About WED

WED is an acronym for World ED itor, and is a free CAD-like software tool that is used to create/edit the following two categories of X-Plane scenery:

  1. Custom Overlay Scenery Packages
  2. Pure Gateway Airports

As far as WED is concerned, there are not really two separate scenery categories, its all just scenery stuff to WED; however, the file structure for each differs, so for documentation purposes, we distinguish between these two categories.

WED is available for Windows®, Mac and Linux. WED contains no scenery/art assets itself, it simply manages art assets contained within the X-Plane folder and visually represent the elements in a manner that is easy to comprehend, visualize and edit.

When you save a WED project (using File > Save), you are not saving or creating the scenery package itself, but rather you are saving a single WED-native XML file that contains all the information required to define and EXPORT (build) a scenery package. Exporting a scenery package is a specific menu action in WED, whereby WED will iterate through its XML file and then create all the necessary files to display the scenery in X-Plane. The XML file IS the WED project file. We sometimes call this XML file the WED Authoring File or Source file.

World Editor is able to:

It is important to understand that WED is limited to editing what is called Overlay scenery. X-Plane scenery is comprised of multiple technologies, using lots of differing files, and rendered in multiple stages. Nearly any part of X-Plane's scenery may be customized; however, most parts of the scenery system are NOT intended to be customized.

This manual only discusses WED and the Overlay Scenery System, which is described further in the Scenery Concepts > Overlay Scenery Packages section of this manual. The Scenery Concepts > Anatomy portion of this manual discuss these other (non-editable) scenery components for overall context and better illustrate how Overlay Scenery fits into X-Plane's broader scenery system.

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