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If I had a dollar for every time I saw this question asked on Facebook, forums etc I’d be richer than Warren Buffett. I have to say though, I can’t really blame people for asking because our track record for releasing news has not been stellar but that’s changing as we improve our online front. Stay tuned for more news on that!

You have to understand that it is not as if we’re keeping the release date a secret, it’s that we don’t have a hard date set at the moment. I will reiterate that we’re all working really really hard. This is not a 9-5 job where you punch in and punch out and go home and forget about work. We’re all pretty much chained to our computers most of the time because like you, we REALLY want X-Plane 10 to go live as well. It’s going to be a great step forward for the flight simulator community.

So when is it coming out? When it’s ready and not a moment sooner or later! Trust me, you’ll be the first to know when we have updates to share.

About Chris Serio

Chris is an electrical engineer and commercial pilot who got roped into software development by Ben because misery loves company.

60 comments on “When is X-Plane 10 coming?!?!?!”

    1. Probably not for v10 – usually it is _years_ between when the first scans for a new DEM acquisition tech come down and when they are fully processed and ready for application use.

    2. I was doing work experience with those guys last year when the second satellite went up, from what I saw as far as schedules is that it could be a couple years before theres general access to it.

  4. I’m already hearing rumours that you’re starting to plan some amazing things for Xplane 11!
    When will it be out? Will I still be able to use my version 7 planes?
    🙂

  5. I was actually hoping to get a release date on X-Plane 11? And could you confirm the rumor that simulates tachyon rays, cures cancer, and includes a perfect duplicate of my childhood home?

  7. While you are fine tuning Version 10 can you release a beta demo for us to fly? I wouldn’t mind paying for it if I had to.

    Jaye
    Seattle, WA

  8. Please make it easier to program your joystick. On X-plane 8 and 9 it takes forever to program your joystick and half the time it doesn’t even take. Why don’t you make profiles for X-52 joysticks?

    Jaye Seattle, WA

    1. I agree the joystick/keyboard settings can use some cleaning for sure…but I’m not sure i can think of a way to make it FASTER. Do you have some suggestions?

      1. It is the lack of any profiles for common joysticks which is an issue. Having some pre-defined joystick profiles out-of-the-box would make re-assigning keys a quicker since you would presumably be tweaking a few keys.

      2. In a manner similar to the the current “SAVE/LOAD SITUATION” function, provide a “SAVE/LOAD SETTINGS” function to permit users to build a series of joystick and rendering presets

        1. I am surprised that with all the complexity of the code, there is no option so far to save your joystick settings, in my opinion this is very important.

  9. I didn’t want the exact time .. but at least the probability 🙂 like after 2 month or 3 or 4 or even years ?

    So .. the right question ” When is X-Plane 10 coming , Probability ? “

  11. Sure wish news and or screen shots begin to becoming more frequent. Coming up on a month since the neighborhood screen shots. Such a long wait from Sept when v-10 tuesdays began. When the delay was announced, saying “having to push back some number of months & working on a new release date:one that will not be pushed back again.” to me, and many others I’m sure would not generate that to be more than another yearly quarter – half a year; with slow iterations of news and pix. To make up for the track record of the first announcement, a gradual more frequent news, blog, pix would be great. The sim will be done when its ready, it will be great no doubt. Tech takes time, perfectly understandable. Just looking to meet half way. Longer delay we know, for example it would be cool to have a v-10 release of info or shots a few times a month ( not 3-4 weeks+ with nothing), even saying on the fb page or blog , “hey fans, v10 making progress, tweaked ____ feature today,.. having fun with this.. etc”

    Best of luck on the project and can’t wait. Please help the fans not be in the cold

    1. Hi Chris, progress is made every single day on v10. It’s by no means an abandoned project like some nay-sayers choose to believe. We typically post screenshots when we (as devs) create something that we think is cool looking and easy to demonstrate in a few images. Unfortunately, not all of the features that we’re working on fit into that mold. Not every feature has a great “eye-candy” factor to it. So do not associate the amount of screenshots and news with the amount of progress being made.

      Also, Ben for instance is always improving the scenery system but once a screenshot his been posted, several more weeks of work may go into making the feature “shippable”…that is, fixing bugs, improving performance etc. A screenshot several weeks later would look no different than the original but yet a lot of work has been done behind the scenes.

      I will do my best to scrounge up some screenshots in the coming week(s) but for now, no news is good news. It means we’re busy and working. 🙂

      1. Hi Chris,

        good name choice, ha. Thanks for the quick reply and all the hard work you guys put in. Look forward to what you can scrounge up. By no means did I assume v-10 was a abandoned project, quite the opposite. Glad to know a little more of the process behind posting images and the weeks that follow of work until a new one. Hope more and more comes out consistently as months go by.
        Is the likelihood of v-10 being out by summer good?

        1. Hi Chris, unfortunately, my pay grade does not allow me to comment on details such as release dates. 🙂 But I promise that as soon as that information becomes available and is deemed worthy for the public, we’ll post it here.

  12. That’s quite alright, always worth a shot asking. Hopefully well have some time between date release and product availability we we have something to look forward to.And not hanging on hope going into summer and have it be available a week after announcing. So very anxious. Any demos or betas I’ll gladly jump on. Good job.

    Have a good Sunday,
    Chris

  13. I wanted to buy X9 and the website said that free upgrade will be available for 9.xx, cool. Then i found that X10 was coming so the question is if i buy X9 now and X10 come out under 3 month will i get the upgrade for free to X10?
    have fun,
    Pierre

    1. @Chris S.: Actually this is a valid question. I’m switching to Mac Intel platform at this time, and really want to fly. I only used “the other sim app for PCs only” up until now, but wanting to jump into X-Plane right away to fully leverage my new Mac. So if I buy X-Plane 9 now, will I be waiting a LONG time for X-Plane 10 and will you use a price strategy that doesn’t penalize me for jumping in at the end-of-life on X-Plane 9. Or should I realistically just wait until X-Plane 10 comes out? Will that take months or years? Thanks guys.

      1. I’m still not able to give out dates or estimates for v10. I will say however that historically, when you bought XPlane, you got all of the updates and bug fixes for that version for free. So if you bought v9 3 years ago, you’ve gotten 3 years of features and improvements at no extra charge. Once we switch to a new version however, there were typically no discounted upgrade paths. It’s as if the new version is an entirely new product.

        The good news for you guys however is that v9 is heavily discounted at the moment so it’s not as if you’re paying full price for the product. I won’t suggest you buy v9 but I also won’t suggest you wait for v10. That’s a decision that only you can make considering your own financial situation.

  15. Any new news or screenshots on the horizon or release date ideas? Been quite some time since the neighborhood screenshots.

  17. I have to agree with Chris Hallam when he says that’s been a long way since X-Plane 10 has been announced and then delayed. Me too, I thought that the delay would be something around a quarter of year…
    Don’t get me wrong, I really like X-Plane and the work you guys do, but maybe you shouldn’t announce a product (with an expected release date) and get everyone anxious over it, if it wasn’t on a more “finished” state. I understand that perhaps you wanted to keep people interested on your sim, but even from a business perspective, you should be careful how you treat your customers.

    That said, I hope X-Plane 10 delivers what you are planning, when(ever) it gets released. I’ll look forward to it.

    Cheers,
    Victor.

  18. I was just wondering when XP 10 comes out, will existing scenery and aircraft work, like with previous versions? e.x. v8 stuff works with v9 stuff, etc.

  19. Just wondering what the system requirements will be for X plane 10. Getting a 2 year old mac in a bit so wondering if it will run 10 or if I should just get 9.

  20. In x plane 10 will there be other planes flying at the same airport as you and will you be able to have IFR and can they guide you to a parking spot like in real life. Also will there be ground vehicles driving around helping to refuel your plane or helicopters and can you open and park in hangars.

  21. I don’t suppose it’s ever occurred to you guys it really sucks when we’re told xp10’s coming out in November (last year), then April this year, and now we’re being told not until the end of this year (maybe). In other words, probably at the end of 2012.

    Customers lose interest when you keep putting dates back. There are just two good helicopters with 3D cockpits in xp9, and ONE decent freeware jet (AN148) with a 3D cockpit. XP10 is urgently needed, but I have to say putting the date back again and again has lost my interest.

    I don’t care when xp10 comes out now, your reliability is shot. You can’t put a value on that.

  22. NB. XP10 was put back because Austin wanted to raise the bar ridiculously high because “he CAN.” That’s what he said on 18th March.
    What it actually means is that he put the release back another year, in order to make xp10 more detailed than was originally planned.
    Bearing in mind very few users can barely run xp9 beyond more than minimal settings as it is, why create a Frankenstein’s monster which very few will have anything capable of running, and make them wait another year into the bargain?

    I feel he’s lost the plot.

    1. Hi Not_happy,

      I think we can really only demonstrate that we have a good plan for v10 by shipping v10. Until then, I don’t think anything I say will make much of a difference.

      I do not agree with your contention though that “very few users can barely run xp9 beyond more than minimal settings as it is”. Take a look at the user comments to this post:

      http://www.x-plane.com/blog/2011/02/x-plane-hangs-on-start-with-nvidia-cards/

      I see people running at 60+ fps, 100+fps, 150+ fps…–fps_test=3 was the “killer” two yearrs ago…we used to see 20-25 fps on that setting. I think there’s just a really wide gap between new and old hardware since the GPUs turn over so fast.

  23. I think that if in v10 the release will be for pc only, it would be a good idea to tune the compiler switches to generate as much sse2,3,4 code as possible and discard de fpu compleetly. Ive seen how much x87 code gets generated in the matrix manipulations and honestly: no one wants to run xpv10 in a p3 system. Another big, and i mean BIG improvement would be to generate x64 versions. I am sure that v10 will be ready when It is ready, but this minimal changes to the toolchain could boost the performance so much that they are worth the effort. Looking forward to the v10 release.

    1. Hi Hector,
      1. X-Plane 10 will not be for PC only.
      2. Re: matrix ops: did you disassemble X-Plane?
      3. Why do you believe that an x64 version would be faster?
      /ben

      1. @1: with PC I mean x86/x64 hardware, a mac is a PC with mac os on it 🙂
        @2 Ive coded a lot of opengl at my work, from C++ to handpicked assembly and I’ve seen how much x87 gets generated if you dont instruct the compilers to avoid it. SSE execution engines are times faster and because the matrix ops are easy to vectorize they get a big boost.
        @3 I don’t believe is faster, It is faster(measurable,profilers dont lie). Forget about the extra memory addressing, it is not relevant. x64 is about TWICE the amount of registers, doubles that fit in GPR’s, abi that is 16 byte aligned, name it…

        1. Back when Joshua was porting X-Plane to Linux, he did get an x86_64 version running temporarily. We found _no_ performance benefit to the x86_64 version.

          This is consistent with what I have found profiling X-Plane:
          1. Some of the time, we are CPU bound in the driver – that is, the limiting factor is us asking the driver to reconfigure the GPU too much. Changing anything in X-Plane code-wise is going to be relatively moot in this case.
          2. When we spend significant time in our code, it’s usually in the quad tree, and the CPU time profile matches the L2 cache miss profile, which implies that we’re L2 cache bound, not instruction-throughput bound.

          1. Ohhh….sorry to hear that is the case with XP’s code, because when you rearrange code in an optimizable fashion, the compilers can take huge advantage of the “hints” we leave for them, stl for example is a hell to get correctly vectorized , when it can. Anyway, it is nice to hear that at least it is not slower in x64, so when you hit the 2GB malloc/new wall(win32), then you know what to do 🙂

            If L2 is the limit, maybe it is time to get the itanium port ready, remember the huge L2’s it had 😀 H.

          2. Yes, our users are _begging_ for an Itanium port. 😉 😉 😉

            Or I could just clean up the allocation patterns of my quad tree. 🙂

      2. Wow, how could I forget the most important of them all: fastcall only calling convetion.
        Cheers!!

  24. Can’t wait till X-Plane 10 comes out :D! Will this version finally have a good build-in FMC with AIRAC updates and so on? I think that’s an essentiel step to a higher level of realism, more important than cars moving on the ground… Especially people who fly online would like it I think.

    Greetings, Robin.

  25. Hey guys,

    as other members asked- will the v-10 have more realistic airport ground truck movement, traffic, etc. FSX Dream team made an incredible O’Hare Scenery/ with real life movements. any chance to have similar adaptations in v-10?

    also, chris- from feb 13th, found the quote of hoping to find new screen shots . many weeks have gone by in the sense of making something “shippable” can we see new eye candy please !!

    take care

  26. There seem to be a small number of people on this blog who are frankly, big CRY BABIES. V10 will take time, laminar cannot waive a magic wand and instantly create the product. I for one, and I think most x plane users, am HAPPY version 10 was announced, and DON’T CARE the announcement came early. I do, however, wish there was more information released describing the upgrade details we’ll see with version 10.

  28. I am eagerly waiting for X-Plane 10 but I would like to point out to you that in this Sim race there is “MS Flight” also running. Commercially wise if I were you I would be in a hurry, as much as technology permits, to come out of this race first. Whoever comes out with the product first will reap many rewards and have a lead by far. Keep up the fine work you´ll doing but do remember this is competitive world….
    Cheers
    Gera

  29. Is it safe to compare MS flight to X-Plane? MS does state their product as a “game” and from the news I’ve read they’re looking to both keep FSX fans as well as targeting a more diverse community of people that include gamers.. for me X-Plane has never been a game (even though the fun factor is there) but the best and most realistic home simulator out there..
    All I’m saying here is there’s no need for race when MS Flight isn’t a competitor.

    I’m already happy with X-Plane 9, so happy that my app folder is 100gb+ big. Can’t wait to see the new features of v10 but if a few more months is needed to bring us a product that will keep us going for another few years, so be it!

    Thank You Laminar Research!

    Antoine.

    PS: Would appreciate new eye candy and a release note with what to expect in v10 🙂

  30. One year delay it is a unprofessional delay, I would say. Just waiting for the new MS Flight Simulator to match it up!?…..well…lets hope that both will be a stunning simulator, because i will buy both if worth the money.

  31. Look, x-plane is nice game but it’s not a flight simulator. Microsoft flight simulator is much farther. Major problem are planes, they are not developed enough to be used as simulator object. Scenery looks deadly no accurate colours and weather is unreal.
    If developer team from x-plane really want a nice good simulator they must invest much more efforts and knowledge to transfer their game to simulator.
    Good luck.

    1. Fully agree on that! X-Plane has so much potential but developers need to make time for advanced plane models and make a good build-in FMC for example, good 3D cockpits and so on. I really hope, this version will give that reality. But given the pictures of X-Plane 10, I’m afraid that the developers will (again) only focus on the scenery. XP10 should only be released when that reality is reached, even if it takes 1 year.

      I’m curious!
      Robin

      1. Guys I am not sure what do you mean about simulators. All the mentioned things are at least price less for all serious pilots. It is really nice that people from Laminar Research are improving also graphical outfit of the x-plane, but in fact graphics is not the thing, that separates simulator and game. It’s all about physics, avionics and lot off other things that help us to prepare for real flight. If you want to get best scenery, effects and so on, please take a flight with real plane. Finally MSFX is a game. It has absolutely terrible physical simulation. A few months ago I’ve get my B-737 in MSFX to spin around wing axes at 90% of v-max. There is also lot of other issues with avionics. Primary target of any flight simulator is help for pilots to get ready for real flight. That’s the X-Plane.

  32. I’ve used both FSX and X-Plane 9 for several years. Before becoming a Private Pilot I had no idea about how these two sims compared to a real airplane. I can now say with absolute certainty that X-Plane has the better flight dynamics, but it is still only a simulator and doesn’t come close to flying the real thing. Both sims are ok for basic instrument training, but everything else pales in comparison to real flying.

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