Now that Wade has XSquawkBox 1.0.3 out, I’ve been thinking about CSLs – that is, the collections of simplified airplanes that XSquawkBox uses to draw the other users. The CSL system was invented back in the days of X-Plane 6, and it’s getting a bit long in the tooth. You can’t use OBJ8 files, and it doesn’t understand a lot of the modern rendering tricks that authors use with the standard tool chain.
Plane-Maker has advanced quite a bit since then too – to make the original CSL, I had to create a special one-off hacked build of Plane-Maker to export aircraft as OBJs. This capability is now built into Plane-Maker, works a lot better, and even supports animation.
X-Plane now exports a native OBJ drawing interface to plugins. Besides giving plugins access to the fully optimized native OBJ draw code, this also means that plugins can draw objects with per-pixel lighting.
One more piece of the puzzle: in France Austin announced that we were working on a new ATC engine. One goal of this new engine is to provide ATC to the AI planes, as well as your plane, so that the other aircraft interact seamlessly in one simulated environment. (In X-Plane 9, ATC only directs you, and the AI are rogue planes that try not to buzz you when you’re on the runway.)
This makes me wonder: should there be a next-gen CSL format that is shared between X-Plane and third parties, based on X-Plane doing the rendering work?
Tom has a new video on youtube of his just finished Falco. The video shows what screen-shots cannot: that the mouse interactions on the plane are really well crafted.
If you’re just discovering X-Plane (or just discovering that X-Plane’s 3-d cockpits can be very interactive), here’s X-Plane’s “raw” capabilities for manipulation:
- The simplest manipulations are based on mapping the mouse from the 3-d cockpit back to the 2-d panel. This can only be done when the 3-d cockpit is textured using a piece of 2-d panel. This is the oldest way to make a clickable cockpit in X-Plane, dating back to the original X-Plane 3-d cockpits. The advantage of this method is that it’s very easy to set up; the disadvantage is that the mouse click gestures tend to be “flat” in their operation.
- As Tom’s plane demonstrates, you can manipulate just about any dataref or command via a drag along a specific axis. Axes are subject to animation, so there’s a lot of potential for “grabbing” things with this interface.
- X-Plane also supports direct “click” manipulation – this can be handy for buttons where you don’t want to require the user to move the mouse around. There are several types of click manipulation.
Click and drag manipulations can be tied into the plugin system – your plugin sees a manipulation as a change to a plugin-created dataref. This makes it possible to create almost any imaginable mouse effect. If you don’t want to write a plugin, you can still write up the manipulators to any of X-Plane’s datarefs (there are thousands) or commands (we’re getting up toward the 1000 mark on these too).
To create manipulators on your cockpit, you can use the latest plugin for AC3D. A manipulator is a property on a mesh within your object – each mesh can have its own manipulation with its own properties.
X-Plane does not have an IK solver. Rather, movement of “stuff” in your cockpit is indirect.
- Your manipulator changes a dataref as the user drags along an axis.
- The dataref change shows as an animation on your mesh.
Fortunately, ac3d has a “Guess” button for the axis manipulators. If you set a mesh to be manipulated by dragging along an axis, the guess button will examine your animations and suggest an axis that will create the most “natural” looking animation for the manipulation. For example, if you have a throttle handle that rotates, the guess button will provide a drag axis perpendicular to the throttle (to push the levers); if you have a throttle lever that pushes, the guess button will make a drag axis that runs along the lever.
X-Plane 9 has a number of recent features to let you customize the exterior lighting of your aircraft; see the wiki for notes and a sample plane.
X-Plane 940 introduced the concept of parameterized lights to support these features. Here’s the basic idea:
Named lights (available for quite a while now) let you add a light billboard to your model that we define. The idea is that since the lights are specified against a real world model (this light billboard should look roughly like a landing light) it lets us upgrade art assets and back the light with the fastest path on the graphics card.
The problem with landing lights is that they are one-size-fits all, and this is particularly problematic for airplanes, where the lights can look quite different in size and angle based on the size of the airplane. Parameterized lights fix this by letting you specify a limited number of parameters in your OBJ. By limiting the parameters that you can set, it means that we can still optimize the light when possible.
I took a few minutes today to round out the list of parameterized lights, and I think there will be 9.46 patch in which we can release them*. When we put 9.46 in beta I’ll update the example plane; the new set of lights will give you parameterized control over the navigation and taxi lights, as well as the generics, beacons, strobes and landing lights.
* We have a few small bug fixes we’ll roll out in 9.46.
There is no need to use the 3-d panel if you only want 3-d cockpit.
That might be the most counter-intuitive statement in the entire universe. Let’s break it down and see what’s going on. Originally we had the 2-D panel. The 2-D panel was where you put your instruments for interior views. When 3-d cockpit support was added, the 2-D panel was used to create the panel texture – that is, the instruments texture for the 3-D cockpit.
Thiat worked for a while, but as handles became more complex, screens became larger, and as 3-D cockpits became a more complex, authors started to run into the system’s limitations. If the author wanted to create a huge panel, then the panel texture for the 3-D cockpit was huge. Furthermore, texture space for the instruments in the 3-D cockpit was wasted because the 2-D panel had to have windows on it.
With X-Plane and 9 we added the 3-D panel to fix these problems. The 3-D panel is a second panel whose sole purpose is to provide instruments as a texture for the 3-D cockpit. When you have a 2-D panel and a 3-D panel, the 2-D panel is used to draw the panel in 2-D viewing modes and 3-D panel is used only to create the panel texture for the 3-D cockpit. With this setup the 2-D panel can be huge, and the 3-D panel can be small and compact with no windows.
The 3-D panel solves a second problem as well. Often the overhead panel is drawn in perspective on the 2-D panel this perspective view is useless for texturing a true 3-D cockpit. With a 2-D panel and a 3-D panel, the author can draw the overhead in perspective for the 2-D panel, and orthographically for the 3-D panel.
Now here’s where things get complicated: if an airplane has no 3-D panel the 2-D panel is used for both the 2-D view and the 3-D cockpit. But some airplanes have only a 3-D cockpit. In this case, there is no reason to use the 3-D panel at all. You can simply use the 2-D panel for texturing the 3-D cockpit and not worry about the user seeing it; in a 3-D only plane the user will only see the panel as a texture for the 3-D cockpit.
This setup is confusing in name: how can you have a 2-D panel used for a 3-D cockpits? But it is an allowed configuration. In fact, it was the only configuration allowed in X-Plane 8.
In summary: a 3-D cockpit can use the 2-D panel or 3-D panel as its panel texture. If an airplane has no 2-D panel, then the 2-D panel can be used for the 3-D cockpits without problems. In this situation and there is no need for a 3-D panel.
(It might be better to think of the 2-D panel and three panels simply add his two panels so that you can have two different versions of the panel. The names to the panel and 3-D panel are really just labels.)
X-Plane doesn’t natively and directly support popup panels, but that doesn’t mean you can’t pop them up. Generic instruments have a dataref-driven set of show-hide fields. (The “filters”.)
Now what you might not have realized is: groups have filters too! So you can hide an entire group with one filter, and you can put premade instruments in the group.
So…even though the FMS is a premade instrument with no filter fields, by grouping it you can show and hide it.
Important: the backgrounds of instruments are not shown or hidden. So if you want to do this, customize the FMS to have a transparent background, and use a generic rotary to put a real background behind it. The rotary goes in the group, and thus it can show and hide.
One more tip: clicking in 2-d goes through one instrument to another, for historical reasons. So if you pop up an instrument, you might want to hide the instruments it popped up over so clicks don’t affect them.
A quick tip to anyone using OpenGL and a plugin to make custom instruments. (The most common case of this I can imagine is customized glass displays, where it may not be practical to use 10,000 generic instruments, and the display being emulated is basically a computer display.)
OpenGL is not pixel exact, its per-primitive anti-aliasing (e.g. draw me a smooth line) is inconsistent and weird, and you probably won’t have full-screen anti-aliasing on your panel. (FSAA is out of your control, as X-Plane sets up the panel render.
For this reason, I recommend “texture anti-aliasing”. Basically in this technique you draw everything as rectangles, – for your lines, you use textures that have alpha at the edge. The linear intepollation of the texture forms the anti-aliased edge.*
For a detailed examination of the problem, I recommend this page. (arekkusu is a freaking genius and his treatment of the problem is very thorough!) I have also tried to explain how the hell OpenGL decides what it’s going to draw here. There are a few important cases where you can be pretty sure about what OpenGL will draw, and a lot of cases where you’re playing pixel roulette.
The “texture” technique also has the advantage that it leads nicely into the use of texture artwork. For example, if you need a line with an arrow-head, well, you’re already drawing a line as a textured rectangle with pixels in the center and alpha on the sides. Just ask your artist to draw an arrow-head in photoshop!
* Texture FSAA actually produces better results than FSAA (with non-AA pixels). The reason is that FSAA produces a finite number of intermediate alpha levels. The number of finite levels depends on the FSAA scheme, but it is always discrete levels, hence 16x FSAA looking better than 2x. By comparison, when we use textures, we get a smooth linear blend between our transparent and opaque pixels, giving us the smoothest possible anti-aliasing.
I am trying to be disciplined and put documentation on the X-Plane wiki, and limit the blog to announcements, rants, and explanations of what’s going on inside X-Plane.
You can read about custom lights here. The short of it is that a custom light is a billboard on an object where you (the author) texture the billboard (with part of the object texture), pick the texture coordinates and color, and optionally run all of these parameters through a dataref* that can modify them.
For named lights, the light texture comes from a texture atlas that Sergio made a few years ago – it’s a nice grid 8×8 pretty lights.
So…why can’t you use it with custom lights? Why do custom lights use the object texture?
The answer is: future compatibility. Sergio and I are actually already working on a new texture atlas for the sim’s built-in lights. (This has been a back-burner project for a while … I have no idea when we’ll actually productize this currently experimental work.) What happens when we create a new texture atlas with all of the lights moved around and scrambled? If your object referenced that texture, the texture coordinates would be incorrect.
Thus, for the lights where you specify texture coordinates (custom lights) you use your own texture. For named lights (where the texture coordinate is generated by X-Plane) it’s safe to use ours.
A Dangerous Bug
I found a bug in 940 that’s been in the sim for a while now: given the right strange combination of named and custom lights in a row, the sim would accidentally use Sergio’s texture atlas rather than the object’s texture for custom lights.
This is a mistake, a bug, and it will be fixed in the next 941 release candidate. I certainly hope there aren’t any objects out there relying on this erroneous behavior, which violates the OBJ spec and is pretty dangerous from a future compatibility standpoint.
* Dataresfs are normally thought of as data we read, so the idea of using them to “process” data is a bit of a bastardization of the original abstraction. You can read about the dataref scheme in detail here.
X-Plane 940 has these generic light things…what the heck are they? Here’s the story:
X-Plane has been growing a larger number of independently simulated landing lights with each patch. We started with one, then four, now we’re up to sixteen. Basically each landing light is a set of datarefs that the systems code monitors.
- You use a generic instrument to hook a panel switch up to a landing light dataref.
- The sim takes care of matching the landing light brightness with the switch depending on the electrical system status.
- Named lights can be used to visualize the landing lights.
See here for more info.
But what else lights up on an airplane? Sergio sent me the exterior lighting diagram for an MD-82, and it would make a Christmas tree blush. There are lights for the staircases, for the inlets, on the wings, pointing at the wings, the logo lights, the list goes on.
We have sixteen landing lights, so we could probably “borrow” a few to make inlet lights, logo lights, etc. But if we do that, the landing light will light up the runway when we turn on any of those other random lights.
Thus, generic lights were born. A generic light is a light on the plane that can be used for any purpose you want. They aren’t destined for a specific function like the strobes and nav lights. There are 64 of them, so divide them up and use them how you want. Just like landing lights, you use a generic light by:
- Using a generic instrument to control its “switch” from the panel.
- Using a named light to visualize it somewhere on the OBJs attached to your airplane.
Generic lights don’t cast any light on any other part of the plane – sorry. You can use ATTR_lit_level to light up part of your mesh dynamically when the generic light comes on though – the effect can be convincing if carefully authored.
Normally I try to make the X-Plane scenery and modeling system as opaque as possible — I want to make sure that nobody ever actually uses the rendering features that I spend weeks and weeks developing.
But the other night I had a little bit too much to drink, got distracted, and posted these:
In all seriousness, I have been trying to find time to put more documentation up on the Wiki. For these features, you will find an explanation of how the planes work, as well as a link to the planes (with plugins) to download, and a link to the plugin source code (on the SDK site, with sample makefiles for 3 operating systems).
Plugins? Do not panic! While plugins are necessary for some of the features demonstrated here, others can be created without additional programming.
BTW, if the existing documentation uses a concept that is not explained anywhere, please email me. I sometimes leave holes in the documentation by accident.
Well, I won’t stop you from lying to X-Plane, but if you do, your add-on may have problems in the future.
Basically: some parts of X-Plane take measurements of real world information and attempt to simulate them. I have previously referred to this as “reality-based” simulation (e.g. the goal is to match real world quantities).
In those situations, if you intentionally fudge the values to get a particular behavior on this particular current version of X-Plane, it’s quite possible that the fudge will make things worse, not better in the future.
This came up on the dev list with the discussion of inside vs. outside lighting. X-Plane 9 gives you 3 global lights for objects in the aircraft marked “interior”, but none for the exterior.
Now there is a simple trick if you want global lights on the exterior: mark your exterior fuselage as “interior” and use the lights.
The problem is: you’ve misled X-Plane. The sim now thinks your fuselage is part of the inside of the plane.
This might seem okay now, but in the future X-Plane’s way of drawing the interior and exterior of the plane might change. If it does, the mislabeled parts could create artifacts.
So as a developer you have a trade-off:
- Tweak the sim to maximize the quality of your add-on now, but risk having to update it later.
- Use only the official capabilities of the sim now, and have your add-on work without modification later.
