The X-Plane Scenery Tools are available as source code, as well as binaries. This article describes how to get, compile, and modify the scenery tools code. See also the Scenery Tools Bug Database.
The X-Plane scenery tools code (XPTools) can be compiled for Mac, Windows, or Linux. Before you can work on the tools, you may need to get/update your development environment.
To build on macOS, you’ll need at least macOS 10.11 (El Capitan) and Xcode 8.3 or higher (free in the Mac App Store).
You also need a command-line version of CMake installed. Beside downloading a binary from the cmake website, it can also be installed via Homebrew: $ brew install cmake
Building on Windows requires Visual Studio 2017 or later (the free Community edition is fine).
In addition to the standard installation of Microsoft Visual Studio Community, you’ll also need some kind of Git client; Git GUI is a simple choice, and the command-line syntax listed here will work in the “GIT Bash” shell that comes with it.
Very old (WED 1.3 and earlier) versions were built using MingW - but this toolchain isn't maintained since.
You will need the gcc compiler, version 5.4 or newer, which should be installed by default on pretty much any system. In addition you will need cmake version 3.0+ and developer files for a few libraries installed:
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libc and make tools, package gcc-?-dev (the ? denotes the gcc version you want to use)
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X11 and openGL. When the binary AMD or Nvida video drivers are installed - these all come with a full set of developer bindings. When using MESA drivers, package libglu-mesa and its dependencies will provide all these.
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FTTK toolkit version 1.3, package libfltk1.3-dev
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cURL, package libcurl4-openssl-dev
When compiling WED 2.2 and earlier or XPTools version 15-3 and earlier - the Qt4 toolkit, package Qt4-dev is required instead of the FLTK toolkit.
It is also highly recommended to install the Code::Blocks IDE, version 13 or higher, for which solution files are available for most xptools starting with WED 1.7. But pure command line builds for all tools are fully supported as well.
The source code now lives on GitHub! You can browse the code online, download it, or clone it using all of the standard GitHub techniques. Clone the complete repo like this:
git clone https://github.com/X-Plane/xptools.git
If you don’t want a complete clone of the code, you can of course use GitHub to just download a ZIP of the most recent code, or download any major release; binary tools releases have matching tags in the repo.
The scenery tools source code depends on a large number of third party libraries; to make cross-platform development easier, they live in a Git sub-module (libs for Mac, Linux and MinGW, msvc_libs for Visual Studio on Windows).
(This step is not necessary on Windows using MSVC)
The first time you want to compile, you need to first download and compile your libraries. These libraries are updated infrequently. From your repository you can do this:
git submodule init
git submodule update libs
cd libs
make -j
The libraries can take 5-10 minutes to compile!
(This step is not necessary on macOS or Linux)
Compiling the required libraries requires a number of manual steps - so a precompiled set of libraries along with the patched source code is provided in the msvc_libs subdirectory. To get this from the repository do this:
git submodule init
git submodule update msvc_libs
Note that WED versions 1.X and xptools before version 19-4 are using 32bit tools and MSVC 2010, while WED 2.x and xptools 19-4 and later are 64bit binaries and all libraries are created for Win10 / MSVC 2017 toolchains, only. So the submodule update step needs to be repeated anytime a different branch with changes to the submodule pointer is checked out.
Go to the Scenery Tools root directory (same dir as where these instructions can be found) and just do a
make -j
This will build the tool using default options for debugging. After awhile, the output can be found under
[xptools dir]/build/[platform]/[configuration]
The platform is determined automatically (when building on Linux it is Linux of course). The configuration defaults to debug_opt. You can specify the configuration when building the tools this way:
make conf=[configuration]
where [configuration] can be one of the following:
releaserelease_optdebugdebug_opt
The release configuration is built with maximum optimizations -Ofast -flto, debug with no optimization at all '-O0' and when no configuration is specified, optimizations suitable for most debugging tasks (platform dependent) are used.
The release configuration are built with -DDEV=0 set, while debug and default variants have -DDEV=1.
To clean the tree you can do:
make clean, this just deletes thebuilddirectorymake distclean, this deletes thebuilddirectory and the built 3rd-party libraries located inlibs/local
You can also build a single tool or a set of tools like this:
conf=release_opt make [tool_1] [tool_2] [...tool_n]
Available tools are:
ac3dDDSToolDSFToolMeshToolObjViewRenderFarmRenderFarmUIWEDXGrinder
The MSVC solution file (.sln) can be found in msvc/XPTools.sln, and it contains projects that build WorldEditor and the reset of the tools.
The XCode project is in the root of the repo, SceneryTools.xcodeproj. There is one target for each of the scenery tools—simply pick a configuration, target, and build.
The project files (.cbp) for most xptools can be found in the codeblocks directory. The IDE is set up to build using the regular command line makefiles and not its internal build tools - so the results are guaranteed identical to command line builds.