aussi Posted January 7, 2020 Share Posted January 7, 2020 Hi Magnus and Happy New Year! I really like your dynamic approach to snow and definitely see this as being the way forward (rather than switching textures) as it allows for very flexible, variable and changing snow cover. Of course I would like to ensure OpenSceneryX works well with xEnviro too. So a question: Are you planning on dynamically applying snow effects to objects, forests, polygons, lines etc. that are loaded from 3rd party libraries? I'm considering adding support for your env/surface dataref, detecting values == 2.0 or == 3.0 and switching to snow covered versions of OpenSceneryX library items in those cases, but this is pointless and would also undermine your approach if you are intending to apply dynamic snow to everything. Let me know your thoughts, Austin G. 1 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Captain Kitten Posted January 11, 2020 Share Posted January 11, 2020 Hi Austin, glad that you're interested in making OpenScenery X compatible with xE This is something we are contemplating on how to approach within X-Plane since it's not straight forward. We have been trying to figure out a way to exclude or isolate objects from the rest of the scenery for a long time. And so far we haven't found a way that is practical and "user friendly" for other developers. We'll try to explore more possibilities when we have finished our immidiate tasks at hand which demand our full attention for at least the remainder of this month and a part of next. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aussi Posted January 12, 2020 Author Share Posted January 12, 2020 I imagine it’s not an easy task, but it’s good to hear you’re looking at it. I’ll therefore build in support for swapping OpenSceneryX season using xEnviro datarefs for the moment, I can always switch this off in a later release if you work out a way to apply dynamic snow. Another question - are the seasonal map pngs created by xEnviro (eg X-/resources/seasons/region_hw.png) before X-Plane loads libraries? Ideally I want to use your maps but only if they are available by the time OpenSceneryX loads. Would you also be able to send me some examples so I can test using real images? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Captain Kitten Posted January 13, 2020 Share Posted January 13, 2020 Yeah.. Laminars sdk on the matter is broken. So there is no way for us to separate objects from the rest. And images get uploaded only after full initialization and successful authorization which happens only after sim is fully loaded and running. The good thing is that png don't change much between loads. We'll revisit this when we have time Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aussi Posted January 13, 2020 Author Share Posted January 13, 2020 13 minutes ago, Captain Kitten said: Yeah.. Laminars sdk on the matter is broken. So there is no way for us to separate objects from the rest. And images get uploaded only after full initialization and successful authorization which happens only after sim is fully loaded and running. The good thing is that png don't change much between loads. We'll revisit this when we have time Ok, I'll do some testing as I suspect X-Plane will throw errors if those PNGs are referenced before they exist. This would only happen the very first time the sim is loaded with xEnviro enabled, but even so it wouldn't be a good user experience. I do like the idea of using the PNGs, but do you think good results would be achieved using the original plan instead (i.e. env/surface dataref, detecting values == 2.0 or == 3.0)? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Captain Kitten Posted January 13, 2020 Share Posted January 13, 2020 You are guaranteed to get 0 in return at the first scenery load (i.e. summer with dry surface) since there are no values before xE is running. With png this is only possible at the very first load and after a long break. In all other cases png will contain more or less adequate seasonal/surface data. Datarefs are suitable for dynamic surface coverage ie ponds and snow patches on apron. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aussi Posted January 15, 2020 Author Share Posted January 15, 2020 On 1/13/2020 at 2:42 PM, Captain Kitten said: You are guaranteed to get 0 in return at the first scenery load (i.e. summer with dry surface) since there are no values before xE is running. With png this is only possible at the very first load and after a long break. In all other cases png will contain more or less adequate seasonal/surface data. Datarefs are suitable for dynamic surface coverage ie ponds and snow patches on apron. Thanks Magnus. I still need to do some testing and the final approach will depend on how X-Plane behaves. Are you able to send me some sample PNGs generated by the plugin? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Captain Kitten Posted January 15, 2020 Share Posted January 15, 2020 You can find those in your resources/seasons folder. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aussi Posted January 15, 2020 Author Share Posted January 15, 2020 1 hour ago, Captain Kitten said: You can find those in your resources/seasons folder. Ah yes, if I owned xEnviro Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Captain Kitten Posted January 15, 2020 Share Posted January 15, 2020 1 hour ago, aussi said: Ah yes, if I owned xEnviro Hold my beer Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aussi Posted January 16, 2020 Author Share Posted January 16, 2020 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aussi Posted January 19, 2020 Author Share Posted January 19, 2020 Ok, so after some experimentation, X-Plane does barf if I install a version of OpenSceneryX that references the xEnviro seasonal map PNGs, but the OSX installer is now more intelligent - it now checks for the existence of these PNGs before allowing xEnviro mode to be enabled. Those changes are done and ready for the next release. Thank you for your help Magnus. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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