Getting Started with X-Plane Scenery

Welcome to the X-Plane scenery development guide! This section of the Wiki contains information, documentation, tools, sample code, and tutorials for authors who are creating custom scenery for X-Plane 9 and programmers who are writing utilities for X-Plane 9 scenery.

What the Scenery System Does
Scenery in the X-Plane Mac/PC/Linux simulator can include essentially everything outside the aircraft. X-Plane is designed specifically to enable users to create and modify scenery themselves. This means that, with a little ambition, a home user with no programming experience could design, say, an ultra-realistic version of their home town. This model of My Town, USA could then be easily incorporated into the X-Plane simulator so that upon flying from Neighboring Town, USA into My Town, the scenery seamlessly and transparently moves into the super realistic scenery. These scenery packages can be even be distributed on the Internet so that anyone using the X-Plane desktop sim can download and install them.

What the Scenery is Made Of
Scenery in the X-Plane desktop simulator is made up of both scenery files (DSF files) and text files that describe the various entities in the scenery package. This includes object files for describing buildings, network files for describing road patterns, forest files for describing vegetation, and so on.

In our scenery system, the world is divided into 1 degree latitude by 1 degree longitude tiles, each one of which is defined by one file. Custom scenery is stored in packages, or folders which contain all relevant files. Objects (in the form of OBJ files) can be placed at any location. These objects are most commonly buildings, but they could be houses, airplanes, or even people--X-Plane doesn't know the difference. In addition to these custom objects, custom terrain textures may be used to create orthophoto-style scenery.

About the Default Scenery
Out of the box, X-Plane comes with over 50 GB of world scenery, covering the entire planet from 74 degrees north to 60 degrees south latitudes.

What We Make Available to Authors
The X-Plane scenery development kit contains the following:
 * A set of open-source, cross-platform tools for creating scenery
 * Specifications for all X-Plane-specific file formats
 * Documentation for the tools, including tutorials

Open-Source Tools
The new scenery generation tools make extensive use of open source libraries; in order to comply with those licenses and to give back to the open source communities that make the new scenery possible, all of the new scenery tools have been released in source code as well as binaries. If you are a programmer interested in working with the scenery, we recommend working within the source code bases for these tools, as they already solve a number of problems relating to in-memory storage and processing of the new scenery.

Future Expansion and Compatibility
The X-Plane 8 and 9 scenery file formats differ from the old X-Plane 7 formats in that they are open-ended; they can represent almost any configuration of scenery as long as a tool can create it. With X-Plane 7, to implement new features with the scenery, the format had to change. With X-Plane 8/9, the format can represent almost anything. This means that the format will not change as we develop new scenery technology. Also, third party programmers will be able to design new scenery creation tools without being limited by our file formats, and it may even be possible to convert scenery from other flight simulators.

Contacting the Scenery Creation Community
We have a moderated yahoo mailing list, x-plane-scenery. The purpose of this mailing list is to give scenery authors a place to discuss technical issues regarding the creation of scenery. The group home page has both a "join" button (if you have a Yahoo ID) and mailing addresses to join the group without a Yahoo ID.

X-Plane.org has web-based forums, including a forum dedicated to scenery creation.