Home | News | Virtual Paths

If you’re a scenery developer, and you open up OverlayEditor and see the list of objects in OpenSceneryX, you are looking at a set of Virtual Paths to the objects.  These are not real paths on disk, they are made-up.  Hopefully I’ve done a reasonable job of making up these paths so that it is easy to find the object you are looking for.  Sometimes this goes a bit wrong and I have to change things around a bit, see the previous post for an explanation of how this is done.

Virtual paths give us three benefits:

1. The folder structure on disk does not have to bear any resemblance to the path that an object is published to.
2. An object can be published to more than one (indeed, many) paths.  However, it is still the same object and is only loaded once by X-Plane.
3. Several different objects can be published to the same path.

Item 1 is good for library maintainers – We can organise the files however we like, as long as the published paths stay the same as time goes by it doesn’t matter where things sit on disk.

Item 2 is good for everyone – This allows objects to be found in different places, so they can be organised under different schemes and found by the user more easily.  A good example are the static aircraft in the library – These are organised both by aircraft type and by livery…  So if you are looking for a B747 then you can find it under /objects/aircraft/jets/heavy/b747-400/aer_lingus.obj but if you are looking for Aer Lingus aircraft you will find the same 747 here: /objects/aircraft/livery/aer_lingus/b747-400.obj.

Item 3 is also good for everyone – Publishing multiple objects to the same virtual path means X-Plane can introduce random variety as the sim will pick a random object each time the scenery is loaded.  A massive example of this is /objects/aircraft.obj – Almost every aircraft in the library is published to this path, so if you use it you will get a random aircraft each time – a bit extreme!  Perhaps more useful are paths like /objects/aircraft/jets/heavy.obj (a random heavy jet) or /objects/aircraft/jets/heavy/b747-400.obj (a random b747-400).  Note that some aircraft are excluded from this, specifically historical liveries, house colours and one-off liveries.

I’ll blog a bit more about historical liveries in future, as well as blogging about the build scripts that are used to compile the library.