In Austin’s recent post to the news list he mentioned that we’d cleaned up a lot of code internally, making X-Plane tighter, leaner and meaner. But is this really a feature, something that you would care about as a user? I can think of at least 3 ways it directly affects the sim.
One difference between X-Plane and most other software is that you can email the authors and ask for a new feature and possibly see it within a few months. But when we evaluate feature requests, time to develop the feature is a big consideration. Having a cleaner code base means we can put new features in faster, which means everyone is a little more likely to get something new. (Of course, we can’t do every feature that is requested…this only improves the odds a little.)
Similarly, X-Plane is a subscription – so the amount of improvement you see across a version of X-Plane is directly affected by our ability to put new stuff in quickly. I’ve worked at companies with a range of policies toward code clean-up, and I’ve found that Austin’s policy of “constantly keep your house in order” (with major code cleanup on a monthly, not yearly basis) results in us being able to get a lot of cool things done without being held back.
Finally one direct result of code cleanup is often performance. For example, under the old code we really had two rendering engines. One handled DSF and ENV scenery, and the other handled airports, superimposed on top of them. Each one knew how to draw a bunch of triangles. Each one knew how to decide whether triangles needed to be drawn. Each one knew how to check whether the plane was on top of some part of the scenery (e.g. a runway or the ground).
This was bad for two reasons: first, it meant we spent twice as long working on anything – once for airports, once for scenery, and second, the two engines were not equal. It turns out the DSF/ENV engine, which is newer and has had a lot more time spent on it can out-perform the old airport rendering engine. This was an issue for 840 but is an even bigger issue for 850, where we want to make airports much more realistic.
By merging thet two and using only our better engine for both, we not only clean up our code, but airports render faster immediately. I do not have final stats on this, but the speed improvement is variable – anywhere from as little as 10% faster to as much as 50% faster depending on the view angle, airport chosen, visibility, etc. So even if you end up turning off all of the new 850 visual features and go for speed, 850 should still be an improvement.
