It looks like the next cut of 10.30 will be a release candidate. I am not sure when we’ll release it, but I am hoping for this weekend.
If you installed 10.30b8 on a full beta, and thus downloaded 500 MB of DSF recuts, I’m afraid to say you’ll end up re-downloading them again for the RC. A user reported bad edge matching between the recuts and the original tiles for one airport. The underlying bug is one that could affect any seam between a recut and an original tile, so to be safe I’m recutting the entire recut set with the fixed code. So…I apologize for the bandwidth hit, but I think better safe and sorry here.
If you do find a last minute bug that you have not reported, please be sure to:
- Report it on the bug reporter. If you haven’t used that page, we don’t know about it. Blog comments do not count, forum posts do not count, and random emails to people with x-plane.com email addresses do not count! Don’t send a bug to a place where it will be lost this late in the game!*
- Please make sure the bug is complete, with detailed instructions to reproduce it step by step and a way to get the reproduction materials necessary. This close to RC, we no longer have time to spend a few days going up and back to understand the bug and then realize we don’t even have the payware ACF we need!
There are two features that will ship whenever they ship, e.g. in 1030 if they’re ready, or we’ll cut a 10.31 in a week or two if we have to:
- Oculus Rift support. There is a new SDK for the Rift, and it’s not backward compatible with the old one, so Philipp has some coding to do there. I think we’re going to enable the Rift as soon as it’s done, but given how few sets are already sold (since they’re just low-res developer previews right now) we’re not going to halt 1030; we’ll cut a quick bug fix release if we need to.
- Cylindrical Projection. Austin reworked cylindrical projection for pro users for 1030; if we find we need to get a few more refinements into the warping code, that may go into a bug fix release too.
My goal is an RC by the weekend, but that’s more of an aspiration than a promise.
* If you like a bug and don’t want it fixed, perhaps emailing me directly or posting it on the forum is the best thing you can do!
Looking good on my system at this point, Ben. Will there be a 10.35 for the distant terrain mesh and higher resolution satellite imagery/normals?
The new build looks amazing.
“If you like a bug and don’t want it fixed, perhaps emailing me directly or posting it on the forum is the best thing you can do!”
I see what you did there…
Thank you for the update Ben 🙂
I’m particularly excited to see how the oculus implementation works. I’ve got a DK2 heading my way and x-plane is one of the things I’m most excited about. Hope to see more news regarding oculus running in the sim soon!
I’m the same as you Jeremy, I’m also waiting for my DK2 (which is probably a few weeks away) and very excited about using it with X-Plane.
Same here, receiving the DK2 on Monday and I look forward to testing it with X-Plane and experiment with my own code, too.
Great news about Oculus support. Already have my DK2 and am looking forward to this – really my main reason for getting the DK2 to begin with!
If the Direct-to-HMD mode can be supported, that would turn some heads, literally 🙂
Also, 60k units have been ordered with 20k shipped. I think the number of potential X-Plane buyers/owners isn’t all that bad.
Ben; thank you for the updates and all your hard work.
I was curious will you be supporting other HMD devices such as the Avegeant Glyph ? Just my personal opinion, but I have pre-ordered one of these because I believe the technology is more open-ended than what the glyph is using. it appears to the OS as a straight up HDMI monitor, Since it contains a display for each eye 1280 x 720 at extremely high refresh rates and low latency with none of the glyphs shortcomings regarding pixelation, screen door effects… Etc. I’m sure a driver could be written that would sequence the two eyes to create 3-D. and since it has a six DOF tracker built in it’s more independent than the new version of the glyph which ties you back down to the chair. Ala IR dots and track IR type of headtracking which I never liked.
not trying to write a review or sounds like a fan boy especially at my age 🙂 but I believe it is something that should be looked into.
Just want to say thank you for all the hard work. Sometimes when i go through the release notes, it makes me wonder how you guys get it all done with what must be a rather small team.
If I may request one change, it’d be the cloud texture that looks like a crude sponge..lol. It makes the skies look weird.
Yesterday I was flying from somewhere near the great lakes to the westcoast and ended up in a thunderstorm (I had real weather on). It was quite an experience, like you can probably only have in Xplane… Truly amazing..
Oh and speaking of the thunderstorm.. would it be possible to have more realistic lightning? Right not it kindof looks similar everytime. I know, probably not on top of the list, but just putting it out there as something to consider 🙂
Great news about the oculus rift support!
I’ve been a long time X-Plane person and I’m also a Rift DK2 person now. DCS World is great in the Rift but it still judders and isn’t fully supported. But the feeling of really being in the cockpit is amazing! Rift support would be a wonderful addition to X-Plane if fully implemented. There were some 65,000 pre-sales as of the beginning of July I believe. Bet a lot would convert to sales if Rift support is good. 😉
Long time no talk! Congrats on the latest Beta Ben, it’s really impressed me and dragged me from the abyss of P3D! I’m enjoying the return, the SIM feels new to me after such a long break, but I can see you’ve done so much good work to optimise.
Can’t wait for Oculus support! Awaiting my V2 kit to be delivered, I think xplane will be amazing with it
Any chance the Airport Scenery Gateway will go live with the release of X-Plane 10.30RC? If so any chance we could have the option to Search for or List Airports using “ICAO Begins with”? for example to list all UK airports you could enter:
“ICAO Begins with” EG
I’ve tried using Wild cards, eg. EG* and it dosn’t appear to work.
WEDbot has been busy!
cessna729.
Gateway release is not tied to 10.30 – we’re working to get the gateway live for everyone and it may beat 1030 out. I don’t think the gateway supports wild cards right now.
Hi
I haven’t bought x-plane 10 yet. I intend to buy from steam – will the steam be working with DK2 too when the next update is released ie 10.30 or 10.31? I am buying mainly because of oculus rift.
Also does x-plane work with NVidia 3d vision?
Hi,
Steam will have Oc DK2 support as soon as the version of the X-Plane patch that supports it goes _final_. You will not have access to beta builds via Steam, but all releases once final go to Steam and our own update system.
X-Plane does not support NVidia 3d, although I actually received a note from a third party developer attempting to support it via plugin. I was able to get support working in the lab as a tech demo but concluded it wasn’t ready for prime time. Perhaps after we have OcRift support if the demand is there we can support stereo displays.
My initial reaction with a 3-d monitor was that it was “neat for a few minutes” but not usable; the problem is that with a 3-d display, you can’t have that much depth without your eyes hurting; it makes it hard to set up a really compelling 3-d scene.
Great work on this release. I tried to make this comment on a previous (more relevant) post but comments on it are now closed.
10.30 seems to have introduced increased distance in rendering terrain. I’m wondering if/when we might see similar functionality for clouds. This would enable us to see far off storms etc and would add a huge level of detail. Would be great if this feature was also available to external plugins like Skymaxx Pro!
Thoughts?
No, it did not introduce the long range visibility improvement (was only planned) … that will – maybe / hopefully – come in 10.35 (or something like that).
Hi,
The GPS is drawn at the very begining of the frame, not under the panel, gauge or other appropriate drawing phases, this means that CPU time for these draw calls is spent even when the GPS is not showing up on screen. Is this going to be moved in an appropriate drawing phase ?
I was also wondering what were the reasons that led to drawing it with this rather unusual way of using openGL calls ? There are probably sound engineering decisions behind this but could not figure out what they were by looking at what GpuPerfStudio is telling me. What are the benefits of doing so ?
PhM
The GPS is rendered to an off-screen and then blitted to where it needs to go. This means that we don’t have to draw the GPS twice when it is on panel and popped up, we don’t have to save multiple font sheets for the different GPS sizes, and we get reasonable down-sampling when the GPS isn’t at full size.
As of now Philipp has not optimized out the case where the FBO is never used per frame. This isn’t a huge priority to me: the actual GPS render is taking < 2 ms of CPU time on my laptop, and the optimization would only take effect for forward-no-hud mode. Philipp and I did spend considerable time looking at the render time itself and making sure it's reasonably small so that the GPS is fast when it is on screen.
Does that mean it is futile to make the panel semi-transparent to show reflection surfaces behind it?
No you can still do it.
– The display-only G430 draws “emissively” since it’s a lit device.
– The background itself can be rendered translucent (I think).
I -think- only the emissive layer is off-screened…I realize now there’s a second reason for needing this: if over-draw is used on a translucent-output surface (which all dimmable lit instruments are) an off-screen must be used.
Hi Ben,
This is kind of a random question that I just thought of, but do the new recut dsfs support population density data? I was reading about the development of UrbanMaxx and how he wants to have different textures for different population densities once the dsfs support it. If they don’t (and for the dsfs that were not recut), are there plans to recut the dsfs to have this new information included (and, if so, is this a “whenever it is ready” kind of feature, or a “major new release” kind of feature?)?
We don’t use population density data; AlpilotX’s land class data does have multiple urban densities, which match pretty well with the density and build-up of cities in the real world.
Sorry Ben, this is not entirely correct … indeed I try to use some kind of density data, as far as it is available. But i can tell all of you, that this is an extremely massy part of the data. There is NO such thing, as a global, high resolution, high fidelity population data! Period! There are some useful information in the landclass of some regions (like the NLCD data in the USA has such information … or in aprts the Europesn CORINE data) … other regions have almost nothing … and i try to puzzle together halfway useful info from other 3rd party sources. I have some information in the “data sources” section on my website (look at “population density”):
http://www.alpilotx.net/downloads/x-plane-10-hd-scenery-mesh-v2/#Data-Sources-Acknowledgments
But its really really really hard to much up the different density classifications to a halfway useful “building height” info. I did already do a lot of heuristics, and the current state of things is the best thing i could come up … until now. This might of course improve in the future … when i get hold of better data, or have better ideas to interprete existing data.
I’m using 10.25 in a cylindrical projector setup. the new warping is really nice, but I have two ammendments for austin:
-you can move single controlpoints very slowly by keyboard, and your have to press the key repeatedly – how about keeping the key depressed and the control vertex moves, or adding a modifierer to move the vertex faster for rough initial setup?
-if you have a nearly finished setup with the some vertices outside the screen (sometimes necessary by overhead projections), and you click inside the area in the area of the vertex, the vertex gets selected as planned, but its position is set back inside the most extent in the visible area, for example the lower left corner – this makes multiple modifys of the same point for fine tuning nearly impossible…
any chance to get this forwarded before you go go live with the rc?
Please email this DIRECTLY to Austin; he does not read blog comments.
Changes to cylindrical projection aren’t going to stop an RC but they could make it into a quick patch.
Hello Ben,
thanks, I thought so, but how do I email directly austin? the info@x-p…-adress?
austin at x-plane dot com.
Is there any plans to eventually include more native methods for drawing maps in gauges? Seems to be a feature Xplane is severely lacking
Hi Ben,
will 10.30 fix the replay problem?
My replay buffer currently only holds a few minutes, despite I have 32 GB RAM available and running the 64-bit XP 10.25. I have seen some forum comments stating that there is a maximum buffer size most likely hardcoded for this replay buffer. Might have made sense for 32-bit, but not for 64-bit systems with plenty of RAM.
Also I do not understand why that info is not simply saved to disk while I am flying. Should not be that much of an issue.
hows the new World Editor coming along?
Hey Ben,
I have a question, not related to scenery, but graphics in general: is there any future plan to support reflections on the objects shader? Even with only a static cubemap?
Cheers.
Someday, probably yes. Almost certainly not as just a static cube map – I think we’ll do something more modern.
Guido Ostkamp, I don,t understanding the replay problem: I can replay at least 30 min, with 16 gb ram. That,s also what I heard is the limit regardless of ram?