Here is a quick update on some of what we are working on. This post won’t contain everything, as some development efforts are still under the radar, and it’s not a comprehensive list of 10.30 features.
(I am not ready to post a 10.30 feature list yet; please do not comment with “will XXX be in 10.30”.)
The Airport Gateway. That’s what we are calling the website we are developing for sharing lego brick airports. The X-Plane Airport Gateway is under construction and has already reached an internal milestone; when finished it will be the portal through which you can share lego-brick airports with the community for inclusion in X-Plane.
We have decided to provide direct upload to the gateway from WED in the initial roll-out of the gateway; it’s a simpler work-flow and it is what we always planned to do eventually. So there will be a WED release (probably 1.2.2) to match the gateway.
I believe the gateway may go live before 10.30 goes final. (I believe this mostly because I think 10.30 will need a loooooong beta) so at this point we’re looking at how to transfer all shared airports into the gateway, rather than looking at how to release airports without the gateway the way we did in 10.25. We do want to upload all of the data we already have into 10.25.
Autogen. Alex is working on a set of autogen that will greatly improve the coverage, variety, and correctness of US autogen. I do not know when he will complete this task; we will release the work whenever it is ready, possibly in a point release of X-Plane just for autogen. Basically if 10.30 is in beta when he is done, the work will be rolled into 10.30 betas; if it isn’t, we’ll do a 10.35 or something for the autogen. The autogen is basically an art-asset update, so it isn’t strongly tied to X-Plane code.
Bug Fixes. A big part of 10.30 is bug fixes and quality improvements, and a lot of the bugs that we are working on are hard to fix. (If they were cheap to fix, we would have fixed them in 10.22 or 10.25.) Our view of X-Plane 10 is that there are a lot of new features that need tuning to meet their full potential, so we are trying to focus on high quality for what X-Plane 10 does, not on expanding X-Plane 10 into (even more) new territory.
As get some of those bugs fixed, I may post a few “call to test” posts – we are looking to do significantly more private beta testing in 10.30 to get specific features tested before the flying circus of public beta starts. (Please do not request private beta access unless we’re calling for testers. Our goal is to have new features and bugs fixed by people who are specialists in that part of the sim.)
Third Party Interfaces. We’ve built up a number of requests for datarefs, third party interfaces, etc. that we haven’t been able to implement in ‘small’ releases like 10.22 or 10.25. I’m hoping we’ll get through most or all of these in 10.30. I’ll write up more details when we get closer to a public beta.
DSFs. We still need to figure out how we will release DSF recuts, but they should be ready when 10.30 is; pretty much all of the work for the recut is already done.
I’ll post more on the 10.30 beta process in a few weeks when we get closer to it. As of now, the basic coding work for 10.30 is not yet done, so while we have some code to test, 10.30 is not “in the can”.
Just a little notice for AMD graphic card users – 14.2 beta 1.3 (out now) fixes the problems, we had in X-Plane 10 with their last drivers.
Thanks for that, I can confirm that it is working with my HD 7990. The first working driver since 13.9.
You talk about the production cost when debating the introduction of new features and bug fixes. When It comes to new features such as i.e “seasons, winter, snow etc.” Have you considerd asking the community to back it up finacally like “a kickstarter” I know the intent but I would gladly pay for a feature to be included rather than paying an third party vendor for a external program that hugs up my machine.
Investing in our hobby + new features = more fun
So…this is sort of massively off-topic, but…no. I have not considered a “kickstarter” campaign as a way to get more features into X-Plane.
I have considered providing a reasonable interface for third parties to do seasons – in particular, I would like to do a seasonal interface for third parties sooner, so that third parties can do seasonal add-ons. (If there is a real community desire, then doing a payware add-on would be a reasonable business venture.) In the past we’ve deferred the interface because we didn’t have our own art assets, but I think doing the interface sooner would be a good thing for everyone.
Such a an awesome product with such a great community of followers – I for one would be up for it – although living in the rainy UK it is really nice to go flying in the sunshine – but flippancy aside – yes great idea – as they say in Dragon’s Den – ‘I’m in’.
@XPlaneOfficial Hi, first of all I would like to congrats you job! But is it possible to have the snow like in FSX for have realism? Thx
Thanks for this information. It means, that your work on XP continues without stopping. This is a good news. I wish the high performance in your work and high performance results.
Cheers
Youri
Why not sell the entire DSF tile update on DVD for $15 or cost price, and sell the program and license DVD for $45?
Newcomers to X-Plane 10 can buy both, while existing v10 users only need the map updates.
I normally don’t comment on stuff like this, I’m usually the one that sits and reads all the comments asking questions that you said not to ask… That being said, I have some questions regarding the Autogen progress that you mentioned above. When you say new Autogen to fix correctness, variety and coverage, what do you mean by that? Do you mean that instead of seeing generic houses all around the US, we can see more region specific houses? i.e. stucco, orange roof, Lagin American inspired houses in south Florida… Will it correct for tall buildings being generated in the middle of a residential neighborhood? Any answer you can give me would be great!
One more question not related to anything in this post, so feel free not to give any detail if it’s something in the works that you don’t want the publicly talk about… Trees: So many different styles, and x-plane 10 has like 2,3 (correct me if I’m wrong!) Since I’m on the topic of South Florida… Do you have any plans for variations of trees according to the region? For example, palm trees in San Diego an Miami, while cacti and palm trees in Vegas. I know that was a mouth full, but I can’t stress enough my appreciation for all of the handwork put in by the developers and third parties that keep improving X-plane!
Keep up the great work!
-Jared
Hi,
Let me try to define the scope of the project here:
– The autogen set we have is what we call the “US” set, but it’s probably appropriate for the US, Canada, and perhaps a few other parts of the English speaking world; it is clearly not meant to look like Europe, Southeast Asia, India, China, etc. So we call it “US” (hey, I’m an American, you’re lucky I even know where Europe _is_ on a map!! 🙂 but really it’s an autogen pack that has certain architectural styles, road styles, color schemes, etc.
– Within the US set we do _not_ attempt regional differences (and we do not plan to do so) but we _do_ attempt to differentiate between cold and warm climates within the set.
– The US set also has to cover a range of urban densities, land classes, and building height ranges.
So I think the US set will be “done” (and I use quotes because even if a set is done, there’s no reason why we can’t add more variety or detail to it) when we have complete coverage of the land classes, building heights, and climate split within the US. It is not supposed to cover region-specific architecture within the US and it clearly isn’t meant to be a good representation of Europe.
The main work Alex is doing now is on land class coverage and building height, and I believe that these two things are the biggest current problems in how the autogen looks. The current library simply doesn’t have the enough variety (and more importantly the _right_ variety) to cover all of the land classes and building heights we have.
The set is meant to be climate differentiated, and my guess is that in most cases this isn’t working due to lack of variety of art assets; I think this situation will be better in future updates. In particular, we try to pay attention to rainfall levels – the look of the ground that is covered in autogen changes a lot depending on whether we have high rain fall or low rain fall.
Regionalization within the US is too specialized for us to put in the base sim – that has to be third party add-on territory.
Finally, the trees are a tale of two kingdoms – the natural terrain tree set and autogen trees are different libraries – the natural trees are highly varied and there’s a good chance that they put the right trees in the right places even within the US, as well as all over the world. The auotgen tree set has very little variety and isn’t tied to real world data.
We may someday be able to unify these sets and get the natural-terrain trees level of variety into the autogen, but that’s going to have to come later – for now we’re focused on more buildings to get those land classes covered properly.
Cheers
Ben
Will the building heights still be random? There are some high rise apartment buildings on short final to KSMO.
One of the problems with the autogen is that there is a lot of empty space behind the buildings. You should add some bigger front yards and backyards. Add a guest house, maybe some junk cars, etc… The commercial buildings need some parking lots, etc… Pick a neighborhood in XPX and then go look at that same neighborhood in Google maps and that will give you an idia how to make fit better.