X-Plane 10.30 Public Beta 1 Is Available

67 comments on “X-Plane 10.30 Public Beta 1 Is Available”

1. Hi ben,

   The mesh about Rio de Janeiro (SBRJ) is terrible in 10.30b1. Can I wait for fixes along 10:3x versions?

2. first impression is JUST WOW!! great work, it runs rock smooth, solid fps 55-59, clouds are really nice, the plane no longer tends to turn right, sim no longer pauses for a second while climbing to high altitudes. Very happy so far!!!

3. new GPS is a nice addition.

   Whats the ETA on WED 1.3? Getting an error loading a custom airport and would like to try to rebuild using the new tool.

   1. Should be beta in “weeks” I think.

4. Just a thumbs up for the big fps-boost! Very well done. First flights were stable, no problems so far. Very very good work!

5. Thank You for this release! I’ve played with it for almost 2 hours (standalone and with 2 computers , one being external visual) and everything works flawlessly. Nice job! Clouds, and fog…great improvment…and in wright direction!

6. Since XP-10 came out, I’ve read opinions that the sim would start to mature when it hit the 10.30’s. This seems to be the case… just had a flight with the default “updater” settings, and instead of the slide show I’ve had in the past, I had acceptable rates, even if a bit low due to the age of my system. Flight in and out of the clouds very nice now, and glad to not have to fiddle with my rudder and aileron trim so much!! Really looking forward to the enhanced distance viewing so we don’t have to enjoy the sunset visible through the mountains. 🙂

   1. Yes, this was one of the bugs I’ve been hoping would be fixed for a long time. When might the bug fixed where we can see stars and sun through the mountains?

      1. Oh…great job on such a huge release

7. Congratulations and thank you !

8. Ben,
   great you got 10.30 out the door! Downloading…

   I know I’m wrong here (and I feel guilty for doing what I usually disapprove of), but I couldn’t find any appropriate channel to put this:

   Is there a way on OS X to define the language used on speech synthesis within an application? If there is, you should use it!

   ATIS is using the system provided speech synthesizer (at least on Mac), which is normally set to the locale of the user and thus may not be english! This may result in the ATIS voiced really funny. I’m using voice output with other applications, but before launching X-Plane I need to get into system config to set it to english.

   This doesn’t feel right, I think I’ve seen an application before which could set the speech output locale by language itself… or am I missing something here?

   1. Please file a bug and include info on how you change your settings such that the ATIS does _not_ sound good (e.g. setting the locale to Martian or whatever) so we can repro.

      1. Hi Ben,

         [X] done…

         Thank you and great work from all of you at LR!

         Cheers

9. There is one topic I don’t see in the change log that came up a while back and I am mildly curious…should we start considering an investment in FRAPS (or similar) for 64 bit video capture?

   1. I don’t know. I do not expect 64-bit video capture to be solved in 10.30. We need to switch to a new capture technology.

10. Thank you so much Ben – Very much appreciated 🙂 Great work!

11. Pretty good for a b1 though a bit demanding for cloud puff count or rain (dunno which yet). Congrats! I hope you get a manageable trickle of bug reports rather than Sturm und Drang.

12. Congratulations on getting this beta out of the door! Generally good reception, it seems.

    3 Questions:

    1.) I am surprised to see no new “global airports” that were uploaded in the meantime. It was my understanding that these would be part of the beta – or is that only for official releases?

    2.) It seems that the “red outline” bug for the Nvidia cards is resolved. Conincidence or did I miss something in the release notes?

    3.) It was stated that the new minimum visibility in fog is now 100 meters, because that is the minimum visibility that CAT3b allows. This is wrong, the minimum RVR is 75 m on my aircraft, and corresponding visibility (visible range without aid of high-powered runway lights) would be much smaller, probably down to 50m or so…

    Jan

    1. 1. Global airports will go in when the gateway is live. We decided not to manually add airports without the gateway because it is so labor-intensive; instead we are working on getting the gateway to go live. The gateway will go live with the airports that were shared with us between 10.25 and now.

       It looks like the gateway _might_ be operational before 10.30 goes final; if not we’ll just do a 10.31 to throw the airports in. Either way, we should have more airports in a few weeks.

       In the long term I expect to put airports into beta 1 of major patches.

       2. I don’t know what happened, but it was a bug in NV’s driver. It is possible that, given relatively massive shader changes as part of OpenGL modernization, we accidentally worked around it.

       3. Please file a bug.

       1. I know this is not the place for feature requets, and I never did, but considering how usfefull would be, and (altought I don’t know the code) I think it should be simple….. for us who never fly on empty airports,, perhaps adding a filter on airport selection screen, to ‘only see airports with buildings’… and/or custom ones.
          Thank you

       2. I’m still getting the red outline bug but it’s no way near as bad as it was before 10.30

          Cheers,

          1. New Nvidia driver definitely stops red outline bug 🙂

             1. Yep – a user pointed out to me that it’s even in the release notes. 🙂 I’m not on the new drivers yet.

13. I flew through a cloud and it was glorious.

    1. Me too!
       And since it dropped to about 13fps (from over 30) I was able to reeeeeally get a long look at the cloud.

       Very pretty!
       Although it never seems to get completely opaque. Even overcast layers I’m still always able to see through? Odd.

14. The improved fps is great news. I am looking forward to trying this out. Will the improved FMS functionality and the Aerosoft database be available through an API so that aircraft developers can build their own FMS with similar functionality as the FMS provided by you guys?

    1. Not right now. We may be able to someday provide some APIs, but we’re focusing on simply getting the functionality working first. Since the final contracts haven’t been inked yet, I also do not know the legal limits we may have with the data.

       1. Do I get this right, that X-Plane 10.30 has 2 sets of navigation data? The legacy AptNav *and* the Aerosoft NavDataPro, but the latter only for the 430/540? Will that require 2 separate updates?

          I hope that it will be possible to have *one* set of navigation data for X-Plane and all plugin-based add-ons, because it is starting to become a mess with each add-on requiring their own format. Some unifying would be welcome here, and I hope that X-Plane will promote this.

          And I also hope that external add-ons, like XHSI, will be allowed to use a copy of the *same* set of navigation data files.

          Regards,
          Marc.

          1. Currently we do have two sets of nav data – conceptually one is like the sim card in your GPS, and one describes the electromagnetic navigation sources in the world.

             I think they will some day be unified, and this is something we’ve discussed internally, but we also think the sim can function with two sets, more or less.

15. Im not sure about this new 10.30 i still cant depend on ATC in 10.25 no time for taxiing cuts your flight on way down the runway starts raising you up on approach,Im now at a point of not using atc.When is this fix coming ?????????

16. I tried to install the update but the installer keeps getting stuck at the file dxxx.txt.zip. It just hangs up there and will not move.
    Rick

17. I downloaded 10.30b1 today and wanted to give the new clouds a try. Unfortunately my frame rates dropped for above 20 to 5 to 6 between 10.25 and this beta. I have a quad core 3.2 GHz. The other comments I read here so far talk of frame rate improvements so I am not sure what I have here. I filed a bug so you can take a look at it. Hope you can fix this. Keep up the good work!
    Alex

    1. Hi, I am back with some good news: I got my 20+ frames/s back.
       It’s not directly a X-Plane bug, but I MUST run the newest Catalyst 14.4.
       I just upgraded to Catalyst 14.4 from 13.4 and that did the job for me. Thanks to everyone working so hard on X-Plane!
       Alex

       1. It looks like most perfermance issues with AMD cards can be fixed by installing Catalyst 14.4.

          My problem is that those drivers don’t exist for my Radeon HD4850. I know it’s not bleeding edge anymore, but until 10.30 it was doing the job. With careful optimization, I used to get between 30 and 40 fps in XP 10.25 with the latest available Catalyst 13.9 drivers (1440×900, HDR, FXAA and Global Shadows actived if you can believe that). Now I barely scratch 9 fps, even on a remote island like NTGJ and clear sky.

          My simple question: should I even bother to file a bug report, or is this behaviour by design (new OpenGL subsystem and all) ? That’s the sort of radical change I would have expected for the next generation of X-Plane, not midway through the lifecycle of the current run. I don’t see myself renewing my hardware until XP 11 (ie. 2015 at the earliest).

          1. This behavior is NOT by design and you SHOULD file a bug!!

             Given that the HD 4000 cards are well within v10 hardware specs, and given that they can’t run the 14-4 drivers, it’s up to us (LR) to figure out why our new code and the 13-x drivers don’t get along and then change X-Plane. The theory is that since we supported 13-x before, we can do it again. (I can only hope that what we find won’t be too scary.)

             This is just what we (LR) have to deal with since AMD doesn’t provide patches as far as back as X-Plane supports GPUs.

             1. Thanks Ben for the clarification.
                Will do as soon as I get back home.

18. Great work guys !

    Ben,

    does 30b1 include fixes for the “red lines on the horizon and fuselage edges” issue on NVidia/Windows systems ?

    1. Not that I know of. It’s an NV driver bug.

       1. Seems to have fixed it for me. Others have mentioned resolved as well. Couple of comments above you mentioned it might be due to the OpenGL modernisation changes having solved the problem. Good stuff any which way.

19. Thanks for the massive update. Impressive.

    From first tests:
    1. Clouds eats FPS, but flying into and out of clouds a much better experience. Thanks for that.
    2. Better flight control. Flying is more fun.
    3. New GPS looks impressive too – thanks Phillip.

    Keep the good work.
    Snagar

20. thanks for this 10.30;

    but the TCAS (for ivao and vatsim) is still very primitive compared to what that other nearly 10 years old popular ‘frankensim’ has! please improve that, also a 3d weather radar will be a great addition.

    thanks

21. Any chance we could see a 64 bit version of the installer/updater?

    X-Plane 10 Installer Linux: ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV).
    Linux: error while loading shared libraries: libGL.so.1: wrong ELF class: ELFCLASS64

    I now have to go install all the 32 bit backward compatibility libraries from the NVidia driver because the installer requires libGL?? I cant imagine complications in building a 64 bit version of the installer.

    Lets move away from 1990’s computing!

    1. Yes – the next recut of the installer will include 64-bit installers for Linux.

       You _will_ still need libGL for the installer, but only the 64-bit one; the requirements will be similar to X-Plane.

22. Fantastic update !

    What is Philipp working on next ? G1000 maybe !?

    Love the going in and out of the clouds ! Almost feels real ! Good job ! I think the aesthetics still needs some work. I would love to see some Towering Cumulus and Cumulus looking clouds. Right now they look like stratus cumulus.

23. It would be great if the new gps would be installed in all stock planes (high res please).

    1. Planes that have the G430 will get a res boost before we go final I think. This will include replacing the Collins-style GPS with a 530 in the Kingair (since the 530 sim is so much more functional than the old-style one.)
       Planes that have no 430 or 530-style GPS (e.g. the 747, the glider) are not marked to get one grafted in.

24. Congratulations, fog and clouds are a big step forward, now I am curious about oculus rift solutions!, im waiting for a DK2, can you add support for positional tracking too??

    1. We are currently working on some UI issues, adding positional tracking for the DK2 is very easy compared to that, because positional tracking is already supported in X-Plane for the TrackIR hardware.

25. Must add kudos for shadows on the aircraft in non-HDR mode. Significant improvement. Still challenged just a bit, but a huge difference from the saw patterns we saw before. Thanks, Ben. All those commits sure have paid off!

    1. Hi Steve,

       I hate to say it, but I don’t think we intentionally fixed the shadow res. 🙁 Whether you see ‘saw tooth’ depends on a large number of factors that control the shadow placement, so the actual behavior can be pretty unpredictable in its own right. (Trying to get the shadow maps to be placed in better locations for less jaggies is on my todo list.)

       cheers
       ben

       1. No kidding, Ben, thanks for the honest reply! So I must have seen the best and the worst of 3D shadows, and my recent experience was when the sun angle was just right. Seems to me that we discussed increasing the shadow map size sometime in the past. Might this be an opportunity for a tuning option, with a number of progressively larger maps to choose from. With an increase in pixel resolution on the map, the aliasing should, in theory, become less noticeable. It may need some anti-aliasing love too…when you get around to optimizing it. It’s a neat, cheap effect though, and really amps the realism inside the cockpit when you get an accurate shadow of the wing or something. Helps external views in videos too, if your system can’t handle HDR.

26. Thank you very much for this great beta. But I’ve one question: Are there any plans to include high definition ground textures or is this only my fault?

    1. I don’t know what you mean by “high definition” ground textures. The ground textures that ship with the sim are land class textures – so their resolution is high, but they are generic, e.g. “this is grass, this is a forest.”

       We do not intend to ship actual photos of specific locations; you can get that from third party custom scenery.

27. Hi. I’ve only managed a brief play, but it looks good so far, especially the clouds transitions.

    One question – I pressed something which made the new GPS unit pop out as a separate window. This is great. It means I can actually see the detail on the display, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how to get it to pop back in. How do I do that?!

    1. Upper left corner has a ‘secret’ close box, or just click the small screen in the panel – the pop out hot spot is a toggle.

28. Please post a simple set of instructions to make the GPS substitution for the old 430 in an existing aircraft. I see the Folder for it and its definition files in the beta 1 release, but I can’t figure out how to get it into the instruments list in Plane-Maker to do the substitution…

    1. Dan Klaue explained it very well for his King Air B200. The guide can be applied to other aircraft: http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?showtopic=76715&p=822414

       1. Philipp..I am using the new Plane-Maker which is included in the release 10.30b1. It is the Windows Release. I can do the steps described by the 822414 instructions. up to the point of specifying the new revised GPS in the drop down#1 window’s check boxes.

          Two problems.. First, my aircraft only shows a 2-d window in its construction. Selecting 3-d gives a full blank.
          Second, no new GPS is shown as selectable in the FMS/GPS
          drop down window in the instrument listing. The selection of the GPS in the 2-d window works… but that ends the described procedure that can occur, since no new GPS listing for the new GPS is available. The Folder GNS430 in the Resources Folder in the 10.30B1 Windows release does contain the files that the Plane Maker should access for the substitution.

          Question: can the GNS430 be put into a 2-d panel cockpit, and does plane maker have the present capability to do this? Or does only a 3-d cockpit have the ability to receive it?

          1. Hi Bob,

             First, please update to beta 2. There was a bug in the error checking for GPS configurations in beta 1.

             Second, this yes, it is definitely possible to put a G430 into the 2-d panel; the default Cessna ships this way!

             cheers
             Ben

             1. I am loaded with Windows 7 64 Bit 10.30b2.
                PlaneMaker 10.30b2.
                MY above comments are exactly the same.
                No new GPS appears in the FMS/GPS Listing.
                The data files are located in the Resources folder for the new gps and appear OK on display.

             2. Hi Bob,

                If you find a bug, please use the bug report form.
                If you need tech support, contact tech support.

                None of this should be in the blog comments.

                Under radios -> GPS FMS -> you will find: Garmin_430_screen.png and Garmin_530_screen.png as well as Garmin_430.png. The two _screen options are new.

29. 10.3b1 is stellar, and I’m very happy! I would dearly love to be able to try the view to the horizon fix for tubeliners at altitude… having upped my system ram to 32gb across all 3 display PCs… can you give us a timeline when this promised improvement will release to beta? My fellow VA pilots are chomping at the bit as it is a huge buzzkill to have the gorgeous scenery blurred as you look toward the horizon. This is the one thing where 10.3b1 is less attractive than 10.25 (to me). The ‘blur’ seems markedly worse. I am using Skymaxx in both 10.25 and 10.30. Thanks, Ben!

30. Ben; are you still collecting the crash reports? I sent them in because the program doesn’t even load.

    1. Yes, but as a customer, contact tech support (info@x-plane.com) if you want to talk to an actual human about an actual problem! The bug reporter and auto crash reporter are _not_ ways to contact tech support (nor is this blog).

31. Why are weather changes still so violet on the new versions coming? there is no word on the change log about this. isn´t it fixable?

    I mean, some times you are flying a large jet at high altitudes 37 knots front wind, then when the weather engine updates METAR it may change in a fraction of time to 57 knots tail wind, as consequence you go overspeed in a second, the AP has no time for reacting and your long hours of flight end up due to structural damage.
    You may be also flying a GA where those sudden weather updates gets your small light aircraft very critical trimmed crazy.
    It will aso be much more nicer from visuals perspective, smoothness transitions from clear skies to cloudy or whatever transition the weather is doing.
    hopefully you can share us a bit of the insides, i can imagine this is not in purpose! anything on your -to do- list about this? thanks a lot 10.30 is great to me

    1. I hate to state the obvious, but if there is a behavior that you do not like, and it has not changed, it should not be shocking that there is no mention in the change log. The change log lists only things that we actually changed (or things we think we actually changed).

       Anyway, I think you know what I am going to say…please file a bug!

       1. ok i will do!

          this behavior comes from previos versions, so i thought it was an expected behavior being difficult to address. I just wanted to understand the insides and if any transition tweaks in the pipe for 10.30

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