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.

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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 the docs 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.

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The biggest wins are:

1. Reducing texture size
2. Sharing textures
3. Reducing object complexity (polygon count)

The third one is becoming less critical as graphics cards become more powerful, but the first two give big improvements, and aren’t that hard to do.  Just before you submit your objects, have a quick think about how well optimised your work is, and whether a few minutes spent improving it would benefit everyone.

On the same theme, it would be really cool if someone would volunteer to be ‘library optimisation guru’ and take the job of auditing all contributions for efficiency, perhaps scaling down large textures where appropriate, or even combining textures to produce shared textures for objects that are likely to be used together.

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