Category: Scenery

What Hath Ted Wrought

Over the last few months we have been lucky to have Ted Greene working for us as a summer co-op student.  You may have seen his commits if you look at the open source WED repository.  Ted is heading back to school now, so this post both discusses a little bit of what he accomplished and serves as public recognition of his hard work.

Ted spent the summer working on ‘workflow’ items for WED – that is, things that make WED easier for authors to use.  One of the main features he implemented was a new ortho-photo importer.

If you have a GeoTIFF you wanted to use in WED 1.2, the process goes something like this:

1. Make an overlay image out of your TIFFs.
2. Run the “make orthophoto command” which will create .pol files and place them in the project.
3. Delete the original overlay image, which unfortunately looks almost exactly like the POLs in WED.
4. Resize the TIFF to a power of 2.
5. Grind the TIFF in XGrinder.
6. Edit the .pol file in WordPad to use the DDS file.
7. Edit the .pol file i WordPad to add LOAD_CENTER (if you remember) – good luck getting all of those numbers right!
8. Export your scenery pack.
9. Get some astonishing error in X-Plane, because the odds of getting all eight steps right is approximately 0%.

The new process with Ted’s code is much better:

1. Import the TIFF files into WED as orthophotos.
2. Hit control-B to build your scenery pack.
3. Go get a coffee – WED is grinding your TIFFs to DDS for you, which is a time-consuming operation.  Don’t worry, it won’t grind them again unless you change the source file.
4. Open in X-Plane and enjoy your orthophotos – with correct load-center directives!

No hand-editing pol files, no chance for human error, and of the four steps, two you already do now and one involves beverages. What’s not to like? This screenshot shows the results of importing the TIFF files into WED and the resulting scenery pack.

This level of automation is how all of the scenery tools should work and it’s nice to finally reach a point in WED where we can add this level of convenience.

For The Nerds

WED is an open source project, and this next part only affects users trying to work with the WED source code.  (If you are not a programmer, you may want to skip to the next section.)  Ted’s finishing the new Orthophoto importer completes the removal of CGAL from WED.

CGAL is an open source library that is critical to the DSF generation code that makes the global scenery.  CGAL is also a very complex, heavy-weight library that can be quite finicky about compilers, brings in a lot of dependencies, and is generally hard to work with on Windows.

By dropping CGAL for WED, it makes the WED code significantly more accessible.  Ted created a complete MSVC 2010/2012 project for WED, so you can just download MSVC Express, open the project and hit ‘compile’ – all of the libraries are included in the repository in binary form.

(For Mac users, unfortunately we are still stuck on X-Code 3.2/10.6 – to move WED to the modern development tools we will have to purge old APIs that Apple has dropped – just like we did on Desktop.)

We are not dropping the makefile system we use on Linux, and it should even still work on Windows, but finally mingw is no longer a requirement to get started.

Removing CGAL from the project should make a Lion-compatible Mac build possible too at some point.

Upcoming Releases

At this point I expect to do a WED 1.2.1 bug-fix patch relatively soon with a few usability fixes.  Ted’s work will go into WED 1.3; I don’t know what the release time frame for 1.3 will be.

WED 1.2 RC4 is out

I posted WorldEditor 1.2 release candidate 4 a few days ago.  If you are using a WED 1.2 beta, please grab this latest release candidate.  If we don’t see any show-stopper bugs in a few days we’ll call it final.

Thanks to Mathias for finding and helping squash the last few bugs; the bugs in the release candidates have all been oddball cases where clicking with multiple mouse buttons induced multiple commands at the same time; the program was usable by avoiding these cases, but in the rare case WED could crash.  Release candidate 4 should fix that.

Learn From My C: Fail

The C: drive on my Windows box died over the weekend.  I mention this so that you can ask this question now (when my drive failed) and not later (when your drive fails):

What’s your plan if you have a hard drive failure?  Do you back up regularly?  Could you rebuild the machine from original install disks?  Would the amount of time it took to restore the machine be acceptable?*  If you make backups, would the data loss between what you had and the latest backup be acceptable?

The problem with hard drives is that they fail infrequently; my wife has never experienced a hard drive failure in the decade+ that she’s owned a laptop.  The result is that I’ve known too many people who haven’t given the problem of hard drive failure much thought until they had already lost data.  A hard drive is an electro-mechanical device…with moving parts…that spin really really fast.  It’s amazing they don’t fail more.  Think about backups now!

For backup these days I like 2.5″ USB drives – they’re fast enough, small, store a ton of data, and they don’t require an annoying power cable.  You could use one to back up several computers.

Nag over…WED 1.2 is almost done – the remaining bugs are Windows-related and will need to wait for a replacement C: drive, which is in transit.  So perhaps we’ll get an RC1 going this weekend.

Update: when the replacement drive arrived, I used Trinity Rescue Kit to boot from CD and do a drive-to-drive copy using the tool ddrescue.  I do not recommend anyone ever have “I’ll rescue my drive” as a data safety plan – it’s a terrible plan.  But…in my case I appear to have gotten lucky; the rescued image is bootable.  This is a nice-to-have in that it saves me a few hours of reinstalling Windows + MSVC from scratch.  (On the other hand, I don’t get that minty-clean feeling of reinstalling Windows from scratch with a clean registry.)  So…chkdisk is running now and I should be able to kill off remaining WED bugs “real soon now.”

* For my Windows and Linux setups (two drives that are alternately used in one machine) my approach has been “rebuild it when it fails”.  For Linux this has already worked well – my Linux drive died a while ago and a total rebuild from a new Ubuntu install DVD was quite fast.  We’ll see this week whether putting a Windows box back together can be done in a reasonable amount of time.

New Scenery Tools – WED and MeshTool

Two updates to the scenery tools today:

WorldEditor: WED 1.2 beta 3 is now out – see the WorldEditor page for download links.  Beta 3 fixes the broken orthophoto exporter from beta 2, fixes jammed file-open dialog boxes on OS X, and has a handful of other fixes.

WorldEditor is open source, so you can see the exact changes made here.

I am hoping that WED 1.2 beta 3 will be totally stable and usable; the remaining open bugs are mostly UI quirks.  If we find more work-stopping WED bugs, I’ll try to cut a new beta once a week until they’re fixed; after that WED can sit for a few weeks, then go final.

MeshTool: MeshTool 2.1 is released.  This is an incremental update to MeshTool 2.0 with bug fixes and a new “contour” option that lets you use a shapefile to force specific contour lines into your DSF.  See the README for details, and the MeshTool page for download.

I have done some work on MeshTool 3.0 but it’s not ready for beta yet.

WED “Make Draped Polygons” Will Be Replaced (Later)

WorldEditor’s “Make Draped Polygons” feature is a stop-gap and a hack, and someday it will be replaced with something better.

I mention this as I debug it because there are feature requests in the bug base to enhance its operation; I think I will replace it with a more fundamentally useful (and less awkward) interface before adding more functionality.

“Make draped polygons” was born out of a hack to WED to allow Sergio to finish his LOWI custom scenery pack before WED 1.1 was even public beta.  In other words, it was a crude attempt to get draping into WED before the real UI work was done.

I am resisting the urge to nuke the feature now because there isn’t something to replace it yet.  But in the long term, what WED needs is better tools to work with imagery and manage the text files that are needed to create ground imagery around an airport.

This new UI will be after the 1.2 release; for now the goal is to get 1.2 stabilized and finalized.

WorldEditor 1.2 Beta 2 Is Out

WorldEditor 1.2 beta 2 is now available for download here.  First, a few notes about WED betas:

• WED 1.2 is in beta – be sure to back up your work, as it has been known to crash.
• The scenery tools are open source – you can view the WED source code here.
• The scenery tools have their own public bug base. So please report all WED bugs here.

Please be careful to report X-Plane bugs to the X-Plane bug reporter page and WED bugs to the scenery tools bug base.  Moving bugs to the right place just burns time that could be spent fixing bugs.

What’s New?

Pretty much all of the changes from beta 1 are in the area of exporting scenery.

WorldEditor now has the concept of an export target – the version of X-Plane you want to export.  It currently knows about four possible targets:

1. X-Plane 9.70 (that is, the final version of X-Plane 9)
2. X-Plane 10.00 (that is, any version of X-Plane 10 back to the earliest)
3. X-Plane 10.21 (that is, the current latest version of X-Plane 10)
4. Robin’s database

Changing the export target can change how export works to optimize for that version of X-Plane; it also programs the “Validate” command to detect possible problems specific to that version.  Examples:

• If you set the export target to X-Plane 9.70 and export a DSF overlay with forests in “line” mode, validate will catch the error – line-based forests are new to X-Plane 10.
• If you set the export target to “Global Airport Database” and use your own custom OBJs, validate will catch the error – for sending data to Robin you must use our library objects.

“Export for Global Airports” is now available on the File menu – this exports a single zip file that you can send to Robin.  The zip file contains an apt.dat and one .txt file per airport with the DSF overlay data.

The exporter itself has been heavily rewritten (view the git logs to see what a blood bath it was) – this should hopefully fix all crash-on-export bugs, particularly on Windows.

So the hope is that this beta will (1) let people send their airports to Robin and (2) let custom scenery authors work without crashes on export.

Scenery Tools – a Roundup

Here’s a quick round-up on the state of scenery tools, as of 10.21 release candidates…

WED: WorldEditor 1.2 beta 2 is “in the can” and should be posted tonight.  I’ll post more about the changes for beta 2 in another post, but beta 2 should fix any major beta bugs that were stopping people from getting work done, and opens up the path to submit airport buildings to Robin for collection in the global database.

MeshTool: I have a few bug fixes for MeshTool 2.0 and will cut a MeshTool 2.1 patch probably in the next week.  If you use MeshTool 2.0 and woud like to test the patches now, let me know.  The MeshTool 2.x builds will build v9-style DSFs, compatible with X-Plane 9 or 10.

I now have a prototype of MeshTool 3.0, which will produce X-Plane 10-style DSFs (E.g. with X-Plane 10 landclasses/terrain, and the X-Plane 10 DEM-in-DSF style storage). I am working on the XES files authors will need.

Note that having a prototype is a long way from having a stable beta; in particular, X-Plane 10’s new DEM system has never been tested with really huge DEMs – there could be significant bugs before MeshTool 3.x is ready to go.

The script format for MeshTool 2.1 and 3.x are the same, so you can easily create a MeshTool project and cut your scenery twice, once targeting X-Plane 9 and once targeting X-Plane 10.

Blender 2.49: I uploaded my patches to Jonathan’s scripts to GitHub – that “v10scenery” branch actually works for airplanes too and contains:

• Jonathan’s original work and
• Ben Russell’s manipulator exporter and
• Ondrej’s manipulator exporter for 2.49 and
• All of my modifications to support new v10 attributes and other stuff.

The idea is to have a unified Blender 2.49 script that is totally v10 ready and can directly export older projects.

Blender 2.6x: I also submitted a patch or two to Ondrej’s Blender 2.6x scripts, found here.  I think that with their current status and those bug fixes, they should be totally usable for aircraft development.

A comment about Blender: I know that some of you have tried to use Blender 2.49 and were absolutely horrified.  I have heard plenty of authors absolutely refuse to touch Blender 2.49, and I do not blame you at all.*

Blender 2.6 is different. The UI is completely redone and it is significantly less astonishingly weird.  I was able to install Ondrej’s scripts, build an object, animate it, add lights, and export it using the user manual only to install the scripts; everything else I was able to do with a few good guesses about how the program might work.  That’s a huge step forward from Blender 2.49 in terms of usability.

So I think Blender 2.6 with X-Plane export has the potential to be a really good intermediate modeling program for authors.  It has all of the power tools you need in a 3-d editor (solid UV unwrapping, visual key-frame animation, non-destructive editing), and if you really become an expert, the hard core features are there (e.g. render baking), so you won’t have to change editors later.

The X-Plane integration is really clean too.  Unlike Blender 2.49, Blender 2.6 allows plugin scripts to augment the core user interface, which is exactly what Ondrej has done.  The result is that custom X-Plane properties are visible directly in the main UI with your editing properties.  This makes full editing of X-Plane features straightforward.

So I believe that my next scenery-tools step (besides running out the betas for WED and MeshTool) will be to submit a few more patches for the Blender 2.6 scripts, to bring in direct support for some of the v10 scenery features.  I think these changes should be straightforward, as it’s basically “more attributes, more check boxes”.

(I think the 2.6 scripts are not yet ready for major intensive X-Plane 10 scenery development – we need to get a few key v10 attributes in to allow authors to get maximum performance from their scenery packs.  These attributes are not important for airplanes.)

* When I first started using Blender 2.49 to support our internal team, I basically had to have Propsman on the phone for a few hours going “click this box, now hit the space bar” and me going “what?!! seriously?!  what the @#$@# did that button do!??!”  In other words, Blender 2.49 is totally usable…as long as you have an experienced modeler to use it for you!

(I will say this though: once you overcome the Blender 2.49 learning curve, which takes about six months (!) the actual key strokes to use it are super-fast and efficient, which is why I think very experienced 2.49 modelers tend to look at 2.6 and go “who cares”?)