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Happy New Year!  I will try to get a few more posts out over the next few days; we spent a lot of December with our heads down trying to fix as many bugs as possible despite the chaos that the holidays always inflict on any company.

We had a slight fire-drill with beta 8 last night; it turns out it crashes on Windows, so we pulled back to beta 7.  X-Plane 10.03 Beta 9 will come out today and fix the Windows crash and 1 or 2 other issues.

Right now we are “pushing” betas to everyone; this is not the norm and we will go back to the normal process (where users opt in to betas) once the 10.03 beta process completes.  Since 10.03 has so many stability fixes, we want to make sure everyone gets them.  We’ll lock 10.03 down before proceeding to additional performance tuning.

For December I had four things I was trying to work on: stability fixes, backward compatibility, performance enhancements, and third party support.  I was only able to make progress on some fronts.  At this point we have most of the hardware support issues stabilized and we’re close to closing up the crashes.  (There is no short term fix for running the sim out of address space unfortunately.)  We’ve done some performance tuning and a lot of analysis, but a lot of the work to act on the analysis is yet to happen.

The front where I made no progress is in third party support.  So starting this week I am going to try to dedicate one day a week to some kind of third-party-only activity, whether it is getting out the docs on the new v10 authoring features, getting out scenery tools, etc.  We have a lot of “almost ready things” and I don’t want to keep authors waiting.

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.

39 comments on “RIP Beta 8”

  1. Happy new year! Thanks for the regular information on the progress. Looking forward to upcoming enhancements, esp WED 1.2…

    Regards,
    Heiko

    1. Are you kidding me. Microsoft is going the free (i.e. pay-to-play the real game) route with their simulator. I mean I halfway suspected it and joked about it with their “Birds fly for free so should you” thing. But I was really expecting to be flat out wrong. So I wonder how much it’ll set you out to get at least as much as you get in FSX. So much for hoping Microsoft would knock one out of the park too.

  4. X-Plane 10 is absolutely incredible! Thank you for all the hard work, support, dedication, and mocha chai triple shot lattes. ( Did you run out of espresso while coding the beta 8 joystick calibration? ) This ‘sim’ has been amazing to experience, fly, tweak, and fly again. I have had plenty of WOW moments. -> One was driving in the morning through the rugged mountain valley where I live in British Columbia, and noting that the sky & clouds were as fire orange and beautiful as Xplane. Congrats! I believe you are now the only whole-world commercial flight sim!

  6. happy new year and good work guys! are the nvidia cards graphic artifacts also considered “hardware support issue”? they just crop up anywhere, like a pointy pixel going all the way in a triangular form to infinity in the space sometimes even slowing down framerates …weird

    1. I think _most_ artifacts on NV hardware are driver related – try the 280.26 or 290.xx drivers. The 285.62 drivers give us a number of weird problems. There are also some corrupt geometry bugs I am still working on.

      2. I rolled back my NVIDIA driver from 285.62 to 280_11-1.
        The “curtains” (or whatever the technical term is) have not
        reappeared so far. First blush looks like a hit on the GPU use
        but cannot prove that. Card is GTX470. Will watch it.
        Frame rate good at around 40 with middle of the road settings.
        So far so good, but will hope the latest driver will one day work.

        Thanks for the updates.

        Chuck

  7. Thanks Ben, and happy new year from Sydney. Hopefully the past few weeks haven’t been all work.

    As Heiko’s mentioned already, the updates are gratefully received and WED 1.2 (especially if it supports ATC taxiways etc) will be even more so.

    Al.

    1. WED 1.2 is high priority…Chris put a lot of work into the ATC system but you can’t fully leverage it until you can build ATC data.

  8. Happy New Year to the crew, yes the improvements are happening, It has been a fun ride but very exciting…
    One question with WED 1.2 Ben, will it or in the future can you implement OSM map within WED, just an outline would all that would be needed, the reason is that it would be a huge advantage in making sure they both airport scenery and OSM mix correctly (no cut off roads etc,) also it would be a huge advantage for placement of scenery, city buildings and so forth….as I noticed that where OSM and airport scenery worked together the effect was simply amazing, where as not working it looked a little blank…thanks

    1. No OSM in WED 1.2…the 1.2 feature set is pretty much locked down. Once we have 1.2 out the door, then we can look at stuff further down the line.

  9. hey ben,

    1. does this mean much more attention to performance/ framerate tuning is nearing?

    2) any idea when the memory address will be fixed in parts or in full

    3) bugs, do you envision working on the list of less significant but still important functional/cosmetic bugs such as ;
    a.boxes around bomb craters, b. carrier catshot situation launching immediately. c. dark gray cloud appearance while flying inside in which the cloud opacity/colors do not match the sky and time of day?

    Thank you much

    1. 1. We are already paying a lot of attention to performance and framerate. It’s what I spent most of my workday on.
      2. No time schedule on 64-bit. It’s too early to make time predictions for public consumption.
      3. Please don’t use the blog to ‘ping’ on filed bugs.

  10. Good stuff Ben.! Congrats to you and the team. It’s all starting to come together.

    I second the WED 1.2 Scenery tools; lets us 3rd party people get our hats in the ring and help flush out all the airports for Xp10.

    Example – I have some XP10 scenery I’m working on, and would love to put the finishing ATC-touches on it. (Images found here http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?showtopic=55935 )

    Sorry I used .pol’s instead of .ter’s for now (and .png instead of .dds, but hey – it’s still a beta so far). I will promise to use .ter files for the final release. -Grin-

    – CK.

  11. Happy New Year!

    Three things:

    1) Have power-line-towers-stepping-where-they-shouldn’t-be (like ON roads) been fixed yet? It messes with much of the realism in low-attitude.

    2) You need a MORE COMPLETE X-Plane 10 site. The site now is like 1/10th of the X-Plane 9 site (ok maybe 1/3rd is more realistic).

    3) You need a COMPREHENSIVE and public, beta changes log. Also it is 2012… make a better (and actully updated) wiki already! (actually the change log should be there)

    1. 1) That’s Ben’s court but no I don’t think he’s fixed that yet. There still remain higher priority issues.
      2) What exactly do you “miss” from the old website? I think the general consensus was the site had too much info that wasn’t getting read or applicable to anyone.
      3) Where have you been? 🙂 http://wiki.x-plane.com/Beta Seriously though, I can’t blame you for not being able to find it as I don’t think it’s linked anywhere visible but people have been passing the link around since we released DVDs.

  12. Hey Ben i had been running Beta 7 with frames running 50-60 30-40 with 3 layers of clouds. Now with beta 9 that down 20-28 in with the clouds and 48- 52. Im running a I7 980 cpu with an ATI 6970 2GB video card. I mimic’d my renderings from B7 and reset my prefs. Is there a reason the performance dropped so much. And is it possible to go back to B7? Or maybe the fact that now there is only one tweak instead of three for the clouds? Maybe the ability to tweak again would be nice. Was running 40 40 30 % clouds beta 7 now i can only put it at 30% with less performance.

  14. Hi,

    since Beta 9 XP crashed several times. Screen freezes with scenery (airports and cities)
    Before Beta 9 XP worked very fine.

    Regards.

  15. Hi Ben,

    Keep up the great work and of course Happy New Year!
    I have a few comments on Beta 9.
    1. Rendering options in Beta 9 are reduced compared to Beta 7 and performance in general dropped compared to Beta 7. Is it possible to give us back rendering options for clouds and even possibility to run on classic antialiasing?
    2. Snow on runway is basically the same as on XPlane 7 and really sticks directly out in the eyes compared to the rest of the scenery which in XP10 looks really great.
    3. Whe flying in dusk (almost completely dark) if I turn aircraft from the sun (heading 90) cockpit becomes lighted compoletely as it is noon.

    Best Regards.
    Nenad.

    PS. My configuration: i73930k, 4.2 GHz, GTX 580, 8Gig ram, Windows 7 64bit, X79 Sabretooth LGA2011

    1. Hi Nenad,
      Please file bug reports (e.g. item 3) on the bug report form, not on the blog!

      For rendering settings, we are unlikely to add back more cloud settings. The goal is to have a simple trade-off of quality and performance for the clouds that works well for a range of hardware with most users.

      For anti-aliasing, the standard FSAA option should be present if HDR is off. FSAA doesn’t do anything if HDR is on.

      1. With respect, Ben, less control is not “more.” Listen to your user base. We lost some cloud control in 9, and that left a lot of people that were very happy with the way things worked out in the cold and ticked off. We waited for XP10 to get this control back, and now you’re telling us to go fish again. The smart man doesn’t cut out features, he adds them. If you want to give users with sub-par equipment a means of tweaking clouds in a way their hardware can handle, a menu option for “easy controls” is fine. But for those of us that demand the most from the product we paid a helluva lot more for than X-Plane 9, we want to keep ALL of the fidelity that was originally available. And that means the original cloud controls. That way it stays a sim and does not veer in the direction of “game.” Optimize the way the code works, not the way it’s controlled. That’s taking a quick, easy path. Sorry to be adverse, I have a lot of respect for you and Austin. Do the right thing.

        1. Hi Steve,

          Underneath the rendering settings are the “art controls” – you can edit these directly if you are so inclined, via DataRefEditor – they give you control over the clouds (and other things) far beyond what we ever had in the rendering settings dialog box.

          cheers
          ben

          1. So what you are saying, my friend, if I read you right, is that the values that used to be accessed via the render settings could conceivably be accessed now via plugin. If so, then resolving the mass user uproar should be straightforward for an enterprising individual….. am I correct?

            Thanks. That would be one form of “the right thing.” 😉

          2. Almost. I am saying that the lower level rendering controls are mostly accessible via art controls (which are plugin writable); some may not be. But:
            – They are _not_ the same as what was in v9.
            – They are subject to change.
            Remember, this is the tuning of the engine – if the engine changes its _algorithm_ then what you can tune changes.

            So yes, there’s a huge potential for tweakability, but caution is advised.

      2. Hi Ben,
        thank you for your answer! I fully understand why you need trade off concerning rendering options in XP10 in order to achieve optimum performance of XP10 for most of the users, BUT please as Steve pointed out don’t leave us with high-end computers without options to get most of XPlane as simulator. I think that adding Advanced settings button(option) in rendering options should not be that hard and it should make even us with “special” needs happy.
        Concerning option with DataRefEditor I don’t want to become developer to get to the extra options. I just need options within the XPlane. Please don’t understand me wrong, this is just friendly suggestion.

  17. Have ported my custom NY Airports into FS10. I find that all my facade-built fences are now only visible from about 100 meters or so. This short view distance must be a result of a change to the .fac files created by your conversion process? My originals specify 1000 meters as the view distance. The current settings destroy the look of my airports.
    Question: Will WED 1.2 provide all of the functions of both the Scenery Editor for selecting and positioning .obj and .fac artifacts, as well as General purpose standard objects such as cars, lights, etc.etc? The processing of scenery files ported from XP9 seems to be handled as a conversion process each time a new scenery tile is required.
    When WED 1.2 is released, is there some way in which a converted file can be handled by WED 1.2 (which I assume will itself produce fully compatible files when used to make airports or other scenery from scratch for XP10.)??
    Video Card:
    My Video Card (Nvidia GTS 450 – 1GB-PCIE 2.0 16X) operates quite well at about 45 frames per second with medium cloud settings and medium scenery complexity.
    I have a 3.1 GHz AMD 64 3 Core Processor and 16 GB Main Store on a Gigabyte 770 UD3 Motherboard providing the power. I am getting some of the Blue Grey Sky darkening overlay on the screen on occasion. I will check for a Driver upgrade and see if that helps. Otherwise I am encouraged by the present capabilities of the XP10 as it stands. I am running W7 – 64Bit and executing XP 32 Bit code, of course.
    Hope to see WED 1.2 and its specs/instructions soon. Would be willing to do some testing or help in some other way if you can use my help.
    Best Regards and Thanks Bob Marsh

    1. 1. If you haven’t done so, please file a bug re: facades and include a small test scenery pack! I have a few open facade bugs, but incorrect LOD isn’t on the list yet I think.
      2. Yyyyyes – WED 1.2 will edit both library and custom OBJs and FACs. I’m not sure what you mean about conversion here. Perhaps you think X-Plane is doing something that it is not doing?

      1. I thought that perhaps some of the format specs for .fac and other files had perhaps changed in XP10 and were being converted to their new form as they were being loaded. The load process at initial X-Plane 10 load up is significantly longer than its corresponding load in XP9 and I thought that perhaps making compatibility transformations at load time might be the reason.. and perhaps a source of some of the bugs like the one I have filed on .fac behavior.

        1. Hi Bob,
          The v10 fac file is extended, but the read-in is still near instant. But I think what people are seeing are just bugs, so please just file a report and I’ll figure out what’s up.

          The long load time is typically the road grid being built and autogen being placed – in both cases X-Plane does a lot of work to turn the vector data into real 3-d locations on the fly.

  18. You have the full set of data in the bug bucket.

    Just one further comment about .fac files. When you implement the 1.2 version of WED that does the first establishment of any facade , the first instance of a named .fac as an object establishes the height of the facade in the DSF for all facade instances of that name that occur in that scenery package. The Windows Scenery Editor for XP-8/9 is supposed to select this height from the content of that named .fac file from the second factor in the SIZE spec. For the Windows scenery editor it actually sets the height to the FIRST factor. I do not know if the Apple version makes this same error, but I assume it does not, because most of your scenery designers must be Apple users. Everything else works the way the spec describes, and you can see that this comes up with some rather different than expected results in the case of facades of lengths different from heights … the simplest form of which are my fences. If you know what the situation is, you can work around this but it would be really nice to have it corrected and if this code is somehow embedded in WED 1.2 unchanged, it will continue to present a problem to Windows Scenery developers.
    Best Regards
    Bob

    1. Hi Bob,

      I’m afraid I didn’t follow _any_ of what you have posted here. But this is also the wrong venue.

      Please file a bug – otherwise the report is basically lost. Please try to describe what is going on as clearly as possible, using very specific descriptions of any file format attributes, programs and versions, and exact technique to reproduce a problem; I suspect I do not understand what you have posted because you are referring to some parts of the scenery process by names other than what I expect; more specificity will help!

  19. Have been using ATC and have some (helpful) comments and suggestions relative to ease of operation subjects. Is this a current permitted discussion subject?

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