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.

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.

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.

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.

• 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!

Both these hacks will no longer be necessary in X-Plane® 10 with global lighting switched on, as it will automatically generate these effects and the combination of the two will look awful on screen.  So, what do we do?

Well, there are two issues to tackle: The policy for new submissions to the library, and what we do with all the existing objects that use these techniques to simulate lighting.

New Submissions

There are already many complaints about the size of the library, so we have to think long and hard about any decision that is going to make it even bigger. Supporting night-time spill lighting effects in both X-Plane® 9 and X-Plane® 10 would mean that for many objects we would need two lit textures, which means doubling the disk space for the lit texture.  I have decided that this is not a forward-thinking policy and will reject submissions that do this.  We will therefore only be accepting submissions with either no lit texture or a single lit texture, and this texture should not have any spill lighting effects built in.

As for shadows, I am less concerned as a built-in shadow only increases an object’s size by a small amount, so although I would recommend that we all look to the future and don’t have burned-in shadows at all, if you want to include one it will have to use the new X-Plane® 10 ATTR_draped attribute (see Ben’s RFC concerning this here) and be wrapped in a conditional block (a new feature coming in X-Plane® 10) that means it is only shown when global lighting is switched off.  Bear in mind that if you do this, the object will not show up in X-Plane® 9  at all.

Existing Objects

Existing lit textures that contain spill lighting effects are a problem, because these would need to be re-made without the spill effects to look good in X-Plane® 10 with global lighting on, and re-making textures is something that the original author has to do.  We will therefore be auditing all lit textures and removing those that contain spill effects. Any individual author who wants to update their lit textures to remove spill effects, please do so and send me the updated objects.

Existing objects that contain built-in shadows will look awful with global lighting, so we will be auditing all objects and removing these.  We cannot wrap them in conditional blocks because then X-Plane® 9 will fail to load them altogether, and I’m of the opinion that it’s better to see the object without a shadow in X-Plane® 9 than not see any object at all.

I hope these measures don’t seem too draconian, especially as OpenSceneryX enhanced airports will lose their shadows in X-Plane® 9, but I strongly believe we need to be forward-thinking and look to the future of X-Plane, which includes a fully operational lighting model that we should be taking full advantage of.

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.

Before it’s released, we would like to get it translated into at least the following languages:

French (fr) – Olivier Faivre

German (de) – Valentin Kaufmann

Italian (it)

Spanish (es) – Amado Chiñas Sánchez

For a more complete list of translations and who has kindly contributed them, please visit the Help Translate page.

If you are willing to either beta test the installer or do a translation then please get in contact via the Contact Us page.