Category Archives: Installer

Public Beta of New Installer

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We now have a public beta of the installer available for testing.  If you are happy testing pre-release software, please download this version and give it a try.

The headline new features are:

  1. The Mac installer now provides support for the default Steam location.  A new button allows you to select the Steam folder if it exists.
  2. The installer now includes the Backup Library that chris k originally built and einstein continues to expand and maintain.  This means that if you have OpenSceneryX installed, you no longer need the Backup Library.  The installer allows you to choose whether the placeholders used are visible or invisible – the visible ones should be bright red.
  3. The Mac version is now a full Cocoa application.
  4. There are three Linux versions: x86-32 bit, x86-64 bit and ARM 32 bit.
  5. The installer should be a bit more robust if your network connection is interrupted.
  6. The Mac version supports Retina displays at high resolution.

The latest public beta downloads are available from the Support page.

If you have any problems, please either reply to this post (you’ll need to register as a user of the site if you haven’t already) or get in touch using the contact form.

Beta Release of Installer and Library

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A beta version of the installer and library are now ready for testing. This beta includes two new features, as well as one other significant change behind the scenes:

  1. The Mac installer now provides support for the default Steam location.  A new button allows you to select the Steam folder if it exists.
  2. The installer now includes the Backup Library that chris k originally built and einstein continues to expand and maintain.  This means that if you have OpenSceneryX installed, you no longer need the Backup Library.  The installer allows you to choose whether the placeholders used are visible or invisible – the visible ones should be bright red.
  3. The installer has been rebuilt using the latest version of the Xojo development environment. This means that the Mac version is now a full Cocoa application.

We need some testers to try out this beta and test the new features, as well as ensuring that no bugs have crept in.  Although the third item above sounds innocuous, a lot of things have changed under the covers so it needs a good test.

WARNING: If you are not happy testing betas, which may have bugs, please skip this and wait for the full release version.

However, if you would like to help out, please either reply to this post (you’ll need to register as a user of the site if you haven’t already) or simply get in touch using the contact form.

Backup Library soon to be included

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Some of you may be aware of the excellent Backup Library that chris k originally built and now einstein maintains over at the .org.  Having this library installed removes a lot of errors you get in X-Plane if you use a scenery package that needs a library, but haven’t got the library installed.

It basically supplies fake invisible objects, lines, polygons etc. that are used instead of the real ones, so that X-Plane has something to load rather than complain about.

After some discussions with einstein, we have decided to join forces so that OpenSceneryX automatically installs the Backup Library too.  This means that you won’t need to download and install it separately if you have OpenSceneryX installed.  The installer will also give you a choice whether to show visible or invisible placeholders for the Backup Library, so that you can choose to know whether you’ve got libraries missing or not.  The visible ones will be bright red, so easy to spot!

Note that einstein will still be maintaining the Backup Library and the full version will still be available from the .org but it will be slightly different as the full version still needs to include a backup for OpenSceneryX itself in case you don’t want to install it.

This feature will be included in the next version of the library and installer.

Steam

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Several users have raised an issue with the Steam version of X-Plane on the Mac. Because the default Steam install location is inside your ‘Library’ folder, and this folder is invisible, you cannot select anything below it in the OpenSceneryX installer.

To solve this, the next version of the installer will have a ‘Use Steam’ button on the Mac – this will automatically check whether the X-Plane Steam folder exists and if so, sets it to be used by the installer.

This work is done, but there is another feature being worked on at the moment (watch for the next blog post!), so a beta version will be released at some point once both new features are ready for testing.

Installer 2.0.1 Bug Fix Release

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There’s a new version of the installer out – v2.0.1. This one’s mainly to fix a problem on Linux where you would only be able to download about 500 files before the installer would stop, forcing you to quit and reload to continue the download.

However, although you won’t see much difference on Mac or Windows, the internals of the file downloading process have been improved slightly for all three platforms, so please grab the new version from the opensceneryx home page.

New Installer

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A new version of the OpenSceneryX installer has been released. This version contains a major overhaul of the user interface, as well as fixes for running on some versions of Windows (Vista, 7).

Please note that the new version of the installer still downloads exactly the same OpenSceneryX library – you don’t get a different OpenSceneryX just because we’ve polished up the installer.

I’m afraid 64-bit Linux users may still have problems running this, and there’s not a 64 bit version because the development environment I use doesn’t support it yet (grrr, ‘First Quarter 2012’ apparently), but if your distro provides the ‘ia32-libs’ package then installing that may allow you to run this version.

The installers are available for download from the OpenSceneryX website.

OpenSceneryX and X-Plane® 10

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The buzz is building over X-Plane® 10 and we’re all eagerly looking forward to its new features. One of these looks like it is going to affect the OpenSceneryX library in a big way: The new X-Plane® global lighting model. When global lighting is enabled, X-Plane® will dynamically shed light, not just from the sun and landing lights (as X-Plane® 9) but also from other light sources. In addition, it will also generate dynamic shadows from all these light sources.

This affects OpenSceneryX in two ways: Firstly, a lot of the existing objects in the library include faked shadows, created by flat surfaces placed on the ground with a texture that looks like a shadow. Secondly, a number of objects have LIT (night) textures that contain simulated spill lighting effects as if there was a light shining on the texture.

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