X-Plane 12 specific sceneries are finally here

The X-Plane Gateway has been accepting submissions that peruse XP12 specific new features since February 14th 2023, and ... they've indeed started popping up like mushrooms. Now the scenery map also knows what these things are and can properly show that whether they've been included in a current X-Plane release or not. Previously they were listed as "not included yet" with a download link pointing to the gateway prompting a few questions from users ... "so is this included or not?"...

The answer is simple; those sceneries had indeed been included in X-Plane 12.04, but since with no power comes no responsibility, the scenery map didn't really know how to handle those sceneries properly and - thus they were shown with incorrect status.

What about X-Plane 11?

When the gateway opened for XP12 submissions, the door was closed for XP11 submissions. This means that all new gateway submissions need to be built using WED 2.5r3 (or greater) But ... fear not, fellow gateway artists; the latest WED is fully capable of opening sceneries that you've spent possibly months working on created with an earlier versions of WED. Thus - it is usually just a matter of opening the scenery in the latest version of WED, possibly fixing the new validation errors/warnings in your submission (we all do validate our submissions before submitting them to gateway, right?) and resubmitting the scenery to gateway.

There is one possible obstacle, though... Because of the new features available in XP12, there is also a requirement that gateway artists need to have XP12 installed on their computer. The requirement makes sense, because as a scenery artist, you are supposed to have checked your submission in the actual sim before submitting it. The supported version(s) for gateway submissions are listed on the gateway's NOTAMs -page (and - at the time of writing, you need to have XP12.03r1 or XP12.04r3 installed ... this is a moving target in the future, so check the linked page.

Developing for X-Plane 12?

I'd urge every scenery artist to read through the fine document describing building Gateway Airports for XP12 which has absolute tons of information of the how/what/why/do's/dont's of scenery development regarding the latest sim platform.

And... the gray markers on the map?

Initially when the XP12 sceneries were included in the map with proper data, they appeared with a gray marker on the map ... which is something that actually should never happen. Oops. While there indeed is a gray marker available on the scenery map, that is only ever supposed to be used for "we know there is something here, but we're not exactly sure what the heck it is supposed to be" ... and the code should always know what it is drawing ... but turns out - while the database was now in order, the rendering code was still struggling with the new entries. As said; Oops.

The proper color(s) for the markers have been re-established (X-Plane major version upgrade is so rare, there really isn't an automatic upgrade path for it in the scenery map).