[helgo]

To wait or not to wait, that is the question.

See the pinned topic "DSF Overly Scenery Editor" - WHILE WE'RE WAITING FOR THE X-PLANE ONE" That was on May 16, 2006.

Author of this excellent tool OE is MARGINAL Without this tool 'till now couldn't add a single house to a custom scenery. I don't know if MARGINAL imagined - when he created OE - that we had to wait more than two years. And it seems that we have to wait longer and longer. We have no tool to edit roads, powerlines, railways, rivers etc. We have no tool to "paint" airport signs on the surfaces of taxiways (WED doesn't allow to add objects (signs) and OE) doesn't show taxilines. So we can't place those signs correctly. And therefore we find only a few custom airports and sceneries made by X-Plane users. I think 80 percent of all new sceneries are conversions from MS Flight Simulator.

On Friday, August 08, 2008 I had hopes that things would be getting better when I read in Ben Supniks blog:

.........."WED 1.1 will have 3 features:

* Ability to edit these DSF overlay types: object placements, facades, forests, object strings, draped lines, and draped polygons (both tiled and textured with ST coordinates).
* Very limited preview of those types. I know you will be able to see the texture for a draped polygon for orthophoto placement. I do not know if I will even have OBJ preview in 1.1. Editing will not be WYSIWYG. It will be more CAD-like.
* Import and export of DSF overlay types to DSF overlay files........
..........I don't know exactly how long this work will take - my rough guesstimate is about 2 weeks. But...that depends on my working on WED for two weeks straight without interruption!......"

I waited more than 2 weeks but than happened the adventure of XP for iPhone. I reminded Ben (September 13, 2008) of his "promise". He answered (adding that he never made promises) ".....Now I _have_ gotten at least another half a day to work on WED since then, but I do not expect to make rapid progress, since I have a number of irons in the fire at once."

On October 14, 2008 I sent an e-mail to Austin telling him the trouble with the tools. He answered "....... yes i agree we need more tools! ben is working on that now!"

On October 21, 2008 I read in Ben's blog: "I always have to hesitate before posting a possible future direction to my blog - our future plans are a road map, a direction we intend to follow, but if circumstances change, our plans change......"


I repeat: To wait or not to wait, that is the question.
Sometimes compromises are better than to wait. Compromises again with the help of MARGINAL.

1. Roads: A swiss friend (Antonio Menotti) had the idea to make roads with draped polygons of the surfaces of "airport/pavement/asphalt" placed with OE. (Maybe not quite new). Now we are experimenting with those roads. They have no lines, no XP-traffic, and highways are difficult to realize: positioning two parallel roads with a little distance between. MARGINAL could help if he would add a Copy and Paste function to his OE. So it could be possible to paste a parallel copy of a road to build a highway. I don't know if it is easy to add a Copy and Paste feature.

2. Airport signs on the ground of taxiways made of objects: We can't place them correctly because we do not see the taxilines in OE. A possible solution: Making a screenshot of an area of the airport in WED and than place this screenshot in OE as a background picture. The screenshot shows the taxilines and than we can add the signs correctly. But there is one obstacle in OE. It is nearly impossible to place the screenshot in OE the way that is matches with the taxiways. To move it you have to work with latitude and longitude and with a difficult zoom function. I'm not a programer, so I don't know if it is possible to make the screenshot movable with keys - as we can do this with objects. That would be a great help.

helgo

[Mr 3D]

Welcome to the wonderful world of X-Plane scenery building

poor Ben you cant blame him there are only so many hours in each day but YES you are right in everything you say and YES it is time we had some progress with this. There would be NO "members" scenery, at all without DSF Overly Scenery Editor and I honor MARGINAL when ever 'I' can. I would say 3 months extra work goes on any build because of these problems..but I'm not going to hold my breath

[Indi-]

It should be noted that World Editor is available under an Open Source license. It's just that no one else feels inclined to really get stuck into it.

http://scenery.x-plane.com/code.php

[MIKX]

Maybe it takes a new member to bring back some enthusiasm and objective views. Thanks for waking us up Helgo.

(Don't forget that besides Marginals Overlay Editor there is also Justins PhotoSceneryX & ITX. which is beginning to fill a huge hole in WED.)

If one was to monitor the scenery forums one year before XP7.63 until XP9.00 there would probably be a sharp drop in the release of sceneries created for XP 7, 8 & 9 SINCE the release of X-Plane 8.xx. I am not talking about converted MSFS scenery, I mean actually made from scratch for X-Plane.

Currently in XP9 Global Scenery is pretty inaccurate; coves, estuaries, canals are often not there or filled in. This becomes crucial where airports are located close to major cities near water. I cite Sydney (YSSY) where (until Justin works his magic) it is impossible to place custom terrain textures in either PNG or DDS without having Circular Quay/Sydney Cove (the little world famous cove next to Sydney opera House) and the canals close to the airport filled in by Global Scenery. I am stuck in ENV OVERLAY until either Ben, Marginal or Justin (or all combined) bring us up to speed.

It indeed ironic that right now the only way to accurately manipulate water areas is by using WorldMaker with OBJ7 objects (converted to OBJ8 after the scenery is 100% complete). By this I mean that WorldMaker is the only app that can override Global Scenery land-water via ENV OVERLAY.

Working with Worldmaker is an arcane skill in itself.

The lack of comprehensive, integrated X-Plane scenery tools is enough IMHO to deter both seasoned XP scenery makers and newcomers and stifles X-Plane growth.

Reliance on MSFS conversions seems silly to me, we have a bunch of talented people without the proper tools of trade.

Ben releases Grinder (thank you) but Mesh Tool requires a Masters Degree in Computer Engineering; scenery makers are 90% artist, 10% computer geek. I could release Sydney (YSSY) 4.01 tomorrow, completely XP 9.xx compliant but it just wouldn't look right seeing ferries sitting on land where the famous Sydney Cove is supposed to be. Ben is apparently aware of this flaw in XP 9 water/coast and says it is "doable". So why hasn't it happened? Accurate scenery is just as important as accurate flight models, accurate aircraft etc.

To be truly comprehensive WED needs to be able to place custom terrain textures which will completely cut through installed Global Scenery, Ben please integrate Mesh Tool into WED.

Why give us X-Plane 9 without a set of comprehensive tools to enhance it?
If I were a programmer I would get stuck into WED tomorrow.

[Peter Cole]

The hours I've spent on scenery only to be stymied by lack of available tools. I have (very) high standards (just see my aircraft & their liveries), and I just can't get airports right enough. In New Zealand, we have water bodies or steep terrain next to most airports. Thankfully Andrew McGregor has made a new DEM (mesh) for the whole of NZ, but it requires a top end CPU (I only have a dual G5). Then there's the difficulty in correcting land-classes.

I understand that none of this is impossible with the current tools - but like MIKX says above, us scenery designers are designers, not computer programmers. I get so down when I look at my 40+ partially converted airports (which all needs serious work) but it's just so hard.

I want MSFS users to see X-Plane and WANT it, not poke holes at it's piecemeal scenery and tools (while overlooking its unique flying advantages).

[alpilotx]

Hmm, this is obviously an important issue - which I fully understand - from the scenery dev community. I have answered a very similar question just weeks ago (but at that time not many reacted on my comment) in some detail. So I would just like to quote myself:
http://forums.x-plan...mp;#entry383209

I will try to throw in some of my "two cents" in this discussion.

First, I can tell you, why X-Plane is so much different from MSFS when it comes to "base scenery" editing. MSFS - at least to my knowledge (it is some years old, but I think it was correct) - is working more like GIS (Geographic Information System - a type of geodata editing / visualizing tool) software. There, the different informations are separated into layers and are merged at scenery load time by the sim. What does this mean? Example: you have a separate data layer (essentially also a separate scenery file!) which only holds elevation data, you have an extra layer which hold landclass information, a separate layer for coastlines, a separate layer for roads etc. etc. ... These different layer are the matched / interpreted by the sim at load time. The advantage of this is, that you can edit/modify them separately fairly easily without the need to care about the other layers (because the sim will take care of them - more or less accurately). The disadvantage is, that it eats a fair amount of computer resources AND you have less possibilities to influence the outcome (as you have to rely on the "GIS abilities" of the sim).

Now, X-Plane does it the other way around. It has an "almost" ready made base scenery when it loads it. It is already - more or less - finalized and in a format which can directly loaded into the rendering engine (without the need for interpretations by the sim). This of course needs a highly integrated scenery file, where all information is burned in. What does this mean? The base mesh of X-Plane is not only a "height field" like in MSFS but already a finalized 3D triangle mesh, where every triangle also holds exact texturing informations. So, there is no real landclass info in the scenery, because it was interpreted at scenery creation time and translated into real textures ... The same holds true for roads. As they have a 3D placement (they are not draped 2D networks), you have to know in advance the final elevation, so you can put the roads with all height information over them ... So, you see, the idea here is, to offload as many steps as possible from the sim, and do the GIS work at scenery creation time (where you normally have much much more time at hand). The advatage is, the sim hase far less work to do AND you have a very high degree of control about how your scenery should look in the end. It tall depends on the quality of your scenery creation code - because the rendering engine gives you a lot of freedom there (maybe you didn't know, but X-Planes base mesh uses an irregular triangle mesh, and not a simple regular mesh like MSFS). AND we also see the one big drawback: you have to put a lot of work in the scenery creation phase and it is not easy to be done. Now, Ben Supnik - one of the masterminds behind X-Plane - has done a good job on some code to generate the scenery. BUT it is very complex and not in a form, that everybody could use (I think, it is also very inflexible as it is highly customized for some very specific data sources). Releasing MeshTool was his first attempt to make at least parts of this system available to the public ...

In the future, this scenery creator code will definitely evolve further and deliver even better global scenery. Also, there are a lot of promising new data sources out there, which might improve some areas which are currently not so good. One good example are the roads. They are currently (outside of the USA) very bad. This is the plain truth.But the reason for this is, that until now, there was no consistent and FREE dataset available which would have delivered a better result (currently they use the VMAP0 data - it has a very low resolution around 1:100.000!). With very good elevation data - like from the SRTM 90m data - of course you will have a lot of roads going haywire (because they are so badly placed). BUT, I hope there will be a great improvement in one of the next Global Scenery releases. I'm trying to help Laminar to incorporate data from the OpenStreetMap project (first experiments are promising - though, nothing is decided at the moment). Just have a look at this project (which is open and is based around the Wiki idea) to understand, how much better it could make X-Plane ....

Still, I understand the criticism of many users, who would like to see some tools for direct scenery editing. Well, who knows, maybe one day Laminar will find the time to polish up their internal tools enough, so they can be released to the public (but I wouldn't wait for a GUI based tool). And there is another aspect which comes from the basic principles of the scenery system. I think it is less designed for direct editing. Rather it is encouraging the GIS approach, where one tries to work out issues in the raw data (or try to get better quality raw data) which is then merged together into a final scenery file. From a pure theoretical point of view, everybody could achieve this, as the specifications of the scenery are open (well, it depends on the quality of the documentation - but there IS documentation :-) ) ... of course, translating the specifications into some smart code are very hard. Until now there is only one guy outside Laminar who has tried it (and has achieved some nice results). It is AndrewMcGregor and I'm sure he could answer even more questions about the "gory" details ;-) ...

Ok, I think I have wrote enough at the moment and hope that I could - at least tiny little bit - shed some light at the internals of X-Plane scenery. If you have more questions, let me know ;-)

I also highly recommend to all interested parties - and who don't already know about it - to read a little bit in Ben Supniks Blog, where he has revealed quite a bit about "his secrets" in the past (and keeps doing so): http://xplanescenery.blogspot.com/

I hope, this time I can stir up some interest, and get some questions or what so ever. Maybe I can answer some of them ...
And for Helgo, I really sympathize with you, especially when it comes to the editing of local, smaller scale scenery! For large scale scenery corrections/improvements, I don't really see an alternative to Global Scenery (which follows the GIS approach - in technical sense and also in from the data side)

[bsupnik]

Hi Y'all,

1. Listen to everything alpilox says - his analysis is spot on. I will only add one statement:

- Pre-generating fully rendered scenery does not have to require complex user input...but it does require an investment in user interface in the pre-generating tools.

Believe it or not, MeshTool is an improvement in the usability of our global scenery algorithms. (I know, it is also impossible to use and dreadfully unstable, I would not expect any non-programmer to use it..I am only saying that the internal "render farm" we use to cut the global scenery is EVEN MORE picky if you can imagine such a beast. It is meant only for internal use.

My hope with mesh tool is to allow other scenery tool authors to our algorithms. Will we have a front-end UI to MeshTool (which is what would make it usable)? I'm no going to comment on future features...I get in trouble every time I do.

2. In my blog post I thought I needed 2 weeks for WED. The time is actually less - probably only one to beta. But I got about 2.5 days of coding on WED before I got interrupted. We're a small company and have a lot of stuff going on.

I will say this: there is one piece of the scenery puzzle where I am looking for ideas (e.g. it's not just a limitation of the tool chain or code): OVERLAY ROADS.

The sim has the ability to do roads in an overlay. Roads in an overlay could mean a nice way to customize scenery, but...the question of how high above the ground they are is still unsolved. I am open to RFCs on how road "draping" from an overlay could work.

In the bigger picture we need base mesh editing and overlay editing, but I'd really like to see roads in the overlay editor - that's where they belong with buildings and forests. Bu without a draping scheme we can't even put them in an overlay sanely.

(Remember that right now we have roads in the overlay, but their height matches the base mesh perfectly - so the overlay roads for the global scenery v9 ONLY go with the base mesh v9 -- a custom mesh would NOT change the road heights. This is the design aspect that must change!)

cheers
ben

[AndrewMcGregor]

So, I owe various things to Ben and the community... I haven't forgotten your emails of last week Ben :-)

Also, releasing a build of my MeshTool plus the input script generators that I did the NZ scenery with would be a good thing... Mac only, sorry, I really don't have time to do any porting. Source will be available, of course.

Thirdly, a build of the NZ scenery with a lower CPU requirement; the current build requires at least two 3GHz cores and 4GB of RAM, along with a good GPU... that's a bit much for some people, it even causes trouble on my MacBook Pro, which I'd say is a midrange machine.

As for overlay roads... I think the only reasonable thing is to have a per-node height AGL, and interpolate at draping points. Anything else is going to lead to inconsistencies of one kind or another.

[bsupnik]

Hi Guys,

Andrew, you don't owe me anything ... you've already gone way above and beyond. :-)

For everyone else: Andrew sent me his modified version of Mesh Tool - he replaced the underlying vector processing engine with CGAL 3.3.1, which improves MeshTool's stability immensely. I am in the process of rebuilding the rest of the scenery generation system based on CGAL. What was even more than the code was _proving_ that CGAL 3.3.1 was up to the job...I started with CGAL 3.0 and ended up with a hybrid and CGAL 3.0 due to my own code...but 3.3.1 is definitely way superior to what I had coded.

Andrew, if you want to release your version of MeshTool, please go for it! My hope is that the "official" version, whether it has none, some, or all of your extensions in the file format, will certainly have the same stability.

cheers
Ben

[MIKX]

Laminar had it right when they released XP7 with Worldmaker which despite its insane GUI pretty well delivered most of what a scenery maker could want; roads, railways, rivers, buildings, smokestacks, custom terrain etc. Even if the resulting Worldmaker scenery does not match up to the overall effect of XP8 or 9 the scenery maker could at least achieve 90% of his goals.

With Worldmaker even a novice could have a crack at making an airport, I shudder thinking about entering the field now, cold.

Two years since XP8 we are having to use a swag of 3rd party apps or make ENV overlay scenery. I speak not just as an org member but as a paying customer of three versions of X-Plane when I say that not having a single set of comprehensive tools since the release of XP8 is bad business policy. WED is slick and on the right track but still lacks some important features . . like being able to place custom objects which I just cannot understand. With the exception of taxi lines and taxiways, Worldmaker still leads

If Laminar could do it with XP7 why not with XP8 or XP9? The cart appears to be before the horse.
Giving scenery makers the tools to ply their craft smoothly can only result in a more appealing product and increased sales which would yield more profit and allow Ben an assistant.