A Global Scenery Squawk List

This post is a bit of an experiment...we'll see how it goes. When we cut the global scenery, we do a number of validations: we manually inspect some of the DSF tiles, we examine the Earth orbit textures (which are derived from the DSFs) as a quick way to look roughly at all of the tiles, we have a number of internal consistency checks in the generator, and we can compare our output to some of the input data (e.g. did we lose all of our water) to look for gross bugs. But we don't have enough resources to manually examine all 18,000+ tiles in detail inside X-Plane.

So: if you have found a defect in a global scenery tile in version 9, please list the tile in the comments section of this post. I will try to give these "previously broken" tiles priority in manual inspection.

Note that the bugs we can expect in version 10 will be very different than in version 9 because we've really changed the global scenery generation process in nearly every important way. The underlying algorithms are heavily rewritten and data sources are very different. The goal here is to simply find areas that might have a higher probability of weirdness.

Let me try to be clear about what constitutes a broken tile and what does not. Please read this definition six or seven times before you post a comment.

• Do not report bugs of inaccurate data. If your favorite road is missing, or the coastline is in the wrong place, don't report that here. That is not a defect in the rendering process; rather it is a limitation in the source data. I am not trying to collect a list of data inadequacies. We have already selected the new data for the new render. "Stuff is in the wrong place" is not a bug for this list!
• Really weird patterns are of interest. For example: I have seen some reports of very long thin bars of land going perfectly north along the edge of the tile, or a comb of mountain and valley, again perfectly vertical. These are bugs in the production process and I do want to know about them!
• Do not report errors in the placement of the 3-d layers (trees, roads, etc.). Since the 3-d layer is being completely rebuilt for version 10, none of these defects will be present in version 10. (They'll be replaced with a totally new set of weird behaviors!)
• If an airport is too bumpy to use (with "flatten " turned off in the sim), report this only if the terrain around the airport is grass. Basically the grass means that we tried to "fix" the airport in the v9 render and failed. If there is no grass (the airport is over forest or city) and it is bumpy, do not report it - that means it was added to apt.dat later.
• Do not report mismatches between the airport shape and the grassy patch; this is just the apt.dat file being updated.

If you have something to report (basically incorrect flattening of grassy airport areas and really weird coastline/terrain bugs that are clearly programming errors) please include three pieces of information:

1. The DSF tile, e.g. +42-072
2. The nearest ICAO of an airport near the bug (e.g. KBED)
3. A very short description of what went wrong (e.g. "tall thin vertical lakes running through the entire DSF").

Please only post defects of the above nature in the comments section of this blog post; to keep things clean I am going to nuke any off-topic comments on this post.

EDIT: see the first Squawk, Arista's report on LOWS. This is a perfect report: it includes the DSF tile, the ICAOs, a brief but clear description, and it is a bug in how we process the data, not the data itself.