finds. In particular, Ted coded a hot zone and runway analyzer that catches mistakes with taxi routes. It turns out that it’s really, really hard to get hot zones perfect by hand; even experienced WED authors who know all of the hot zone rules usually miss a few just due to the shear number of hot zones in a large airport and human error.
We have also seen airports on the gateway where the author clearly did not understand how hot zones were supposed to work at all.
We put the validation in because X-Plane’s ATC absolutely cannot function without properly marked hot zones; they are the only way that the ATC understands how airplanes are operating in the movement area. I think a significant amount of “weird ATC behavior'” will go away as we get better airport data that passes validation, and it will make the remaining real bugs easier to spot.
It’s not fun discovering that you have a big pile of problems to fix in your airport. To that end, we have been working on the docs to make sure that the ATC system is clearly documented, and we are now working on the validation messages themselves to make them more clear. If you find some part of the docs themselves that aren’t clear or have mistakes, please file a bug on the X-Plane Scenery Gateway’s bug reporter.
To be clear: airports already uploaded to the gateway with WED 1.4.1 will remain there, even if they fail validation; we’re not removing airports. But if you want to upload new work once WED 1.5 comes out, you will need to fix existing validation problems.
Who Will Validate the Validator?
The validation code may not actually be correct! People reported a number of high profile validation bugs, and they have been fixed in beta 3. But this doesn’t mean we have found all of the problems.
Please run your airport through beta 3, and if it fails validation, read the docs. If it seems like what you did is valid but WED is saying it is not, please file a WED bug on the X-Plane Airport Gateway’s bug reporter.
When WED 1.5 goes final, it will become the required version to upload airports to the gateway, so we want to be sure that the validation code is enforcing what we want enforced.
X-Plane 10.50 is now final – X-Plane will prompt you to auto-update the next time you run. Steam users – 10.50 should be posted on Steam within a day or so.
We are working now on a new beta of WorldEditor 1.5, which I hope to have in a day or two.
You can find the release notes here.
