X-Plane 10.04 went final yesterday – as always there’s one bug that gets by you. In our case, “solid” cockpits (cockpits that constrain the camera so you can’t move through walls) are inoperative.
At this point it looks like we will do a tiny micro-patch to make 10.05 that fixes this and puts some new strings into the app. Honestly if we didn’t have string changes, I’d probably wait for the next real patch for the cockpit fix, but I believe that it is a low risk change if we must cut the app anyway. The main goal of 10.05 is to get the language just right in some of the dialog boxes for the next set of DVD masters.
The amount of change from 10.04 to 10.05 will be very tiny – comparable to 10.04 rc2 to 10.04 rc3 – literally one or two lines of code changed total.
In the meantime we are working in parallel on the next big patch.
Work on 64 bits is underway – I do not believe it will be available in the next big patch, and we have not specified any date (soon or far away). Simply put, I am staying out of the business of release dates for work like this. Our internal estimates have huge margins of error, due to the many unknowns of the process, and I don’t think we make anyone happy by saying when the feature will be available and then being wrong.
Who Will Use 64 Bits
When X-Plane or the installer checks for updates, it sends an identifier (called a “user agent”) to the server. This is a standard part of HTTP and all web browsers and web-communicating programs do this; our servers (we use Apache, like most of the universe) keep a log of the “user agents” calling in, which can tell you what web browsers and other programs are requesting web pages.
Here is an example of two user agent strings from a real access to our web page:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2
As you can see, Safari and Firefox are both identifying what version they are and what operating system they are running on. This means the website owner can tell how many people are viewing with older browsers or tablets/mobile phones, and optimize the layout of the site accordingly.
Here’s what X-Plane looks like when it calls up our web server:
X-Plane 10.04r3-3-IBM6.1_64
For as long as we have had auto-check-for-update, X-Plane has include the operating system in its user agent string, just like web browsers do. This means that we can tell the approximate operating system split by looking at the user agent strings on the server.
With X-Plane 10.04 we have moved to the more complete string you see above – in particular, it includes whether the version of Windows is a 32 or 64 bit edition. (The above string comes from Windows 7 64-bit. Why Windows 7 is versioned 6.1 is beyond me. The extra “3” is an indication that the user has a full global edition of the sim – this is a paying user running on Windows 7 64-bit.
So I can tell you that at least for users who have updated to 10.04r3:
- The platform split for full copies of X-Plane remains about 63% Windows, 32% Mac, 5% Linux.
- Among full-copy Windows users, about 85% are on a 64 bit Os – that is a surprise to me, but a good one – it means a lot of users will be able to utilize the 64-bit port. (Among demo users it’s about 75% 64-bit.)
Uh, What Do You Guys Do With This Information?
Not much. We didn’t actually set out to do a hardware survey – rather we put a user agent string into the installer when we first wrote it, because it’s required by the protocol. Apache logs user agents by default, so it was only after running the installer a while that we realized that we could “mine” the log for platform information.
We do not:
- Try to correlate these user agent logs with customer information in any way.
- Archive the logs permanently – as anyone who admins a web server knows, the logs get very big, so the server keeps a few weeks of records, then throws them out. Our only change from the default Apache config is to cut down the retention time because our server gets a lot of traffic.
- Send any personally identifying information in the user agent string or otherwise. The server logs incoming IP addresses, but this is not part of our installer – all web servers know the IP address of the incoming requests; logging them at least temporarily is necessary to be able to identify the source of a web attack should one occur.
Hi Ben!
Will try to be clear as english is not my native language.
I was wondering if you plan to get some “airport autogen” in XP?
It would be great even to only have generic stuff for airport, those are desperatly flat…
Depending on runway lenght, AI would put adequate airplanes, for example small buddies performing touch and go at local field… That would be great I think.
An other thing is about old things of XP that would be great to upgrade also, especially all the sounds (engine, winds, thunder…). I don’t remember those have ever been modified since XP5, or not so much, and frankly speaking those sounds feel really outdated on such a modern flight sim…
A last thing. I have set all the quad values in *.for files at 2, but still, there are trees rendered with only 1 texture, because if I’m not mistaken, XP uses the quad values as a maximum number for rendering trees, depending on settings, distance from aircraft position, etc. Could it be possible to have an option to force the use of quad numbers set in the *.for files? That would give better visuals especially for small hardware configurations with low trees density setting.
Thks for your great job! The 10.04 is running well on my old MacBook Pro (2009).
Cheers from Belgium…
Hi Dave,
Re: autogen airports, I don’t know yet. It was on the todo list for 10.0 but we ran out of time; it will depend on whether we get technology that looks good and also how quickly people start to manually populate airports. My main concern is that it might annoy people if we autogen airports if the placements look bad. For the very simple airports, we could autogen but this isn’t the big interesting ones.
For the forests, I don’t think we can change that right now…forests eat up a ton of memory, and the lack of the second quad is usually X-Plane trying to save memory. Maybe in the future but right now when the memory budget is super tight I think this is not safe.
As for why Windows 7 is 6.1:
It’s based on Windows NT lineage. NT was used as branding in the NT 4. Since then Windows changed branding a few times…
Windows 2000 was really NT 5.0.
Windows XP was really NT 5.1 (it wasn’t very different).
Windows Vista was really NT 6.0
Windows 7 is really NT 6.1
Windows 8 will be 6.2 (surprising since it will support ARM among big changes… you’d think they would bump to 7).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT
Actually it… scares me a bit that a company with 85% Windows customers, doesn’t know these things. Don’t get me wrong, but this 85% just gives me the right to whine a bit more about shifting development to pure Windows/DirectX platform. So there you have it: At least start developing this thing ON Windows (even if you don’t shift architecture to DirectX etc., which is not like flicking a switch, sure). It is only fair, it WILL give better code results to the main source of your income. It’s a bit… insulting to ignore that fact.
There I said it.
Sorry meant 63%.
And you are not insulting 37% of X-Plane users, are you ?
The question about Windows versioning was a joke, not a serious inquiry.
He can’t be serious can he, only a windows version?, X-Plane was created on a Mac and one of the benefits of X-Plane is that everyone can use it, if that is what NLS wants then fly MSFS and with only its WindowsOS problems…
“My main concern is that it might annoy people if we autogen airports if the placements look bad” … I don’t know how much worse things can be than they currently are right now?
That sounds like a dare! 🙂 Seriously, imagine a wrongly placed autogen terminal blocking the taxiway you need!
Seriously…even that would be waaay better than about 19,999 empty airports. I’d even prefer Autogen-Airports over Autogen-Cities, if I had to choose.
Little idea…why don’t you aka. LR make a little poll, just so you get the view of your customers and can optimize your priorities? 🙂
OffTopic: We are the 85 percent! 😀
No really, I’m looking forward to utilizing my 64bit system with X-Plane.
I can’t deny that there is a very vocal portion of the user base that wants algorithmically placed generic airport buildings. But I am not one of them. Even manually-placed low quality building objects tend to make me delete packages. If this implmented, please make it a turn-offable option in user settings.
agreed, generic un realistic airports for the major cities/ intl airports that we all know would be a fail. It is great that developers are cranking out packages of high quality. I foresee by the end of the year and this time next year we will have a great deal of nice looking custom airports.
Surprising that we XP 10 adventurers are an advanced lot? Surely not!
i pass my regards to the team;
please also bearing in mind – we need a new meshtool to improve landscapes – mesh etc etc.
If Windows is 85% in using 64bit then what would the Mac percentage be?, It has got to be higher than that?…
If it balances out in the 90% region with the Mac percentage being higher then that is a very high percentage of users that can benefit from 64bit.
major areas of benefit?, I read that reading and squashing of high custom scenery numbers (lots of objects) will be improved making it smoother in loading and viewpoint.
The change from b10.04rc2 to b10.04rc3 was huge from my point of view, I am still shaking my head at many of the frame rate returns i am getting and yes it is very stable, so was it a small update…no way but the biggest since the release of XP10
“I read that reading and squashing of high custom scenery numbers (lots of objects) will be improved making it smoother in loading and viewpoint.”
I don’t know what this means exactly, but 64 bit will _not_ improve the smoothness of sim loading in any way. 64 bit only does one thing: it lets you get around memory limitations.
What I am saying Ben is that if you have a big 250mb+ scenery file installed, as you move around your viewpoint the computer then stalls slightly as it absorbs all the objects if they are all concentrated in one area like say the heavily populated object areas of like LAX Terminals and Tower, but then mostly runs fine in lower density object areas like the Cargo Terminal, so does the 64bit allow you to process this information quicker to get around this issue…I usually find the frame rate will drop and then recover a little as it redraws the screen…
No. 64 bits does not make any information move around any quicker. It only gives you access to more memory.
I think 10.6 is the first “real” 64bit version of OSX. I don’t have the exact numbers but I think it would mirror Windows in having a strong majority of users running a 64 bit operating system. I see very few users running 10.5.
Mac stats: of paying customers running X-Plane 10.04r3, 70% 10.7, 30% 10.6, < 1% 10.5. Good thing too, 10.5 has funky drivers. (For example, FXAA just doesn't work on 10.5.) But 32 bit hw can run 10.6 and 10.5 can run 64-bit apps. 32-bit macs are all old though - they don't need 64 bits to max out hw.
So, when will the 10.04 update be up for grabs??
It is out now.
looking forward to the next big patch vs minute 2 code line patches, hopefully the time frame isn’t many weeks or months between updates, real bummer
You will be pleased to know that just now I wrote 8 lines of code!
touché good ben , hope more ocean and cloud texture/ shading is in the next patch
The de-facto standard hardware survey in the game industry can be found here : http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey .
PhM
But are Steam’s users the same as ours? I think we may be a bit outside the games industry demographically.
It seems to me that X-Plane users are playing games as well, otherwise they would not be comparing X-Plane rendering to other games rendering. X-Plane users also seem to be aiming at high end machines to get the most out of it, which brings us to the same game machines configurations again.
PhM
Will you support 64 bit linux also? I hope so as that is what i use till i have enough money to get me a mac
yes. We are doing 64 bits on all 3 operating systems.