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X-Plane 10.10 is compiling now; in theory it should be up tomorrow morning.  Obviously if the build crashes on us before it is uploaded we’ll recut it.

In my tentative list of features from this blog a while ago I forgot to mention that 10.10 has some of the scenery management features I mentioned a few months back during the dev conference in Columbia: scenery packs can be reprioritized or disabled by a text .ini file and they can be on other hard drives.*

To be blunt, I think beta 1 is a little bit gooey and underdone in the center.  I think there will be a big difference in quality between the first beta and what we have 1 week later.  The main bugs we are interested in early on are regressions, e.g. things that worked in 10.05r1 but do not work in 10.10b1, especially with third party add-ons.

Two notes on bug reporting:

  1. You do not need to re-report bugs that are not listed as fixed in the release notes. We try to post long, detailed release notes so that you don’t have to waste your own time repeating bug reports.  If it isn’t listed, it means we haven’t gotten to the fix yet.  Beta 1 does not fix all bugs we know about!
  2. Please do not post any bug reports on this blog.  Please do not  post bug reports on this blog even if you have also filed a bug report.  Please only file a bug report on the bug report form.

I am going to be a complete bastard about that second point.  If you post a bug report as a comment, I will delete it without reading it.  If you do this multiple times, I will ban you.  We really need all bug reports to go to a single place.  When they go to the bug report form:

  • One person initially reads all of the bug reports.  That means that duplicate bugs are rapidly recognized as dupes, wasting less triage time and helping us understand what bugs occur frequently (so we can fix them first).  When bugs go into multiple places then more than one engineer looks at them and a lot of effort gets wasted.
  • With the bug report form, we control who it goes to.  We can change who reads them if someone is out of the office or overloaded.

So: no bugs in the comments section – it’s the best way for all of us to get to a stable, final 10.10 faster.  I will post links to release notes and the bug report form when the beta goes live.

* Unix nerds: yes, ln -s works on Unix OSes.  The feature here is that aliases and shortcuts made using the Finder/Explorer by non-geeks work too!

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.

15 comments on “Scenery Management”

  1. Hi Ben,

    Great stuff. Just a suggestion, but can you put the link to the bug reporting form EVERYWHERE! People are lazy, and despite having been the X-Plane world since v5 I’d have to search to find the form. A simple link whenever you mention it would, I’m sure, ease the number of users posting bugs in the blog comments.

    As for the work, fine stuff, gooey or otherwise the road is onwards!

    Cheers all,

    Tony

  2. I have a bug report:

    My excitement for this patch made my brain crash to desktop. Is this a known bug?

  3. Ben, two things please.

    1) will there be instructions unto how to to keep scenery packs on a different drive /ssd for users?

    2) in the late june post you said that roads in 10.10 will not shoot up anymore; great. I am just wondering does that mean that current OSM data roads are fixed only, or is it that 10.10 will have more up to date OSM data? I ask because there are still not fully or close accurate areas of roads in some areas.

    Thanks

    1. 1. We avoid providing clear instructions about how to use x-plane because we don’t want to ruin the mystery of the product!

      2. We have not recut DSFs or taken new OSM data. The vertical position of roads is determined by X-Plane (based on the “layer” info from OSM). In 10.05 X-Plane would freak out when it couldn’t figure out how to make all of the layers fit. The new algorithm will sometimes let roads hit each other (particularly if the OSM data is silly) but won’t ever let a road go off into the stratosphere.

      So this is strictly a “how x-plane visualizes the DSFs” issue.

  4. 1 more thing, sorry

    Are any of you running Mountain Lion GM? apparently ML has updated/ better graphics drivers and performance for OSX, would this potentially help X-plane performance or bugs. We may just have to see in two weeks or less

    1. I ran it once to see if X-Plane would run or crash – it ran. I did not run a perf differential. Re: performance, once it’s out someone can run fps test comparisons to get hard data.

  5. I’m not sure – I try to do other things while it happens. Total compile time is less than an hour now per platform, and I do all 3 at once on different machines around my office. There’s more in a build though: packing up the zip files, uploading, mirroring the servers, and a bit of book-keeping.

  6. um ben,i checked x-plane today and i went to about x-plane and nothing because there is no new version
    Did you recut it?

    1. The process of building, packing, uploading, testing, and releasing the beta is not done yet.

      I will announce it on the blog when it’s done.

  7. I think it could be nice to have a read-only access to the bug list, don’t you ? It would probably lighten triaging a bit, and people would see the ongoing stuff too.

    And good news for the incoming version, I was eagerly waiting for it ! 🙂

  8. Ben,

    I know this doesn’t add much to the conversation but thank you for your efforts and many thanks to the rest of the crew……

  9. Ben, please put a link to the bug report form here in this blog.
    Actually, if you type “X-Plane 10 bug report” into Google, you get to this post, and this post doesn’t contain a link to the real bug report form.

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