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Installer 2.0.2 Bug Fix Release
A new version of the installer has been posted.
This version fixes a bug that would affect some systems where X-Plane is installed on a different drive or partition to the system. The installer would create loads of empty folders but would fail to install any files.
Get it from the OpenSceneryX homepage.
Night Lighting in X-Plane 10
Just reading one of the latest posts on the absolutely excellent XPlane10′s Blog, they mention ‘glowing buildings’ at night on one of their scenery package reviews.
So, just a quick note about glowing buildings in OpenSceneryX – now that we’re firmly in X-Plane 10 world, more OpenSceneryX QA time is being spent ensuring our LIT textures look good with the new lighting model. A lot of older objects have slightly ‘glowing’ night textures, which were used in X-Plane 9 and earlier to try to simulate spill lighting from floodlights. These are now outlawed, and a further audit of all night textures will be done to remove any night textures that glow. Unfortunately, sometimes this means that legitimate lighting effects (e.g. illuminated window panes) may have to be removed, but for an overall improvement in the look of our objects at night.
Installer 2.0.1 Bug Fix Release
There’s a new version of the installer out – v2.0.1. This one’s mainly to fix a problem on Linux where you would only be able to download about 500 files before the installer would stop, forcing you to quit and reload to continue the download.
However, although you won’t see much difference on Mac or Windows, the internals of the file downloading process have been improved slightly for all three platforms, so please grab the new version from the opensceneryx home page.
New Installer
A new version of the OpenSceneryX installer has been released. This version contains a major overhaul of the user interface, as well as fixes for running on some versions of Windows (Vista, 7).
Please note that the new version of the installer still downloads exactly the same OpenSceneryX library – you don’t get a different OpenSceneryX just because we’ve polished up the installer.
I’m afraid 64-bit Linux users may still have problems running this, and there’s not a 64 bit version because the development environment I use doesn’t support it yet (grrr, ‘First Quarter 2012′ apparently), but if your distro provides the ‘ia32-libs’ package then installing that may allow you to run this version.
The installers are available for download from the OpenSceneryX website.
New Beta Installer 2.0.0b5
There is a new beta installer out (beta 5) that should fix issues with the Windows version where it would stop with an internal exception. Please try this new version if you’re having difficulties, it’s available from the top of the support page.
OpenSceneryX 2.0.0 Released
After quite a long delay since the last release (sorry!), OpenSceneryX 2.0.0 is out. There are loads of changes in this version, some highlights are:
- X-Plane 10 Compatibility – all baked-in ground shadows have been removed as X-Plane 10 now provides a proper lighting model with dynamic shadows
- A large number of new objects
- For scenery developers – The developer pack now includes a PDF index of everything in the library, with screenshots. This should be a big help to quickly find the object you’re looking for.
For the full list of changes, check out the release notes.
There is no new installer for this version, so just re-run your existing installer, and don’t be surprised by the number of changes (especially deletions) in this release. However, if you want to try the newest beta installer, it’s available from the top of the support page here: Support. Unless any major bugs are found, this beta will become the next official release version shortly.
Have fun!
New Beta Installer 2.0.0b4
The latest beta version of the installer has been released – v2.0.0b4. If you’re having trouble with the installer, especially on Linux, please try this latest version which is available from the top of the support page.
OpenSceneryX and X-Plane® 10
The buzz is building over X-Plane® 10 and we’re all eagerly looking forward to its new features. One of these looks like it is going to affect the OpenSceneryX library in a big way: The new X-Plane® global lighting model. When global lighting is enabled, X-Plane® will dynamically shed light, not just from the sun and landing lights (as X-Plane® 9) but also from other light sources. In addition, it will also generate dynamic shadows from all these light sources.
Continue reading
Installer Changes
I thought I would make a quick change to the installer to allow it to parse the installed scenery packages and only install what is needed from OpenSceneryX.
Of course, nothing is ever quite as simple as you first think – Parsing the DSF scenery files is fine and once that’s done, building the list of .obj, .pol, .lin etc files to download and install is also fine. Those bits were straightforward to implement. However, what I had neglected to think about was that those .obj, .pol, .lin etc files of course contain references to textures, but the OSX installer doesn’t know about the textures until after it has already downloaded the file.
So, this means I’m having to re-work the installer and the library build scripts so that they are more intelligent and know more about the dependancies between files in the library. I was hoping to get the new installer out by now but this has set things back a bit.
Also, I could still do with an Italian and a Spanish speaker volunteering to translate the installer, otherwise those languages won’t be included in the next release.