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…are greatly exaggerated.  I was out of the office last week on vacation (for the first time in 2.5 years) and didn’t bother to post first.  Austin and Chris were also out on vacation for at least a week each.

We are not dead, we are not out of business, and we are definitely not stopping development of X-Plane 10!  Austin has been working on X-Plane since approximately 1637 (well, the 90s at least) and he is not going to stop now.

Stuff We’re Working On

I am still working with Alpilotx and others on DSF recuts.  This work is moving forward, but my side at least is going slowly because I am also working on other features that are pre-release and have not been announced.

I also had some time to do some OpenGL modernization over the last two weeks before vacation.  This code does not directly improve X-Plane, but it sets us up to improve performance: once we have more modern code we can get access to newer GPU features.

Upcoming Releases

At this point I am looking at two releases:

  • Some kind of short-beta release to roll out new terrain textures, some of the userr-submitted lego-brick airports, and possibly a few small bug fixes.
  • Then a long-beta release, where we could put a major feature or two, and also ship code that needs more serious testing (e.g. the OpenGL modernization).

Over the last few years that I have been working on X-Plane, the time between major patches has been steadily increasing.  Back in X-Plane 7 or 8, we might have a major patch every three months; with X-Plane 10 that interval is more like six months.  I think this longer time between major betas is good for X-Plane 10:

  • It lets us run longer 8-week betas without being in beta perpetually.  This gives third party developers more time test.
  • Fewer larger patches means less work for third parties, since a major patch means retesting add-ons.
  • X-Plane 10 is a much bigger product than X-Plane 6 – it needs a longer development cycle.

Still On Fire?

The other factor making it seem quiet around here (besides slower major betas and the occasional time off is that we are finally moving out of fire-fighting bug-fix mode into doing structured development.  When we were fixing bugs in X-Plane 10.0 as fast as possible, a bug fix was followed by a beta and announcements as quickly as possible.

Now that we have a stable 64-bit build out, we’re writing code that looks to build the future of X-Plane, rather than just fixing its past.  So the quiet you hear now should hopefully turn into good features in the future.

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.

52 comments on “Rumors of My Death…”

  1. I’m really hoping that you guys would consider putting either X-Plane 10 or the next version X-Plane in the Mac App Store. I understand the concerns about bandwidth caps, but it seems like you should be able to make the United States or Europe a default region at a lower price, and offer the other regions as In App Purchases. Heck, Logic Pro X has 35GB of in-app downloads available, it seems like X-Plane could effectively go that route. I just loathe the idea of requiring physical CD or USB key to verify that I own what I own, and have resisted purchasing X-Plane 10 because of this.

      1. Wow, I must be missing something that happened here? It seems to work well as a distribution strategy for a lot of folks.

        1. Hi Kenneth,

          Don’t want to speak for Laminar here, but you should search “X-plane lawsuit”. Sad but true.

    2. I do have the physical DVD, have not looked at it since I installed X-Plane. Why? Running Linux, made an ISO-image I linked to and thus facking a DVD-player. Not having a DVD player in my PC it was my only option. So, I would like to receive X-Plane 11 direct over the internet or by USB-key.

    1. No – as far as I can tell, dual GPU should in theory already work if you go mod the driver profile for X-Plane to support SLI/crossfire. But I am not sure, because I don’t have one of those cards. If you have a 7990, try setting it to AFR rendering and see what happens.

      1. I’ve installed the latest driver (13.8) and the Catalyst Application Profiles. I can’t see any settings for modifying the driver or enabling AFR. Is it turned on by default for X-Plane?

        1. Answering my own post. I’ve found out how to modify the profile now and turned on AFR rendering. Before this, only one GPU on the 7990 was working as revealed by GPU Shark. Now both GPUs are working and run at 37% with x-Plane. My frame rate has doubled. Looking at some of my more demanding sceneries I think that the card is faster than the 7970 it replaced, by around 10-20% at a guess. I think that is all I’m going to get out of it for now unless AMDs drivers improve or X-Plane changes in some way.

          1. Hi Roger,

            Ah good – I’m glad one of us knows how to turn AFR on. I don’t have a 7990. Re: the improvement, AFR should only help you when you are fill rate bound…for my 7970 this basically happens when I put up heavy clouds on a high res or SSAA. If the GPU isn’t maxed out before (e.g. you are CPU bound from shadows) then the 7990 won’t help.

        2. I think it is not turned on by default; I have no idea how you set up X-fire or SLI in the driver control panels – only that it is supposedly possible.

    2. or fix the current one. so it doesn’t tell you to taxi to the active runway 5 secs into the take off roll after the atc gives you permission to take off. and if you don’t abort the takeoff it cancels your flight plan. this one seems to occur randomly and when it does you just go in circles on the ground. or the more known issues such as the atc directing you into mountain and if you navigate to avoid hitting the mountain or to go around a storm ect. the atc screaming your off course and then canceling your flight plan.

  7. Hope you didn’t find too much dust in the office on your return. Where’d the cat go?

    1. Funny you should mention the cat. The baffles on my office window-unit air conditioner are torn, so the air conditioner is installed in the window with cardboard + duct tape to block the extra space.

      The cat pulled off the duct tape and turned it into a cat door over the week I was gone and apparently enjoyed a week of freedom. To thank me, she left a small dead bird on my office floor as a token of her appreciation. Can’t say she’s ungrateful. 🙂

  8. Nice to see you back Ben.

    Hope you had a wonderfully refreshing X-Plane free (ish) break.

    Oh…and I’m certainly glad X-Plane is NOT sold at the Mac App Store.

    Cheers

    Dom

  9. Dear Ben, it cracks me up to know there have been circling rumours about your death just because you had an vacation. Thats just insane lol….

    Anyway, just have to ask about certain features I know the public are waiting for now that 64bit is stable!

    1. Will we see seasonal textures with the new texture set you mentioned?
    – Guss a huge new customer base will apear when that comes to x-plane

    2. Will we see an option for selecting night hdr textures without having to set HDR?
    – Reason being that XP in my mind (personal taste) looks better without HDR during the day, but I would love to have night features!

    3. I see ProSim http://prosim-ar.com/ now aim to make dedicated plugins for there software and X-Plane, are you guys aware or in anyway adaptable to this?
    – This will in my mind make cockpit builders more friendly to adapt X-Plane as their simulator base!

    PS.. Welcome back

    1. Hi Tom,

      1. No. Albert’s texture set update updates various natural terrain land classes from their old v9 definitions.

      2. No, because there is no such thing as a night HDR texture. The night textures that exist are used in both HDR and LDR. Any lighting you see in HDR that is not present with HDR off are happening from real 3-d lighting at night; these lights cannot be drawn without HDR mode on.

      3. I have not been contacted by prosim, but I don’t think we need to be ‘adaptable’ to them; the X-Plane plugin SDK is available to everyone, so they should be able to simply write plugins.

      Cheers
      Ben

    2. If any sim software was *ideal* for simulator cockpit builders, it’s X-Plane. With active SDK support by guys like Ben and Sandy Barbour, and the insane amount of extensibility that one can create in plugins and custom aircraft permits the user every opportunity to match ‘pit hardware to the software. When you add SASL to the mix, it’s just too easy, even for non-C/C++ programmers. I’ve looked at sim options for FSX and others (sorry!) but those are completely bogged down in complexity and lack of support by the primary sim developer (Microsoft). Thanks, Ben, for all you’ve done in the past to help the crazy folk, er, the loyal hobbyists building cockpits in their den. Or basement. Or garage. Or wherever she-who-must-be-obeyed will permit! 😉

    3. Hi Tom

      What prosim is for the 737.. http://www.airsimtech.eu (AST) is for the A320.. real prof. software
      It has come up a few times at there support forum about making the software working with XP..
      Only reply… AST is hooked up to FSX via FSUIPC.. And have to be recoded to work with XP… and that is not in the work….
      Have not tried to use XPUIPC and AST…. Maybe this can work….

      henrik

  10. Welcome back! Hopefully, you shouldn’t need to wait another 2.5 years for your next well-deserved vacation…

    As far as OpenGL modernization is concerned, might this mean the API logjam may to some degree be ameliorated? That alone could improve performance enough to leave some “headroom” for eye-candy, or perhaps more aggressive rendering settings. I realize this will be no small feat to accomplish.

    In any case, I speak for the multitude of users that truly appreciate you hard work.

    1. There’s no API logjam.

      What there is is a lack of access on OS X to UBOs (constant buffers in directX terms); we do think that moving to constant buffers may lower CPU costs for drawing.

      Also, the current code is not 100% threaded-driver friendly on Windows. I believe that API cleanup _will_ fix this. Plugin OGL code may defeat the win though.

  11. Hey… Welcome back to work! I thought this was happening because the lack of activity, Over the holidays? Where? Nice?

    Regards

  12. Hi Ben,
    I’m no OpenGL Expert at all, I barely know what it does. But I was curious to know, if this modernization will consist mainly in a code cleanup, maybe to apply recommended coding practices that were not followed in the past, thus making future engine developments easier, or if there will be some more in-depth modification, maybe replacing old, deprecated calls with more recent equivalent methods?

    thanks!
    filippo

    1. We’re finally ripping out the fixed function code…in v9 it was necessary to support older hw. In the long term we want it gone so we can use GL3 and GL4 on OS X.

  14. Hi Ben,

    Very funny post, made me smile , not to mention some of your replies about cat etc. .. 🙂

    I think you are going to execute me but I have to ask, I know it has been asked many times before( I asked myself probably 3 or four times starting many moons ago).

    Autogeneration, I hate to say that but putting aside all the scientific details, area around Philadelphia and New York City looks pretty much the same as it had when I purchased X-Plane version 10.

    Isn’t the look in this area the most important BEFORE tweaking HDR settings and all the features you guys introduced so far since version 10 was born?

    I hope I am not the only one being concerned about that and I hope you will forgive me one more time for asking the same question. 🙂

    Good to see you back and you definitely deserved that vacation.

    Cheers , AJ

  15. Ben,

    Will the scenery recuts you mentioned work towards the larger DSF tile that will assist in pushing out the visible geometry distance?

    1. DSFs aren’t getting longer – visibility distance will work by having a larger number of DSF tiles loaded at once. So visibility range isn’t tied to recuts!

      1. Ah. Good, that the scenery doesn’t need a complete makeover for longer view ranges, but uncertain about the larger loads….that take time. 😉 And with Al’s spiffy high res tiles…oy vey!! 😀

  16. Ben:
    Now that this is behind you, any plans to revisit the AC 3-D plug-in? It has been an awfully long time since we have see any improvement in this.

    Thanks

    2. What functionality do you think is missing that you need, Jim? I found some stuff just recently that I had *no* idea was available. It was dependent on the selection mode…..some things for surfaces, lights and stuff.

      1. The X-Plane Object Properties could do with some work to prevent the massive slow downs in AC3D when normal geometry is selected. (Normal as in not a rotation or translation)

        Normal map support might be nice, as well as any other features needed for scenery creation to bring the AC3D plugin in line with the blender tools.

        1. There’s one serious hitch: AC3D lacks the fundamental 3-d editor features that Blender has. There are a handful of specific OBJ features that were added late in v9 that are not part of the ac3d UI editor, but then there’s the serious problem that ac3d doesn’t have native animation, native normal map preview, baking, non-destructive editing, etc. 🙁

  17. Hate to be the guy who always goes here, but….. now that we are clear and far into 64bit zone… any chance that we will see an increase in .dsf view distance to 100 mi for those with plenty of ram? That plus the current planet render on clear days at FL380 would stomp the competition. (p.s. still loving the 3d planet render to 100 miles and how it looks, now if only we could get some 2048, or 4096 _nml maps……JK)

    1. Yeah – in 64-bit we’re going to grow the loaded DSF size so we can support higher visibility. Not sure when we’ll ship that though – probably not in the next update.

  18. Kind of curious about one thing.
    X-Plane 10 is a rather new product (for X-Plane lifecycle). It was supposed to be mostly new code (and some things from ground up). So what the heck is OpenGL modernization? Wasn’t “modernized” already and with eyes in the future?
    I mean I would expect a post like that (the OpenGL part) somewhere in vX.90 development cycle getting ready for major version X+1.
    Maybe you can clear this a bit?

    1. This modernization is setting the ground-work for _future_ development.

      We could get all of the GL features we needed for X-Plane 10 using a mix of GL 1.x and 2.x. The parts of the sim that have to be fast are all shader based, but for example the UI still runs using GL 1.x fixed function rendering, and the sim uses 2.x uniforms (because it has for the last five years).

      To use GL 3.x on Mac we have to drop 1.x, because Apple doesn’t support ARB_compatibility. We didn’t have time to do this before, but now I’m finally getting to some of the work of moving off of 1.x permanently. (This work also couldn’t happen during 9.x because v9 supports non-shader hw.)

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