Here are some answers to command questions about the scenery system. If you don't find the answer you are looking for, please email me at bsupnik at xsquawkbox.net.
We are hoping to release the global scenery this fall; sooner if possible. Global scenery is our highest priority.
Sergio Santagada is working on the artwork with Cristiano Maggi and Massimo Durando. Austin Meyer and Ben Supnik are working on the programming. There are also a lot of other people who are helping out with scenery in various ways; we appreciate their help a lot!
Possibly not. These previews represent various tests that the art team has done
to evaluate various global scenery generation and texturing techniques. But the final
product may not look as good. We need to keep the global scenery simple so that it will
fit on a few DVDs. We also need to limit the number and size of the textures we use
and the number of triangles so that all computers can run X-Plane 8 with global scenery.
Please consider these pictures to be previews of what X-Plane can look like, not a
guarantee of what the global scenery will look like. (Also see below.)
No; there will be roughly three levels of quality in the scenery. The continental US
is most detailed due to SRTM data and detailed road maps. The entire world from
54 degrees south to 60 degrees north is somewhat detailed, thanks to SRTM data, but
the roads are not as detailed. Parts of the world not covered by the SRTM data
(where the SRTM data is corrupted) will be very inaccurate
due to a lack of high quality elevation data and high quality vectors.
Also the accuracy of the data we use varies; sometimes it is very good and sometimes there
are errors. So you may get lucky and find your home town looks perfect, or you may find
huge errors. While we try to make the global scenery as good as we can, we cannot
go through the entire world and hand-correct errors. It will be possible to use our
tools to make custom scenery that represents small areas with a high degree of accuracy and detail.
DSF stands for Distribution Scenery File format. DSF is the file format for the new X-Plane 8 native scenery. ENV is the file format for version 7 and older scenery. X-Plane 8 shipped with new DSF files for the United States and ENV files for the whole world. The new global scenery will be entirely DSF format when it is finished.
Yes. The global scenery features significant technology improvements over the original US DSFs. So we will provide new US DSFs that feature some of the improvements.
Andy Goldstein maintains the X-Plane FAQ; it has a lot of great info on scenery and X-Plane.
The terrain mesh in version 8 can be variable resolution; there may be more mesh points in some areas and less in others. There is no upper limit on the resolution for the mesh. The default scenery is created from 90 meter DEMs and usually has a maximum density of 90 meters. The default scenery usually has approximately 100,000 triangles per square degree, but this does vary.
Yes, absolutely! You might almost say that the new scenery system only supports custom objects. In X-Plane 8 there are no objects built into X-Plane; every object comes from a .OBJ file somewhere. Objects can either be in a library or directly in a custom scenery package. The default scenery uses only objects from libraries, but a DSF file can use objects from its own scenery package as well. You can have hundreds of thousands of objects hand-placed in a DSF file.
Yes. While the new default scenery is not photorealistic (it is based on classes of land, road networks, and individually placed objects for buildings), it is possible to use aerial or satelite photographs to make version 8 scenery.
The new scenery system does not support auto-gen as we know it from X-Plane 7. In X-Plane 8, objects that correspond to a given terrain type (apartments or shops in a city, farm houses on a field, etc.) are each individually placed in the DSF files by the scenery-generator tool. This allows objects to be placed using a very complex algorithm that would be too slow to run inside X-Plane while flying. So objects cannot be placed automatically based on terrain. For this reason, you will not see autogen objects in V7 scenery. (However, X-Plane can place objects along vector roads - powerline towers are placed this way. This is sort of like autogen.)
X-Plane 8 features a near-total rewrite of the scenery engine from version 7. So certain X-Plane 7 features from the X-Plane 7 rendering code are now missing. They will be back! But we want to get the global scenery and scenery editing tools out before we put these details back. When cars come back, they'll be visible for both DSF and ENV scenery.
X-Plane 8's scenery engine is brand new; we have not had very much time to performance tune and optimize scenery loading. Once the global scenery is done, we will be tuning the code. X-Plane 8 should eventually exceed the load times of X-Plane 7; performance improvements will be availabine in the form of free X-Plane 8 point releases.
Yes. X-Plane 8 will load X-Plane 7 custom scenery packages without any modification. Scenery packages that require modifying the Resources folder may not work without modification. However, X-Plane 8 does not support autogen, so version 7 scenery will look sparse in version 8.
X-Plane 8 now supports ENV taxiway lines, as of version 815; upgrade to the latest X-Plane 8 to see them. However, our future plan is to have taxiway lines in the apt.dat file, not ENV files.
X-Plane 7 featured rivers as textured line segments; the X-Plane 8 rendering engine draws all water, no matter how narrow, as full polygonal waterbodies. The upside of this decision is that a seaplane can correctly land on anything that looks wet in X-Plane 8. The downside is that we cannot draw X-Plane 7 vector rivers in X-Plane 8.
Because X-Plane 8 does not support auto-gen, you will not see many of the auto-gen buildings when flying over ENV scenery in X-Plane 8. This is probably not something we will be able to change in X-Plane 8.
WorldMaker's scenery editing capabilities were implemented on top of the version 7
X-Plane scenery engine. When we totally rewrote the engine for version 8, we had
to remove WorldMaker's scenery editing capabilities.
To edit X-Plane 7 scenery, use
WorldMaker from X-Plane 7.63 (available for free download). You can use WorldMaker
8 to edit airport and nav data. The new scenery editor will be a separate program
from WorldMaker.
We will release the scenery tools after the global scenery is done and as soon as the user interface is refined enough for general use. Everyone will get access to the scenery tools at the same time - when we release them, we release them publicly. Following the xplane-news Yahoo group for release announcements.
All new scenery editing tools will run on Macintosh and Windows. Betas may come out first for one platform and then the other. Because the tools will be open source, a port to Linux is possible but not planned at this time.
Yes. All of the new tools will feature both a graphical user interface, and where appropriate a command-line version for advanced users. In some cases the command line tool may be available first, since command line tools are quicker to code.
Photo-Realistic scenery is scenery based primarily on high resolution aerial or satelite
photographs. Essentially you are flying over a picture of what the area looks like in real
life.
Probably the greatest strength of photorealistic scenery is that while in flight, it looks
almost exactly like what you see out the window of a real aircraft. However, it has some
limitations too: because it is based on photographs, shadows do not change with the time
of day, season, or weather, and when you fly low to the ground, it becomes clear that you
are not flying over real buildings, but pictures of buildings.
Photo-realistic add-ons are avilable for X-Plane, however the global scenery will not be
done using this technique. Our main two reasons are: there is not a good source for
global high resolution photos that we could use, and also the scenery (at 16 meters
per pixel) would potentially take up 2340 GB - that's 260 DVDs.
It will be possible to make photo-realistic scenery with our new scenery tools. It is
also possible to combine photorealistic scenery with other scenery techniques. (For
example, you can use land classes where photos are not available, and place buildings
over their images in the scenery for a 3-d look in cities.)
Landclass scenery is scenery based on catagories of land. The world is broken down into
areas with catagories such as forests, cities, farms, etc. and then the terrain is
textured based on these catagories.
Landclass scenery can cover a large area with only a few image files (one for each land
class), but a large area of a single land class can look repetitive (for example an area
of repeating farms). More textures can be used to hide the repetitions.
The global scenery is to some extent land-class scenery.
Auto-gen is a process whereby a flight simulator draws 3-d objects (buildings, trees, houses, etc.)
while you fly based on the terrain you are flying over. X-Plane 6 and 7 used auto-gen to
populate urban areas with houses and buildings, and forests with trees.
The power of auto-gen is that it allows the sim to draw a lot of objects without having to
store information about those objects in the scenery files. The rules for placing the
auto-gen objects can be improved without rebuilding the scenery, and the user can control
how many objects are drawn by the sim to improve framerate or appearance.
X-Plane 8 does not use auto-gen; in X-Plane 8 all objects must be placed in a DSF file ahead of
time. The program that builds the DSF files can place objects using hundreds of gigabytes
of data that X-Plane does not have access to, and algorithms that take weeks to run. However
once the objects are placed, they are positioned permanently and cannot be changed without
rebuilding the scenery files.
SRTM is the Space Shuttle Radar-Topography Mission, a joint project between NASA and the NGA to collect high quality global elevation data. The SRTM is one of the best free, public domain sources of elevation data available right now. SRTM data has a resolution of 90 meters worldwide and 30 meters in the US. The SRTM data covers a latitude band from 54S to 60N.
No. The SRTM data was not available when we did the X-Plane 7 global scenery. (Actually, this scenery was built for X-Plane 6.) You can get third party global scenery for X-Plane 7 in ENV format from xpsrtm.com.
The original US DSFs are not based on SRTM data; they are based on 90 meter NED data. The global scenery will be based on SRTM where available, and less precise data for the northern and southern areas that were not covered by the SRTM.