A few random items in no particular order…
- Comments to the dev blog should be working again – sorry about that. WordPress hoses the file system permissions every time we update the anti-spam plugin (which is very important btw – WP is a spam magnet) and as usual I forgot to fix it.
- The dev blog (and news feed on the main site) are slow because of the social networking plugins. I’ll be poking at this a bit next week when Chris gets back. We do have a cache on the blog, but local browser cookies can interfere with it.
- If you’re running OS X 10.5.8, have a decent machine (e.g. at least a few cores or a DX10 or better graphics card), etc. and you are going to run X-Plane 10, then you should update to at least OS X 10.6. 10.5.8 is missing some key OpenGL driver extensions, and the system memory allocator is really bad in the multicore case.* (I spent part of today making 10.6 my main OS and 10.5.8 just for testing because I can’t work with the poor allocator anymore.)
* For X-Plane 9, we put a third party high-speed allocator, “NEDMalloc” into X-Plane. We will not be doing this for X-Plane 10. All of the modern OSes (modern Linux, OS X 10.6/10.7, and Windows 7) contain high quality system allocators, and having a second allocator “layered on top” lowers our total memory capacity, which we don’t want to do.
So Windows XP and Vista users will stay with a lower efficiency memory allocator?
Correct, here’s why. To “fix” the multicore issues we have to layer an allocator on top of the system one – this chews up a bit of memory since both allocators hold onto some reserve. So by not layering, we allow users to get the absolute best performance by running a newer OS.
And PPC systems that cannot run OS 10.6?
Dunno but it doesn’t matter. PPC systems are bottom of system requirements and come with at most 4 cores. They’re not going to be able to run enough “stuff” for the OS to matter.
Hey Ben, since we are talking about etc 😉
I had a question regarding the new global illumination system – most specifically, how it handles color casts over surfaces like OBJs and aircraft. As an example, the effect of the sunset on white surfaces.
Thanks!
The sunset casts non-white light on white surfaces even in version 9! 🙂 try it – you’ll see the lit side of the sunset go a little bit yellow or pink right at dusk.
I don’t know if the ambient levels will be further tinted in v10 – that depends on what our artists do…