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Happy Thanksgiving!  X-Plane 10 is now out the door, and over the next few weeks I’ll post on a number of topics.  But for tonight: that burning smell is our five download servers pushing 100 mbit each and not even coming close to meeting the demand for X-Plane 10 demos.

We are working on this now, and over the next few days we will get more servers into the pool.  But first we are going to analyze traffic and try to find the most efficient way to deploy our available bandwidth given such high demand.  Hopefully over the next few days we’ll be able to improve overall demo download times.

The demo is 2 GB and a lot of you have fast pipes, so it’s going to be slow going for a bit no matter how many servers we throw at the problem.  If you can run BitTorrent, you may want to give it a try, but we are definitely working to make a straight demo-download a viable option.

 

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.

30 comments on “That Burning Smell”

  1. Why not just throw it out on a CDN like Cloudfront or Akamai or something? Let them deal with the scaling.

  3. Ive been following this blog daily for 2+ months now, both intrigued as a lifetime MSFS user ( as in since a kid, playing version 2 ) and as a former openGL programer. I downloaded the demo today, and want to share some feedback. I am sure you will get more feedback then you can handle, but I can feel that as a compact and humanly connected company you are keen to hear what your users experiences are, and with that wordy into:
    I have a 6 core AMD 1055T & a 768MB GTX 460, and after playing with soooo many settings on the demo today, I basically only get usable frame rate if I turn texture quality to medium/low. In this case, the textures are far more blurry than in XP9.
    I imagine graphics memory is a big necessary for this version, that tipping the scales to higher resolution textures forces data through the bottleneck of the 16x pci express bus. No matter the settings, frame rate, the GPU does not pass 60% usage, and that only happens with 16x & 8x antialiasing. Also no single core on the CPU goes past 80% with and average of all 6 cores at 30%. Its a bit daunting actually, as moving towards usable framerates – > xp9 looks better, even on a fairly good computer.
    The exception is the clouds, which are just phenomenal! I could fly through them forever.
    Curious why flying into a pink cloud makes everything go the the same washed out grey?
    Curious why the ILS boxes and the Ctrl-P Path seem to be a lower resolution than the screen resolution ( white chunky pixelated )
    When I set global shadows on to low, and the time of day becomes ‘day’ the entire ground becomes a flat grey texutureless surface ( all the way to the horizon )
    Also, the next step of a rural land class autogen for the housing layout would both make things appear far more realistic in the country, but also spread out your dense housing to allow for fewer empty roads everywhere… ( as in the farm house )

    Thank you for all your amaizing and hard work… I hope these days are celebratory. I did want to share my raw impressions though, to help your flourishing efforts.
    A

  4. I got 1.76gb in 90 minutes before it ground to a halting 23kb per sec then only 213mb over 6 hours, so I closed it, I’ll try again tomorrow.
    Many (if not most) got bad torrent downloads, so I don’t know if that is the way to go?

    Past that, my thanks to you Ben and everyone at Laminar, we do appreciate the work on our behalf, no doubt your lighting system is the star of the show,
    any ideas when the new WED will be released and many are chomping at the bit to get started (including me) at fixing up and adding scenery….

    1. Our priorities are something like this:
      1. Put out fires with downloads, installers, and other “must run” issues.
      2. Work hard on performance and rendering settings and old driver issues.
      3. Get the new tech out to third parties.
      So new tools hopefully some time in december, but maybe late in december depending on how much perf work we have to do.

      1. Sounds like a full few weeks!..You love us really Ben.

        Thanks after Christmas/New Year for WED would be really great, we are very lucky, I can’t think of any business that is closer to its customers, this blog has been a wonderland sometimes and that we both are tune with each other for the same goal…
        Now about XP11..”I would..”

  5. After 14hours downloading the torrent version of the demo I tried opening it up on my Mac.
    The app won’t open. I’ve read there is a permissions fault in the torrent file but I don’t know enough to fix it.

    Apparently it’s only the 38Mb app file that has a problem. I’ve tried ‘updating’ from the website but that seems to want to download all 3Gb (not good at the moment!)

    Any suggestions?

    Cheers

    XG

  6. Why not upload the demo to usenet/newsgroups, its free bandwidth. And how about removing the 10 minute time limit if an XP9 disk is in the draw, at least till release day.

  8. You can rent a cool servers with a high bandwith for example for Europe area (servers located in france) for a really good price at http://www.ovh.com/fr/serveurs_dedies/.
    For example server with 10 Gbps costs 200 e per month – its really cheap. I’m not working for the OVH company, just using their services.

    I’m a huge fun of yours product and know what pain it is to wait for a demo one day to download it. And you can rent it for example for one month when you have a lot of traffic.

  10. Thanks for the demo, it’s great! downloaded via torrent and sharing it now. Just a question: what is the france_vfr directory in custom scenery? just a dsf and a large txt file.

    1. france-VFR is a MISTAKE by me!!! i screwed up – when I cut the torrent, I had a test file that the France VFR guys sent me (to test compatibility between their add-ons and v10). So I have accidentally torrented their wokr to half the planet. 🙁

      I think with the 1.02 patch we’ll have the updater remove the mistaken files.

  11. Concur on the BitTorrent idea, Ben. This is one area where peer-to-peer is going to shine, maligned as it is in other ways. I didn’t even see the option on the main download page…I’m so used to installing/updating with X-Plane tools. Another user pointed it out to me, and instead of a 24 hour plus experience, I was able to download in about 12 hours. This is with a completely non-optimized torrent configuration. Other torrent users are getting much better results. The seed/peer counts are very high.

    Awesome job. Thanks for the early X-Mas present!

  12. The long wait time for the download was well worth it Ben!
    8 hrs.

    This IS the Sim to have, superbly done, can’t wait for my disks and V10.5 🙂
    Congrats to ALL involved!

  13. Graphics and terrain detail for VFR flight is beautiful! One thing I’d like to see rectified in the infant ATC though is this: It’s unrealistic to hear “N1234, fly heading 044” If it’s possible to round headings to the nearest 5 degrees, would be a lot more realistic. Shouldn’t be such a big thing to fix for 10.1/10.01, whatever…

      1. Another similar thing worth fixing is the lack of an initial altitude in the IFR clearance. Now it says e.g. “Cleared to KSFO as filed, climb and maintain FL350”. It should be relatively easy to make it say “Climb and maintain 5000, expect FL350 10 minutes after departure” (U.S. phraseology) and maybe issue a departure frequency, if any. Other than that, the basic infrastructure seems well in place. Looking forward to seeing this thing grow. In the meantime, fixing my ill mobo and getting V9 content transferred over.

        1. Hi Ilari, those kinds of clearances are very specific to local procedures. Some airports don’t need to issue a step climb, others do it religiously. As the system grows we might be able to add specific handling on a per-airport basis but for now I just kept it simple.

    2. very very future thing to work on would be running all the voice files through normialization and some heavy compression ( as in audio compressor ) the volumes jump all over the map for each word.

  14. Thank you very much for this demo!

    I’ve downloaded via torrent and it was very quick. I think the fs community is quite appreciative of this demo after reading these developing posts, and seeing the screenshots, and videos!!!!

    However, and I know that’s probably not what you want to hear, I think I must be doing something wrong. I read all the posts pretty much on the developer blog, about X-plane 9 vs 10 performance etc. I could hardly run X-plane 10 last night. I pretty much fought with it, and could not get over 18 fps, with the following system:
    i7 core
    Windows 7 Pro 64 Bit
    24 Gb of RAm
    ATI Radeon HD5870

    I have very old drivers installed. Maybe that’s the case, and maybe also, I should not have had FXAA AND regular AA turned on at the same time. But basically, it looked like a slideshow as soon as I had clouds. I will definitely try to update the drivers to the latest Catalyst (mine I think are 2 years old), and play with the FXAA settings.

    Now, It would be really nice to understand what some settings mean:
    like the “overlay” shadows vs. “static” and something like “3d Bump Maps”. The context screen that pops up in X-plane 9 to explain the settings are not there in version 10!!

    Other than that, I enjoy the lighting and the water reflection of the sun. I wish I could have flown last night, and not fought with settings….

    thanks again, and hopefully I can manage to find some guidance on how to configure it to run smoothly!!!!!

    thank you
    PAtrick

  16. Just something to add to the todo list for the next torrent cut: The current binaries for both MacOS and linux are missing the executable flag. Just need a “chmod +x” to fix ’em

    1. Hi Gary,

      Perms are 755 on Mac and Linux dirs in the torrent source. We think the torrent client did the chmod for us, killing executability. 🙁

  17. Allrighty.. 🙂 By the way, my boss nearly crapped his pants when he first saw your work in action.. keep it going 🙂

  18. WOW! Loving vs 10. Depth perception is immensely superior. Flight dynamics, to me, seem night and day better. My historically accurate plane from version 9 now looks historically accurate with no tweaking yet. I wish you guys mega success and thanks.
    Downloaded torrent in about 4hrs. Windows version. Hung at 99% but finished and worked. Will there be a retail version? If so when? Again WOW!

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