HOWTO: Use Command-Line Options in X-Plane

Normally you just double-click X-Plane to launch the sim. But X-Plane 850 has some hidden command-line options. We provide these for in-field debugging; if you hit a problem such as a bad video driver you can trigger special options within the sim that aren’t exposed in the settings dialog boxes.

Macintosh Users:

To run X-Plane using command-line arguments, you must launch X-Plane using terminal.

1. Open the utility “Terminal”; it can be found in the Utilities folder (within the Applications folder). Terminal gives you a command-prompt.
2. Drag your X-Plane application into the terminal window. The command line will list the names of all of the folders leading to your copy of X-Plane using / for directories. All spaces will be preceded by \ characters.
3. Delete the extra space at the end and add the following to the command-line:
   

   Contents/MacOS/X-Plane

4. After the word X-Plane you can include command-line options.

Here is an example from my Mac:

/Volumes/GIS/X-Plane\ 8.50\ RC-3/X-Plane\ 850\ RC-3.app/Contents/MacOS/X-Plane --no_sprites

This would launch X-Plane 850 RC-3 (in the X-Plane 850 folder of my hard drive “GIS”) using the –no_sprites option.

Windows Users:

To Lauch X-Plane from a DOS prompt you will have to…

1. Pick “Run…” from the Start menu. Type cmd (3 letters) for the name of the program and press return. This will open up a DOS prompt.
2. Type cd and a space and then drag your X-Plane folder into the DOS prompt window (the full path of the file will be typed). Press return. This will move your command prompt to the X-Plane directory.
3. Drag the X-Plane application into the DOS prompt window. You will see its full name in quotes including the hard disk and directories separated by back-slashes.
4. You can then add any additional command-line options.

An example from Windows:

"X-Plane 850 RC-3.exe" --fps_test=1

(It is necessary to change directories on Windows to make sure that Log.txt and other files are put in the right place. On Mac these files always end up in the X-System directory.)

Linux Users:

X-Plane can be launched like any other command-line tool; you may need to prefix it with ./ if you don’t have the current working directory in your search paths. For example:

cd /home/bsupnik/X-Plane\ 8.50\ RC-3/
LD_PRELOAD=/usr/lib/libalut.so ./X-Plane-i586 --fps_test=1 --require_fps=20

On my distribution (Ubuntu with GNOME, stop your snickering!) it is not possible to simply drag the application into a terminal because the spaces in the file paths will not be properly escaped.

Command Line Options

Generally X-Plane command line options have full names and two dashes. Some require parameters, as in =1. Order does not matter and you can use as many options as you want. Some examples (simplifying the application name, which varies by version and OS):

X-Plane --no_sprites
X-Plane --fps_test=2 --no_pixel_counters

Rather than document the options here, use the –help option to list all command-line options in the current version of X-Plane.

Some Typical Examples

A number of drivers crash when X-Plane uses VBOs, particularly on Linux. If you can run every application except X-Plane itself, you may want to try:

X-Plane --no_vbos

Some drivers cause texture corruption when hardware-accelerated runway lights are used; you can work around this with:

X-Plane --no_sprites

EDIT: the Windows version won’t show the –help string in the DOS window by default, but StormRunner pointed out to me that you can do this:

"X-Plane.exe" --help | more

which routes the output to the DOS window.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

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