X-Plane’s New Scenery Engine: The Tile Scenery Engine
In a major announcement, Laminar has also unveiled a completely new scenery engine for X-Plane 12: the X-Plane Tile Scenery Engine. This is a future scenery system designed to replace the existing DSF architecture, which dates back to 2004.
X-Plane has used the current DSF system for more than two decades, and Laminar now says modern scenery has moved beyond what their architecture was built to handle. Streaming content, large raster datasets, scalable levels of detail, advanced terrain editing, and more flexible scenery patching all require a more robust foundation.
The new Tile Scenery Engine will use a tile-based and layer-based structure, support LODs, be friendlier to the GPU, support streaming, expanded raster data, and more detailed terrain modification. The Tile Scenery Engine splits scenery into smaller, more manageable pieces, making large areas easier to load, edit, stream, and iterate on.
This should allow more efficient terrain editing from the developer’s perspective, make working with orthophotos easier, and make scenery updates easier. This engine also gives X-Plane a foundation for future scenery technologies that would be difficult or impossible to build on top of today’s DSF system, Laminarr says.
Existing sceneries that rely on DSF will still work; however, as Laminar says, the Tile Scenery Engine will be backwards compatible with DSFs, meaning current scenery should continue to work as the new system is introduced.
The Tile Scenery Engine is currently targeting a late 2026 release.
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