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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
Release Candidate Three is out – Steam version coming next week. I think this is going to be the final version of 10.50, mostly because I’m going to stick my fingers in my ears and ignore any more bug reports. Seriously though, if you do find a bug, please report it, we’ll fix it in a new patch.
RC3 took a while to get out because we had a number of severe bugs reported very late in the beta process. Several third party developers waited until our release candidate to even try the beta, and this has delayed the release schedule.
Third party developers: please do not wait until the release candidate to check your add-ons. Doing so means a few things:
WED 1.5 beta 2 will be out as soon as I can compile it.
As some of you know, it was my plan to end-of-life the AC3D exporter for X-Plane; the decision was based on having limited resources to develop exporters.
The good news is: Andy Colebourne of Inivis has taken over development of the plugin, and has released the latest version of it – you can find it here. I am linking our download page to his forum link for easy access.
The AC3D plugin shares OBJ import/export code with WED and the rest of the Laminar Research C++ tools; my goal is to not break Andy’s work when working on WED. We use this code not only for WED object preview and the AC3D plugin, but for internal tools that pack up art for the iPhone version of X-Plane, so hopefully there will be some good leverage between the AC3D plugin and other Laminar scenery tools.
First, X-Plane 10.50 release candidate one is now available to Steam users.
X-Plane 10.50 release candidate 2 should be out Monday for DVD and digital download users, and a few days after that on Steam. I am hoping that 10.50 rc2 will be the final build. See the release notes – the list of bug fixes in RC2 is already posted.
If you know of a bug and it is not marked as fixed in RC2, file a bug ASAP.
For users who are having problems with real weather: we are still looking into this, but the problem looks intermittent and may be a problem with the servers. We are trying to gather more diagnostics, but whenever we try to reproduce it, the servers have a good day. (These are not our servers, they are NOAA.)
Finally, we have the code done for WorldEditor 1.5 beta 2 – Ted’s fixing his last few bugs and I am hoping to cut that Monday or Tuesday.