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.

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.

This affects OpenSceneryX in two ways: Firstly, a lot of the existing objects in the library include faked shadows, created by flat surfaces placed on the ground with a texture that looks like a shadow. Secondly, a number of objects have LIT (night) textures that contain simulated spill lighting effects as if there was a light shining on the texture.

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Don’t Copy Stuff From The Library

Today I had to ask a scenery author to withdraw their scenery from the Download Manager at x-plane.org because he had copied a large number of objects out of the library into his scenery package.

This is a call to all authors:

Please download the Developer Pack from the home page and read the instructions inside it – you do not need to copy any files to be able to use OpenSceneryX.  If you do, you are breaking the license and infringing the copyright of the generous people who have contributed to the library.

This has happened on a few occasions, always due to innocent mistakes and usually just one or two objects.  It’s easily fixed but it’s better if it doesn’t happen at all.  Please read the documentation in the developer pack – it’s very easy to use the library properly.

Important Info For Scenery Developers

IMPORTANT FOR ALL SCENERY DEVELOPERS USING OPENSCENERYX: Please read the instructions in the developer’s pack.  It is especially important to read the part about including the “Placeholder Library” in your package.  If you don’t do this, your scenery package may* CAUSE X-PLANE® TO QUIT if a user hasn’t installed OpenSceneryX.

I’ve noticed that a number of released packages don’t include the Placeholder Library and have tried to alert the authors whenever I spot this.  If you don’t do it you’re simply making work for yourself because you’ll get a bunch of users complaining that “I installed your package and it crashes X-Plane”

It is simplicity itself to include the Placeholder Library in your package, it’s just a file and a folder that you copy across.

For more detailed info, download the latest developer’s pack, which is always available from the OpenSceneryX Home Page.

(*) Versions of X-Plane® older than 9.30 beta 8 will quit, versions of X-Plane® newer than that will throw up a warning message.