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Austin Goudge Interview OpenSceneryX Conducted by Dominic Smith Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule to talk to us, Austin; the team and I really appreciate it. No problem, it's a pleasure! OpenSceneryX is probably the most well known X-Plane library to date, and one that has grown is size over the years, but could I start by asking you how it all began? Well it all started with X-Plane 8, which I think was released in 2004. This introduced the concept of libraries and Laminar started using them widely themselves within the sim. Scenery package authors could also use these built in Laminar libraries, but they were very limited in scope and there was no third party collections that could fill in the gaps. So each scenery developer had to start from scratch and either build their own complete set of items (including most airport furniture, vehicles and static aircraft), or go hunting around and asking others for permission to use theirs, or just steal them without asking. This is not only inefficient for authors, it's also inefficient in X-Plane too - if two very similar objects are modelled twice by different people for nearby airports, they both have to be loaded into the sim with separate textures and models, using twice the video card RAM. There were a few discussions about this at the time on the x-plane.org forums, and eventually in 2006 I decided that it was time to try and work out a solution. With fantastic help and support from many others both at that time and since, "The Library" (now "OpenSceneryX") was born. With so many objects now contained within OpenSceneryX, how is the library organised? Carefully You've highlighted one of the challenges of running a library like this - the structure. I came up with the top level organisation into item type (object / facade / forest etc.) very early on and that has worked well. Beneath that however, things have not always been straightforward and the structure has evolved over time as more and more content has been added. This has also had to take into account an important feature of much of the library content - texture sharing between items. A few mistakes have been made - why on earth are airport buildings in /objects/buildings/airport while all other airport stuff is in /objects/airport for example?! Well the answer is gradual evolution - something that seemed sensible at the start might not have turned out quite so sensible in the long term. One main goal though is backward compatibility - if an author has used a library item when they built their package in 2010, then an OpenSceneryX update in 2019 must not break it, even if stuff has moved around inside the library. Austin, one of the things many designers think about is copyright, and how their object might be used. With this said, how do you go about ensuring the developers rights are protected? You've pinpointed another big challenge. After a big discussion at the start about what type of copyright could be applied to the library, we agreed that one of the Creative Commons licenses would be appropriate. We also agreed that we can't stop payware authors using the library. I know this is contentious* so I make it very clear how the library works when designers contribute their content. In practise, few payware authors have referenced OpenSceneryX because they would risk pillory by the community unless their package is outstanding in its own right. The other side of this is I also need to protect myself against accusations of copyright infringement. This involves very carefully checking everything that is contributed to the library, including models (which may be derived from other models) and textures (which may be derived from other textures), to ensure nothing has been illegally copied and that all contributors have given permission to distribute their work. I have declined many contributions because the contributor couldn't prove who the original authors were. There are no exceptions to this - every item has to have all its original authors credited. * I won't get into the detail of why we can't restrict who uses the library here, as its related to the technical details of how libraries work, but in summary, copyright infringement boils down to who distributes the copyrighted work. If a designer has made objects for FSX/P3D, can they also add to the library, or are there limitations? If they own the copyright on the work, or get permission from the original authors then it's absolutely fine to contribute items that have come from other sims. There are a number of tools out there that allow you to convert between the different formats. Why do you think it is that third party libraries have become the norm in X-Plane and not so much on the other popular platforms? I am not very involved in the other simulators - always being Mac based, one of the main reasons I got into X-Plane in the first place was that for a long time (apart from MSFS, which was discontinued in the 90's) it was the only non-combat sim available. Knowing the X-Plane community though, I have always been impressed by the 'hands on' attitude. A large number of X-Plane users like to get their hands dirty fiddling with the sim, aircraft and scenery. Also, the built-in airports were quite minimal in detail for a long time. For these reasons, I think a large section of the community has jumped into scenery building as a hobby, and libraries are a great resource and time saver for these developers. The flip side is that the X-Plane community seems to be quite altruistic, so large numbers of designers are willing to contribute their work back to OpenSceneryX for free. Hosting the library must be quite a challenge, especially as OpenSceneryX is provided free of charge, so is there anything the community can do to help with the project? Hosting something as popular as OpenSceneryX has its challenges - both the Library and web site used to be on a single server but it got completely overwhelmed so nowadays it's on a multi-tier architecture, including CloudFlare, AWS CloudFront, AWS S3 and Linux servers at Rackspace. Although the library is now approaching 8TB of bandwidth / month and 85,000,000 requests per month (which equates to 32 requests / second, 100% of the time), Cloudflare is our saviour - I cannot sing their praises highly enough, without their free plan the hosting would cost an additional £700 per month, and the project would be dead. Even so, the library has cost money every year so far to run. Despite being very hesitant to do it, I have had to put advertising on the web site to partially bridge the gap, which means I'm only £10-£20 in the red in an average month. However the library will never be commercial - that would fail every contributor who has donated their work, past and future. So all I would ask is that if you like and use the library, a PayPal donation goes a long way to helping out! Lastly Austin what plans do you have for the future of the project? Now that the library has support for seasons built in, I would like to extend this to as much of the content as possible - imagine all buildings had snow on their roofs in snowy deep winter? I'm always looking at ways of improving the online library documentation. At the moment I'm investigating ways we could display 3D previews of all content on the web site, instead of the simple flat screen shots we have currently. I want to improve the ease of using OpenSceneryX inside WED and OverlayEditor - for example the hierarchy oddity I mentioned above could be solved if the same category was published to both /objects/buildings/airport and /objects/airport/buildings, so it wouldn't matter which path the user used. I have been discussing producing a version of OpenSceneryX for the Aerofly FS 2 flight sim (OpenSceneryA perhaps?), with one of the key members of the FS2 community. I believe this would benefit both flight sims as two communities would be actively contributing to the library. Recently, some very generous members of the community have donated entire libraries of their own to OpenSceneryX. Merging libraries is a major task, as I have to be careful to support all the previous library paths, but it's worth it as every merged library is a fabulous boost for OpenSceneryX. I'm therefore very open to any more offers of full library merges in the future. And finally of course, I'm always looking to expand the library with more contributions from the wonderfully talented artists in the X-Plane® community. Many thanks Austin, and the team and I wish you all the very best with the OpenSceneryX project! To find out more about OpenSceneryX, head on over to: www.opensceneryx.com
