X-Plane 10.22 Beta 1: Memory for Lua and Landing Gear

X-Plane 10.22 Beta 1 is available now (release notes, bug reports).  To get this beta you’ll need to check “Get New Betas” in the X-Plane 10 Installer’s update screen.

This is a very small bug fix patch; there will not be an art asset update, and we’re only including three fixes that we think are critical enough to release ASAP, as well as support for the latest Xavion iPad app.

I will comment on Lua memory allocation in a separate post.

Landing Gear Problems

Plane-Maker 10.21 has a bug: when you save your airplane, the weight distribution coefficients for landing gear are calculated incorrectly, causing the plane to tilt or lean on the runway.  Astute users noticed that resaving the plane in Plane-Maker 10.20 fixed the problem.

This bug is fixed in Plane-Maker 10.22; if your plane has “the leans”, just re-save it in Plane-Maker 10.22 and the problem should resolve itself.

This bug was always a bug in Plane-Maker, not in X-Plane itself; airplanes whose data was not saved incorrectly would fly correctly in 10.21, which is why it took a while for the bug report to get to us.

Copy Protection

First: let’s agree to disagree re: copy protection.  No one likes copy protection, and we can all agree that copy protection is always imperfect.  (That is, it never avoids annoying users completely and it never stops piracy completely.)  Users who buy products and the companies that sell them often disagree about where to draw the line between deterrence and annoyance.

So please: no rants about how awful DVDs are in the comments section.  The goal of this part of the post is to explain what we fixed so that users who have seen a known bug can have better situational awareness.

X-Plane 10 “remembers” that you have inserted X-Plane DVD 1 recently, so that you do not need to have the DVD constantly in the drive to fly.  Right now X-Plane needs to see DVD 1 (for each product you purchased) every seven days or so.

Every now and then we get a bug report from a user where the process of saving the DVD information fails; due to a bug in X-Plane 10.21 and earlier, when this process fails, the DVD would not enable scenery loading at all and the user interface would tell a global scenery user that a regional DVD was found.  This was very confusing and also annoying (since it stops paying customers from using the product).

The bug in X-Plane is fixed in 10.22; furthermore if the preference-saving process fails we now put up a message for the user to contact tech support; previously it was a small item in Log.txt.  If this preference-saving process fails, we want to know about it and fix it.  (So far the only cases we’ve seen are Hackintoshes with hardware configuration issues and one case of a borked network preferences file.)

Water, Water Eveywhere

There is a separate bug in the copy protection system that I couldn’t fix for 10.22; we’ll revisit this issue for 10.30.  The issue is this:

• When X-Plane needs to see your DVD to get out of demo mode, it tells you after you have started your flight.
• By that time you are on a runway that is all water.
• When you insert the DVD, does not reload scenery; you have to go to another airport and then come back to your original airport to “force” a scenery reload.

This behavior is confusing – X-Plane says “now you can fly anywhere in the world” but where’s your scenery?  We get a fair number of tech support calls about this.  The problem is that if we reload scenery when the DVD is inserted and your airplane is on the runway (in water-world) then once scenery is reloaded your aircraft is underground and your aircraft is destroyed.  So a fair number of things need to change (e.g. when we check for the DVD, what we do when we find it) to fix this use case.  That’s too much change for 10.22 and will have to wait for 10.30.

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.

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