X-Plane 10.11 Is Final (and the upcoming releases)

50 comments on “X-Plane 10.11 Is Final (and the upcoming releases)”

1. I’ll venture a guess that there would be more community participation in OSM updates if everyone fully understood the workflow. Might be a relevant theme for a screencast.

2. Hi Ben , 3 things please

   1) Water-
   where/ how exactly can we as users suggest and submit water changes correctly?

   2) Autogen-
   Can you say if all or some autogen will come in the beginning of beta releases, or not until 10.20 is finalized quite a way down?

   3) Plugin loss vs elminating memory loss tradeoff-

   Any idea how third party acf authors are progressing with 64bit?
   *meaning once 64bit beta is rolling, will the amount of time and planes loss of function be less of a burden in terms of having to stick with 32bit for many months more in order to keep acf vs choosing to get all the 10.20 features and autogen but with less planes perhaps? ( * IF i am correct in that theory)

   Thank you much,

   1. 1. That’s a bit beyond the scope of a comment. I’ll see if I can find a good link to an OSM tutorial.
      2. We won’t delay beta 1 for autogen – we want to give plugin developers more time. So my guess is mid-beta.
      3. No idea. The headers have been available for a few months now, but the link materials and sim are not, so there is a limit to how far plugin developers can get.

      1. True, technically more than “a” comment, but they all seemed relative and on my mind.

         sorry, but for clarification- In regards to your #2 comment reply, why would developers need more time for autogen? Don’t you guys just drop art assets in. It would be great to shell out some sky scrappers, fix the US suburban homes from each non US continent etc early on in betas to give us a taste of more realism from the start or in waves of release from start to finish of 10.20 if possible. we are eager for nice looking urban areas, especially waiting since 10.10 did not release them.

         Thanks much,

      2. I thought the plan was to release new autogen with beta 10.20 ?

         1. It is. But we’re not going to hold off the BEGINNING of the beta period for 10.20 for the next autogen drop. If 64-bits is ready before the next AG drop, we’ll start the beta first so plugin developers can work on 64-bit ports, then drop in the AG mid-beta when it’s ready for beta.

      3. About point 1… If I change water definitions in OSM, when will be available for XP10? Because, I think, it must be an upgrade of world meshes…

         1. We don’t know when they will be available.

      4. I’ve spent a few hours this morning adding some lakes and other bodies of water in the OSM database. I’s not all that difficult (just time consuming), although I still haven’t figured out hoe to tell OSM to put an island in the middle of a body of water yet.
         I checked the current OSM data and just like you said, only the lakes that are already in the OSM data base are cut into the DSF in X-Plane 10. So, if I’m reading you right, the next time you cut this specific dsf, the lakes will magically appear? Pretty cool if true.

         1. That’s the theory. We’ll take a new export of the planet file and thus grab your water.

            1. I’ve spent quite a bit of time the past few days working on adding lakes in Southeast Alaska. Once you get going, things progress at a fairly fgood pace, but I have a question regarding placing rivers in OSM.
               Rivers can be drawn as a line, and then designate the line as a river, stream etc…. Will your algorithms read these lines as water and then cut them into the dsf? or do we need to actually draw the banks of the river/stream and designate the body of water a lake?

            2. The rivers need to be areas.

3. @XPlaneOfficial Updating… Thank’s guys 😉

4. I have my Linux 64 bit ready for testing as soon as the beta build is ready for testing. : )

   Thanks to the devs for making this available for the many platforms and bit versions.

5. Has there been any progress on the plans for distributing new airports? Is Robin accepting new airport scenery and distributing it, or is the only way to get populated airports to hope someone at the .org makes it available for download, and search manually?

   1. Still only the org. I will post here when there is news.

      1. You might answer the same, but this is a slightly different slant…is Robin able to accept ATC taxiroute data yet for inclusion into the master apt.dat?

         Thanks!

         1. I _think_ he is, but I am not sure.

            1. Ok, thanks. One more thing…will custom scenery be destructive to the master apt.dat ATC data? Example: if the data is in the default apt.dat file but a custom scenery pack without ATC data is installed does the custom take priority like scenery does currently?

            2. Custom Scenery always trumps default scenery. If the default scenery has a fancy ATC taxi network and the custom scenery does not, X-Plane will see that you have none and auto-generate one for you. No other way would make sense since the custom scenery and the default scenery may be nothing alike. Now if you (the custom scenery author) know that the airport pavement has not changed and has the same runway and taxiway layout, you can simply copy and paste the ATC data into your custom scenery and voila!

6. Hi,guys!
   Glad that the 64bit version is close to release. 🙂
   Could you please tell me if advanced ATC and AI (i.e. more AI planes, stars, sids, vfr,…) is still under development? Any plans of adding airport “life”, i.e. vehicles.
   This would add so much more realism to the sim.

7. Do you think that maybe Outerra might be able to interface with xplane or vice versa. They are also working with OSM data to render in their engine as well and it’s looking quite good. http://outerra.com/wfeatures.html

   1. If it can be slaved to external data, you might be able to drive it with a visual – driving a visual with camera position is usually straight forward with any flight simulator with data IO. There’s no built-in integration between the two of any kind.

   2. Makes me think of what Austin originally said will revolutionise with XP10, the so called “built up from straws of grass”. Certainly not easy to implement but seriously jaw dropping:
      http://goo.gl/ezgKv

      Actually reminds me of the work Austin put to the new 3d clouds tech:
      http://goo.gl/GxEgl

   3. Once Brano has the Outerra/Anteworld SDK up and functioning, depending on how deep the data control permission gets, one could conceivably drive the camera in Outerra around using the present position data in X-Plane. X-Plane would be the flight dynamics system, Outerra would be the visuals. This is all well and good when you’re flying. But when you want to taxi on the ground, the idea goes to pieces because the collision mesh in X-Plane is not going to line up perfectly with Outerra. Outerra is gorgeous beyond words when it comes to visuals, but the systems modeling is going to lag for years. I suppose a hack between the two sims could be worked, but it would likely be inefficient ….at best. I have misgivings about X-Plane 10, to be honest, but to be fair, I think Ben & Co deserve my patience.

      Ben: Big time kudos and thanks for addressing the OSM hydrology data for the US. I noticed that a few years ago you were actively working with the US data and perhaps some sort of port to OSM. Is that still in the works? It just seems like if everyone just goes after their favorite body of H2O there will be chaos and the update will be sketchy at best. That’s the problem with crowd sourced data. No control. OTOH, if the whole NHD dataset could be merged at one time by one team – hopefully overriding duplicates – that would provide the best solution prior to the scenery recut.

      Thanks for all you guys are doing. Some of us, myself included, may seem a bit unappreciative at times. But in the end, there’s a lot to like, a lot to love, in whatever the latest version of X-Plane that happens to be on my cockpit system!

      1. Re: NHD … I’m not sure what the status is now – there was discussion on the talk-us list last week. The problem is that the NHD has newer data than the extract I got a while ago, so I think people want to use that newer data.

8. It’s good to know 10.20 will be running on 64bit architecture.
   Do we need to uninstall our current x-plane 10.11 in order to switch to 10.20?
   Or 10.20 will release a separate .exe to install?

   1. No. When 10.20 comes out, you’ll simply get a second EXE from the installer, and you can run whichever one you want (32 or 64 bit).

9. I know there are very good reasons not to talk about “future features” but I feel it would be good to outline what XP10 is _meant to be_ when it’s finished, or, the other way around: what we’ll not see in XP10.
   There are so many scopes that “need” work and I’m sorry to say that progress is rather slow in term of the whole picture. The last year brought a lot of important tuning, optimization, stabilization, some nice little features etc. – but basically it’s, well “the same” like it was one year before.
   Don’t get me wrong, this is no rant – I like XP10 the way it is! But I’d also like to know what it is intended to be in – well – two years or so. I think it would help people and 3rd party developers making decisions (and maybe regret them;).
   C’mon, what is Laminar’s glass ball telling you?

   1. The magic 8 ball says: “Reply hazy, try again”. 😉

      Here’s the problem with announcing what we DO NOT intend to do: we don’t really know. We know what we are NOT going to do in the next two major patches, but that is a very short time frame, and as time goes on, we’ll figure out which features to drop in next. If market conditions change, we’ll use that flexibility to get users what they want faster.

      I can say this for third parties:

      1. don’t wait for additional rendering tech, use what v10 has _now_. Most of our effort is in making what we have now go faster, and we think we’ve already taken a pretty big step forward relative to v9 in terms of what is possible.

      2. 10.10 is meant to be a stable base for aircraft development.

      (Re: point 1, to everyone asking for rendering feature X, we have heard you, I just don’t know how soon we’ll get to it, or which version it will be in.)

      Cheers
      Ben

10. Hi Ben,

    Thanks for all the work you guys are doing on Xplane. Lately i’ve been amazed at how good it actually looks already. I noticed little things being added on in recent updates, such as signals along rails, traffic lights, signs and all sorts of other fun stuff. I do remember seeing a picture Mathijs Kok released of a train crossing a while back when XP10 was being released.. i wonder what happened to them, since i haven’t seen them in the actual sim yet. It’s not important for a flightsim.. it’d just be fun to have them 🙂

    Another thing i was wondering is whether it’s possible to run XP10 in stereoscopic 3d (horizontally interlaced, specifically). I know that most stereoscopic 3d drivers (IZ3D, Tridef) work with directX, but maybe there’s a way to make it work in OpenGL and offer it as a feature in one of the menu’s? It’d look so amazing in Xplane, i’m sure!

    1. I’m not sure what happened to the level crossings. Alex is a train fan and really wanted to get them in, but this is the problem with preview screenshots: sometimes an art asset isn’t quite ready for prime time and stays in the vault, only to show up later. This is why I am always wary of pre-release screenshots. In the run-up to v10 users were just going completely nutty looking for every last pixel on scenery packs that were still radically changing.

       Re: stereoscopic, I don’t know of any OpenGL drivers that do stereo on consumer level cards. If you find a white paper email it to me, otherwise it’ll have to wait.

       1. Thanks Ben..

          Here’s a link that might get you started on stereoscopy in OpenGL.. it looks like it isn’t too hard, but what do i know 😉

          http://www.gali-3d.com/archive/articles/StereoOpenGL/StereoscopicOpenGLTutorial.php

          There are further links on that page.

          Hope that helps..:)

          1. And here’s some more 🙂

             http://cs.anu.edu.au/~Hugh.Fisher/3dteach/stereo3d-devel/index.html

          2. ah yeah – but see the card list?
             ‘.. nVidia Quadro, ATI Fire GL, …’
             As far as I know, the ‘native’ GL stereoscopic API is supported only in the high-end CAD cards, not the gamer line. 🙁

             1. Hmm.. that’s kinda sad.. I’ve been reading around a bit more, and it does look like there’s no driver support for stereoscopy from OpenGL. Then again, according to some people you can work around that: here’s a quote from an article:

                ‘Every other line on the screen is polarized differently. So in order to produce a stereoscopic image, you don’t really need a driver. All you need is the good old OpenGL stencil buffer, as explained here. You then render one eye with all even lines masked out, and then another eye with all odd lines masked out.

                This worked well, and we were soon able to get some basic stereoscopy working. It only took a couple of hours of coding. I only wish this coding had not been necessary on a machine that came littered with 3D stickers and pictures of 3D pirates on the box!’

                from: http://grenouillebouillie.wordpress.com/2010/11/19/budget-stereoscopy/

                That should work at least for interlaced stereoscopy (which i think is fast becoming the prevalent technology).

                Anyway.. i’ve been playing 3d Xplane 9 on my LG Optimus 3d phone just now, and all it did was fuel my fire to see Xplane 10 in 3d even more, since it looked amazing even on a 4.3 inch screen! 🙂

11. for the water and OSM Problem, I’m not sure the source of the problem is only in OSM. The post “Where’s my water” clearly says: OSM is the only source of water body data in X-Plane 10.

    My “water” is in OSM but not in Xplane. Just look at Ottawa in OpenStreetMap. The Ottawa River is there. Clearly missing most of it in Xplane, almost all the way to Montreal (almost 100 nm of river missing!!!)

    meh
    15 years ago I paid 90$ bucks for a Flight simulator that was crappy graphically but had “my water” in it. Now I paid 90$ for one hell of a good simulator but “my water” is not in it. I guess we can’t have everything can we ? 🙂

    Patrick

    1. I think your water will probably come back. 🙂 Besides the issue of data missing in OSM itself there are, as I have posted before, two other issues:
       – The data in x-plane is older. So unless you have checked the map from July 2011, it is possible the water has been added to water _since_ we last took a planet extract. For populated, highly mapped areas, this is unlikely but possible.
       – I do think there is an import bug, something I need to address in recuts.

       1. I think there was most likely an import bug somewhere Ben, as the bay south of Sydney YSSY Australia has been present in OSM for as long as I’ve known. Long before July 2011, but the area is filled in with fields in XP 10.

          So a recut from OSM isn’t scheduled until 10.30?

          1. Yeah – I think there was an import bug too – I just don’t know what happened.

             A recut isn’t “scheduled” at all. It’s something we want to do, and will get to after we get 64-bit out the door.

             1. How am I supposed to sail on my water now !?!?!?!?!?!?! 😀 :-D.

                I’m sure all things will be all good very soon 🙂

                thanks

12. Hi Ben,

    Just wondering if you could elaborate a bit more on what you mean by ‘better autogen’?

    Is this performance enhanced, or is it buildings relevant/related to certain regional locations?

    Cheers

    1. By better autogen I mean more variety of buildings. The buildings are _not_ regionalized (we are still only aiming at a consistent set of autogen for one regional style) but the variety of buildings will mean more appropriate architecture for cities. Performance should be unchanged – autogen perf improvements will come with rendering engine tweaks.

13. Any news on new things to implement in XP from OSM, guys? It would be so cool to implement for example existing footpaths, FERRIES (mapped sea routes in OSM), churches, graveyards, schools, parking lots, hospitals, oil cisterns.

    Once you think about it you get overwhelmed with just the thought how totally mind boggling it would be to have that sort of actual life like detail in XP. It certainly would take VFR flying to new heights.

14. What about the low fps because of the clouds and ati?(I’m in linux, I don’t know if this affects Windows too)

    1. I think we’re still a little behind on Linux performance because pinned memory isn’t working. I don’t know if or when this will be fixed; it may depend on ATI.

15. I really like that you guys have invested some time in making the sim more approachable to novice flight simmers like myself. I find the 3D cockpit mode very usable with a mouse, letting me easily switch between using the mouse as a joystick and as a means to change where my avatar is looking. I also like the quick scenario set up menu that appears at the beginning. My biggest gripe with previous versions was the lack of a simple interface like this.

    I hope that you continue spending effort towards polishing the interface. It makes the experience that much better.

16. ATT and water runways –

    Quite a few of my scenery packs have airports with both land and water runways such as Juneau and Ketchikan Alaska for example. I’m in the process of creating custom ATC plans for them but I’ve noticed that most of the time, the land based aircraft try to taxi to the water runway.

    Is there any way to tell the ATC engine to ignore water runways? FWIW, my plans DO NOT provide taxi routing or runway routing for the water runways.

    If this is a bug, I’ll file a bug report. If this is a “Missing feature”, then I feel it is important enough to address it in a quick patch.

    Thanks.

    1. PLease file a bug!

       1. Thanks, Bug report sent.

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