The second quarterly SDK Q&A will be hosted soon, and you can now ask your questions in this thread: https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/sdk-q-a-scenery-editor-questions/406757

The main focus of this Q&A will be the Scenery Editor. Time and date will be announced soon.

Hey Folks, please add a LIKE if you will on a problem discovered likely in the airport builders' SDK.  I tried hard to get the attention of Asobo and Orbx early on to no avail, very sadly:

https://forums.flightsimulator.com/t/sdk-q-a-scenery-editor-questions/406757/7?u=zahidhuubow

Edited June 2, 20215 yr by Noel

As a heads-up, the SDK Q&A is scheduled to go live in 5 minutes from now. You can watch it here: twitch.tv/msfsofficial

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Quick Summary

The session begins with Alyzée presenting the simulator's new SDK Q&A platform (https://devsupport.flightsimulator.com/), which is public to everyone, but you need to register in order to ask or answer questions, and share content with the community. You can also share private information with Asobo directly. The team have been reading them, but they haven't had time to digest them yet (they plan to answer them in the future).

They would like to introduce Sylvain (FlyingRaccoon), a long-time fan of the franchise and recently-hired tech Q&A for the SDK (testing for bugs and features as well as providing support), who has already provided several answers on the Q&A platform.

The beta version of the visual effects editor was released with Sim Update 4, and they're already working on fixing bugs (it will be updated with the next patch). Eric says that the new effects shown in the E3 2021 trailer were made with this editor. Also they're optimising WASM compilation times (a "fast compilation mode" is up to 8x faster, but with slightly slower performance).

They have collected data for internally for the scenery editor, and with today's stream they're looking for input from the community. One of the demonstrated improvements is rendering the game as a window inside the editor. They also plan to improve UI/UX, jetways, exclusion polygons, and also add a tool to create fences and validate airports (to detect errors). Those improvements will take until next year to be fully implemented, but they plan weekly updates.

Questions

3ds Max lights need to be repeated on all LOD levels (regarding airport lights draw distance). When it comes to sprite lights, they would like feedback on how far they should be drawn.

They are not so sure about high-resolution ground and projected mesh texture support, due to VRAM constraints. Jörg (who has talked to Sebastian about this) and Sylvain explain that they do plan to take advantage of newer hardware over time.

Sylvain says that he admires the scenery by Orbx, while Jörg is constantly impressed by the overall creativity and some "badass" airports (as well as airport texture packs) which are driving them forward to make their airports better.

They do plan to do something in order to prevent AI traffic running over airports, and also remove street lights and power lines. The exclusion system is a priority for the team, and Jörg says this will come in 2021.

They do not provide official support for adding elevation data (as it's on a very low level of the engine), but they are improving the tools to help influence that data through the scenery editor.

They plan to work with the gameplay team in order to increase the draw distance of objects and effects in multiplayer mode.

They recently fixed an issue with the windsocks facing the wrong orientation, this means that projects made before this fix must be corrected manually.

They need more details regarding the issue where terrain heights sometimes appear different in-game compared to the editor. They would like users to create a question in the Q&A platform, and also provide screenshots and a sample project.

VDGS support in the SDK might come at some point, but not any time soon. Jörg intervenes to say that they are still prioritising planned features based on feedback, and urges the community to give as much as possible.

The aircraft reading the default ILS frequency instead of the one set by the user has been reported many times, they are still working on identifying the issue.

MP3 support for mission triggers is probably not possible because they're using the Wwise audio system, but they will take a look at it.

The ability to add custom textures for taxiways is not on the roadmap at the moment. They will evaluate this in the next few weeks.

There is a livery sample (to aid in the creation of liveries), and they mention that for the "official" way, the original source package of the aircraft is needed. They will consider creating a video tutorial if the community asks for it.

They would love to work on a better animation system for developers, but there is not enough bandwidth to do it any time soon.

There is a living world sample, but they're looking to improve the ability to edit the ambient traffic around an airport. Jörg says this is planned for next year.

The SDK documentation features information regarding airport services, but if the community feels it's not good enough, they would like some feedback.

Remote activation of runway lighting at an unmanned airport is rather low on the priority list at the moment.

They already have a lot of tickets when it comes to changes being applied in a real-time manner (without requiring a restart), but there is still lots of work on the engine front that has to be done.

 

Edited June 16, 20214 yr by ChaoticBeauty

I wonder what they consider the “official” way of creating liveries.

7 minutes ago, conundrum said:

I wonder what they consider the “official” way of creating liveries.

That would be the livery sample which is included in the SDK (there is no video tutorial about that yet though).

You can check out the entire answer at 43:58 in the Twitch VOD: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/1058125342