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.

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!