WED Polygone problem

[lizz]

Hi Everyone,

I'm currently working on a scenery for EHEH, Eindhoven Airport in the Netherlands. This is my first project and currently it drives me crazy....

I started off with the default airport layout as provided by X-Plane (10.10rc3) and decided to use this as a template and enhance from there. This worked perfectly although I had to restart clean a few times. Although it is quite a steep learning curve I gained experience and made some nice progress.

I discovered OE as well which made it rather comfortable to place facade buildings and place pre-defined objects from the libraries. So far so good until WED suddenly stopped to process polygones.

I made some Apron markings (like MAXSPAN38M) using the taxiway parts from the opensceneryx library in WED and they perfectly showed up in X-Plane.

Somewhat later I used the same polygone parts and spend a few hours on making taxiway stand markings to discover that these were not showing up in X-Plane at all. WED does show them but I cannot get them visible in X-Plane.

Whatever I try no polygone that I place in this scenery will show up in X-Plane anymore. If you look at the pictures I made a stand marking (B5) using the opensceneryx elements and nesides it a square made using the normal taxiway tool. The latter one does show up in X-plane the polygone want.

I'm struggling with this problem for a week now and cannot find a solution. I made these stand markings in OE now but it is not as comfortable and precise as WED in placement.

I did a test with another (default) field by placing the same kind of marking on the tarmac, load it up in X-plane and it was OK.

What could I have done wrong that caused this nasty issue???

Is there anybody out there who has some suggestions to solve this?

regards,

Lizz

[Colin S]

I ran across this when originally developing orthoscenery. The most likely reason is that those polygons are layered below the taxiway by accident. Open the polygon file in a text editor and check the layer specification. It should be runways +1 or +2 or something.

[chris k]

Hrm.

Using OE and WED together will generally issues; for the simple fact that WED will overwirte anything you do in OE (when you 'Export Scenery Pack').

It sounds like you used WED to do the layout and place polygons initially, then changed to OE to place the objects/facades; and have now swapped back to WED to do additional polygons.

Unfortunately, WED does not see anything that you did in OE. If you now "export scenery pack" from WED, it will overwrite the .DSF you edited in OE. Polygons like that are not stored int he apt.dat, but in the DSF.

Worse comes to worse, send us your earth.wed.xml file and your DSF file. (zip them up and post them here), and we can have a look in more detail as to whats going on.

As youre using the OpensceneryX characters, they generally are already at the correct "LAYER_GROUP" as alluded to by Colin; however, its a good idea to check anyways, to ensure it's at something "above" taxiways.

- Ck.

[lizz]

Hi guys,

Chris made me re-think my way of working carefully and now I realise that I'm really messing up due to this WoW (and I'm even NOT blond ... )

I was indeed using OE and WED together on this scenery, but I carefully have read the forum and was never performing an 'export scenery pack' from WED as I read that this really messup your work. Instead I always did an 'export apt.dat'. So, I added polygones in WED, did an export apt.dat but not realizing that this not saves any polygone data to the scenery as these are stored in the .dsf file. As a test I just exported the scenery pack from WED and everything showed up fine.

So my concern is now how can I safely work with WED and OE together? I really would like to use OE to add buildings, facades, equipment etc. as OE simply is more comfortable handling this then WED while WED is much more precise in e.g. placing Tarmac markings. But I also would like to have the option to add polygones after adding buildings and stuff in OE.

I noticed that it is possible to import the .dsf into WED and WED displays all the data in this .dsf in a seperate group in the hiarchy pane together with the complete path to the .dsf. When I then save the WED file (.xml) and perform an 'export scenery pack' everything shows up correctly in X-Plane.

Is this a safe way of working or am I asking for troubles again?

Regards,

Lizz

[chris k]

Bingo..... You're 100% correct in your assessment of the problem that's occurring, and conclusions. Well Done! (Thus proving you're not a Blonde -)...)

You are also correct, that you can indeed "import DSF" back into WED. So, if you use OE to make changes to the raw DSF, you can indeed incorporate those back into WED by doing a DSF import. However, as you have discovered, this ends up with duplicate entries inWED. You will need to delete the duplicates from the WED project, but keep the new entries as added by OE. It's a manual process, but works.

> Is this a safe way of working or am I asking for troubles again?

It is indeed a safe way of doing things. Note that once you re-import, You can move things around in the WED hierarchy pane (the top right window) by click-dragging the entries around. You can also delete duplicate entries (of which many things will be duplicated naturally on re-import of the DSF).

This method will work - Provided you don't mind the hassle of re-importing the DSF back into WED, whenever you want to switch from using OE, and instead use WED to continue your work.

- CK.

[lizz]

Hi Chris,

Thanks

Finally I have more understanding on how these two editors work together. Altough there are very nice tutorials and manuals around for WED and scenery making in general this kind of practical knowledge can only be gained through trial and error and, of course, a number of kind X-plane enthousiast hanging around here, be it on the other end of the globe (love internet....)

regards,

Lizz