A MeshTool Bug

To put it mildly, I am buried. If you have emailed me in the last few weeks, I apologize, but basically whatever is going on, I can't look at it for at least a few more weeks. The four posts for June is an indication of work-load. In particular, since a lot of what I am working on is v10, it is under the radar until we do some kind of more formal announcements.

I did find a little bit of time last night to fix a MeshTool bug (thanks to the users who found this - it was a tricky one!). There will be a MeshTool RC2 to fix the bug: if you use only "wet" orthophotos (that is, orthophotos that have water-like physics) but not "dry" ones, the orthophotos are not exported at all.

I realize that the entire schema for creating mixed wet/dry orthophotos in MeshTool is byzantine at best. Basically you have to manually build the set of GIS files to create this effect, and even with examples in the README it is still pretty hard to do. I hope to automate this a bit in a future version of MeshTool but for now I need to finish version 2.0 as is. I'll try to cut a new RC within the week.

Also a slight side note: MeshTool contains some hidden commands to let you build road grids inside MeshTool. This was never documented or supported; the code came from a merge of Andrew McGreggor's work on New Zealand. Starting with RC2, exporting roads will simply not do anything.

The problem is that I did not separate MeshTool from the rest of the scenery code, and the rest of the scenery code is transitioning toward version 10 roads (which do you no good now as v10 isn't released). If you are successfully using the hidden road code in MeshTool, email me and I can advise you on how to cut your own build. If you are trying to use the hidden road code but not succeeding, please use another tool like Jonathan Harris' XPOSM.

In the long term we will end up with "draped" roads in overlays - that is, roads that do not depend on the shape of the mesh. Thus you will be able to simply write road data into an overlay file (or someday draw it in WorldEditor). But we're not there yet.

Tyler has made a lot of progress moving the scenery documentation to the wiki. Once I find some time to give him more feedback we will be able to complete this process. Hopefully this will make it easier to keep the documentation updated.