Using Glass Objects in Planes

X-Plane 9 allows you to categorize objects as being on the plane's outside, inside, or glass. X-Plane depends on these flags being right for a few things:

• The draw order of the airplane is determined by the object types - glass is drawn last to avoid translucency artifacts.
• Interior light from the plane is only spilled on the "inside" objects.
• Glass objects are excluded from shadow calculations to avoid having opaque windows in the airplane shadow.

It is important that you use these flags as intended; X-Plane 10 depends on this information as well, and X-Plane 10's global spill and global shadowing algorithms are more sensitive to incorrect categorization of objects than X-Plane 9's forward renderer.

In particular, you should have glass for the airplane windows in an attached object tagged as type 'glass'; do not attach your glass to the cockpit object, which cannot be categorized as glass. If you have an old plane with glass in the cockpit, consider cutting the object in half in a 3-d editor and attaching the glass separately.

(You should also use our prop disc animation, rather than use an OBJ for prop discs; the OBJ format doesn't contain the z-buffer tricks necessary to make the prop look right.)

The Four Minute Mile

Sometimes these posts get off topic, sometimes in the direction of the art of computer programming, sometimes in the nature of the industry, and sometimes with pictures of the pets. This post is going to go off a bit into the subject of project management.

Randy and Tyler posted what was becoming clear (by the lack of an already existing beta): our estimated release date for X-Plane 10 was incorrect. Software project delays are pretty common, and often when a third party add-on is delayed, the community jumps to speculate about "what's going on" inside the project and tries to infer whether the delay is an indication of serious problems.

I'd like to try to reframe the issue of delays in terms of an analogy. You ask me: how fast can you run a mile? I tell you "4 minutes and 15 seconds". I then run a mile and you time me. My time: 6 minutes, 10 seconds.* What can we learn from this episode? I think we can learn two things:

• For a computer programmer, I am surprisingly fast - a six minute mile isn't to be sneezed at when you spend your days sitting on your ass in front of a monitor drinking coffee.
• My ability to predict my own speed is not very good. I was pretty naive to think I could run a 4 minute mile - that's what world class athletes run. My estimate was off by a fairly big error margin.

One thing we should not conclude is that because my mile time was 2 minutes slower than estimated, that I am a slow runner. The estimate sets up an expectation, but if the estimate is wrong, it's not a useful metric of efficiency.

The same applies to X-Plane; we missed our original projected ship date because the estimation of when we would be done was not a very good estimate. This isn't good for a few reasons:

• It creates uncertainty for third parties as to when a platform will change.
• It makes it difficult for marketing to properly plan a roll-out.
• It makes it difficult to balance the value of more features vs. an earlier release date (since we don't know how much "time" we are trading for "features" if the time estimates are wrong).

But the delay is not at all a black mark for our team - on the contrary, they're working their asses off and creating some really great work.

When looking at a project that will be delayed (because the original schedule was wrong) there's a few things you can do:

1. Add more people. This is quite often the wrong thing to do - please read the Mythical Man Month to understand why. Once your team is the right size, adding more warm bodies usually makes schedule delays worse and hurts efficiency.
2. Remove features. This is the only real way to bring in a ship date.
3. Move the date back.

When Austin and I were working on X-Plane 8, we hit a similar scheduling problem - what we had set out to do was going to take a lot longer than we thought. (Like X-Plane 10, we had just doubled the team size and begun a project that involved massive rewrites, which made it hard to ship until the work was fully complete. Sound familiar?) The difference? With X-Plane 8 we had contracted to ship with an external distributor for Thanksgiving, so we had to go for item 2 - we cut scope. What we cut was the world - that is, we shipped new global scenery only for the US, and the existing ENVs for the rest of the world. We also had to ship the artwork we had on hand, despite being unhappy with its quality. We didn't finish the rest of the world and graphics we were happy with for another 11 months.

Option 2, cutting scope is painful and hard. Sometimes it is the right thing to do. In the case of X-Plane, however, we have the luxury to move the date back. With that in mind, we're trying as hard as we can to keep feature-creep minimal and finish what we've already bit off, so we can get the release done and out the door.

* My mile time is not 6 minutes, 10 seconds...I would be astounded, and quite possibly in the ER if I could run that fast for any sustained amount of time.

Curved Roads

At this point I can say with 99% confidence that X-Plane 10 will feature bezier curved roads. In X-Plane 9, a road is a line segment; you can simulate curved roads by using a lot of line segments, but the global scenery roads are pretty chunky.

X-Plane 10 allows for a road to be a bezier curve, allowing the specification of smooth curves with a small amount of data. This sets us up to trade off visual quality and performance using a rendering setting.

A few notes for authors:

• Like all of the new v10 road features (and pretty much all of the new v10 scenery features), you don't have to use bezier curves in your roads. They are there as an option if you want them.
• X-Plane 10 will not make curves for you; road data that is defined as line segments in the DSF will be rendered as line segments. (This follows the principle that DSFs contain pre-processed scenery data, and the sim shows DSFs exactly as they are written.)

Pay No Attention to the Documentation

The DSF specification alludes to bezier curved roads; this "old way" of encoding curves was never supported in the sim - all versions of X-Plane ignore this data. The "old way" was how we thought we might do curves some day.

The version 10 curve encoding is different; the "old way" will continue to be ignored in version 10. So: do not use the DSF spec to try to make curved roads now. I will post detailed documentation on curved roads once version 10 is available to authors.

A Cliff Shader

I have been stingy with pictures of next-gen global scenery for one reason: it's really hard to get a nice shot of the global scenery that doesn't show unfinished features. With something like global lighting I can zoom in and show just the new trick, but with global scenery, I can't take a picture of a new house without showing a city block that looks funky due to a bug and a road that isn't finished. Posting a working shot of the global scenery where some sub-systems have bugs and artifacts would just freak everyone out.

I figure if it's obvious that the shot isn't a production shot, I can get away with posting it though.

A lot of the times when I work on the rendering engine, it is with test textures like this. Our art team does their best to hide the seams between different art assets, so that the scenery looks like one continuous world. The problem for me is that the better they do, the harder it is for me to tell if the underlying shaders are doing what they should do.

So alpilotx sent this test: it's all of the Innsbruck area painted with a test texture. What's new and interesting here is that the flat, hill, and cliff areas are all shaded by a single shader that selects between multiple textures (and rotates the textures) based on the underlying mesh.

We are adding the cliff shader to version 10 for a few reasons:

• Often we can get better cliff and hill definition by processing in the shader than by painting different triangles with different textures; our ability to control the transitions using different .ter files is limited.
• Using one slope-sensitive shader saves over-draw and triangle count, which makes the DSFs faster and smaller.
• Some day we may have the GPU distorting mountains on the fly to make them more mountainous. If we do, we need the GPU to also apply the correct textures; if the cliff areas are precomputed then they won't respond to GPU distortion.