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Release notes are (finally) updated. I’ve been stuck in a pattern of not getting the beta done until late Friday night (with the servers ready to go live Saturday morning), and the release notes whenever I can get to them.

With this release, we’ve moved screenshots and AVIs to the Output folder so that they don’t clutter up your main X-Plane folder and make it hard to find things. They’re not in their own “screenshots” or “AVI” sub-folders because the expectation is that you will do something with them, e.g. rename them, file them, email them, or delete them.

(If we wanted a permanent archive, we could show a “save…” file box like the Save Replay” option, but having us prompt you at every screen shot and AVI save would be totally annoying – it’s more important to be able to snap a lot of pictures.)

Windows XP support is fixed (after I briefly broke it). To be clear:

  • Windows XP is within the system requirements of X-Plane 10 and will be for the rest of the v10 run.
  • That said, I strongly recommend you not use Windows XP. It’s end-of-lifed, it’s not getting security updates, you’re basically just asking for your computer to get p0wned.
  • When you do update, please update to a 64-bit edition of Windows.

X-Plane 10.40 had (for a while) new code to more aggressively manage the rudder when you don’t have a rudder axis assigned. This code has been removed, and behavior should match X-Plane 10.36. If you see weird behavior with the rudder, please set up X-Plane 10.36 and 10.40 side-by-side, and file a bug only if the behavior is different between the two builds. There are a lot of ways to have screwy control behavior that aren’t bugs (e.g. having mis-calibrated hardware).

We may re-visit auto-rudder in the future. The fundamental problem is:

  • There are aircraft (most of them in fact) that you just can’t fly without a rudder.
  • Some users won’t have rudder-pedal-equivalent hardware.
  • We don’t want to turn off the laws of physics in X-Plane.

The inevitable result is some kind of AI in our control input subsystem to create rudder inputs to make the plane flyable. The big question is how clever that AI system should try to be. (The problem being that without knowing pilot intention, you can’t know what to do. Sometimes the goal is coordinated flight, sometimes the goal is intentional cross-control to maintain the runway centerline.)

Scrolling should be fixed in the advanced joystick button configuration screen; however if you are still seeing a bug setting up joystick buttons, please file a detailed bug report. We have had several bug reports that tell us something is wrong, but they have been very thin on details and reproduction steps.

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.

48 comments on “X-Plane 10.40 Beta 11 Is Out”

    1. I don’t think we will do that.

      Generally, I am very “anti-preferences”. My view is that preferences:
      – Make the sim more complicated.
      – Create tech support problems – any time a preference is set wrong and something strange happens, this makes X-Plane hard to use.
      – Often means we are exposing to the user decisions that should be made by the sim itself.*
      So to make a preference worth it, there must be real benefit. My view is: there isn’t enough benefit.

      * For example: we let you pick whether texture compression is on. This is a little bit strange…most users have no idea what texture compression is, how it affects the sim, what the trade-off is or what the sim will do with the check box on or off. We have to assume that the setting will be either strongly biased toward the default or random as users make up their mind without good data. Better would be for us (LR) to determine which textures should be compressed for an overall rendering setting the user _can_ pick and not expose this.

      (And if you are going “but I know what texture compression is” – just remember, you are nerdy enough to read the comment replies in a dev blog post! You are not the typical user and maybe you have already seen the post explaining texture compression, targeted at authors.)

      1. For you to say you’re trying to keep the sim less complicated, but have a setting such as texture compression and not a user-assigned screenshot save folder is a little backwards. Such a setting (for screenshots) is very useful IMO and highly uncomplicated, especially compared to all the other settings you have. But that’s just me.

        1. Let me be clear: we are -trying- but not yet -succeeding- in simplifying prefs. So we have texture compression, but this is an example of a bad thing I want to get rid of. So my goal is to have -neither- custom folders for screenshot output nor texture compression.

    2. FIX THE ATC!!! PLEASE!!! Make it like it was for version 9, where you could contact a tower and get info! As it is, it is very basic and raw. It take a lot of the fun and interaction away from X-Plane!

        1. I can’t say what Dennis is alluding to, but I have 4 things that could bring ATC more in line with the previous versions:
          1 Instead of just saying you are off course say you are off course and then give a heading to steer to get back on course.
          2 Allow to report in flight emergency and get vectored to nearest airport.
          3 Bring back tower radar vectored approaches, this may have been in version 5.

          1. “Off coarse” is a known bug – that’s for us to fix.

            My view is that ATC is -not- a GPS. We may some day bring back some kind of vector assistance but if you liked ATC to give you vectors, you’re not really using ATC as ATC.

        2. Hello – I am new to X-plane, and a commercial pilot. Is it possible to use X-plane ATC function to receive vectors to the ILS? This is a common, everyday procedure. How can I request this kind of approach? As a commuter airline pilot, this is what we do all day long.

          I think the comment below that ATC is not a GPS was related to what’s called a surveillance radar approach, only used in emergency situations when the onboard navigation equipment has failed.

          Thanks in advance for clarification.

          Chris
          Rochester, MN

          1. Hi Chris,

            Yes, ATC can provide vectors to the ILS. Please contact tech support (info@x-plane.com) for help using the sim.

            Re: ATC not being a GPS…you probably already know this if you are a commercial pilot.

            – If you call ATC while receiving radar services, declare an emergency, and go “where’s the nearest airport”, the controller will give you a vector. You can hear this in the Sully cockpit recording – ATC keeps offering Sully vectors to return to the field, and Sully keeps rejecting them because he knows he doesn’t have that kind of glide range.

            – However, if you’re just receiving normal ATC services, you can’t just go ask GPS “where is my next fix.” ATC is not a GPS.

            – The X-Plane 9 ATC was not even remotely realistic, and it would

            – The X-Plane 9 ATC would give you vectors to your destination – e.g. you could just go “I want to fly to Boston” and ATC would guide you -the entire way-.

            Users want this back because it’s an easy way to take a flight, but it’s not a realistic ATC function. X-Plane never had a real surveillance approach, although the carrier landing is close to it, kind of.

  2. Most people solve the rudder problem by assigning the Z axis of their joystick which for me – as for many others with Logitech hardware – has broken down about half a year after I bought the stick. Anyway, this isn’t the best way to do it as you easily tend to twist the stick accidentally during X/Y movements.

    Personally, I assigned rudder left/right/center commands to my joystick’s “coolie hat” (digital cursor on top, easier to access during flight and on takeoff and landing) and also numpad divide, multiply and minus on the keyboard (easier to access on ground during taxi). This works okay the controls behave too jumpy, working in fixed step increments. I don’t think any huge effort in auto-rudder would be required if the digital input could be “smoothed” somehow, so it doesn’t let the rudder jump to new values but increase/decrease while holding the assigned key down.

    Sorry if it’s already there and it’s yet another thing I didn’t find yet. 🙂

  3. Precision Flight Control Cirrus II console still not working since 10.40b6… Do you plan to fix that? The bug was filled 2-3 weeks ago.

      1. Austin: “yes, this is actually a known bug!
        some datarefs changed in x-plane 10.40 (which is not supposed to happen normally.. not sure how it happened this time) …”

      1. btw. Ben wow about the new promissed sound architecture? We are still without any tools to safe planet from being dumb in XP10.

  5. On beta 11 Call me crazy and sorry prob should be filing a bug report, but wasn’t sure… Just noticed that when my Prop acf are stationary the Aileron and Elevator are affecting airflow, but no matter how much power from prop or wind I add with prop off, Rudder is not affecting the airflow?!

    1. File a bug – this is definitely beyond the scope of ‘let’s discuss it in the blog comments’. When you file a bug we can route it to whomever needs to see it, which in this case is Austin, as I don’t really understand how props work…or air…or wings…or…airplanes.

  6. Hi Ben,
    It’s kind of off-topic, but MeshTool is not workin with Win10 if there are polygons on script.txt With shapefiles it seems to work fine.

  7. Hi Ben, it’s been a long time we keep getting the whiteout/greyout condition when passing through clouds or accidentally going into them when flying under them. It’s very off putting to be slapped in the face by this scary wall of grey or white approaching us when we very slowly ascend into clouds.

    Are there any art controls that can remove this whiteout? Since it’s in beta 11.

    Warmest Regards

  8. Good day,
    Yes I like where the .AVI is being placed but a root folder need to be placed there also, a .png folder to tidy the system up now so you don’t ha the two mixed up like what is happening now… just thing out loud…
    thank-you,
    captbullett

    1. Austin likes it the way it is – if you email him enough times he will either:
      – Change it to how you think it should be or
      – Block your email.

  9. Hi Ben,
    Just a question about the aurora borealis. I have turned it on and they are very pretty, but I think the latitude setting might be set too low. I live at Lat 51 deg in the UK and it is very rare for them to show, in fact I have never seen it here. The lucky Scots at about 57 deg see them far more regularly. I presume it’s not a bug hence putting my question here.

    Cheers

    1. The real aurora varies in latitude with solar conditions; we’re not going to simulate that. If you think it’s too aggressively low in latitude, you can discuss this with Austin…he may change it…or block your email. 🙂

    1. Is the issue that the scenery isn’t loading what you expect or isn’t changing?

      Note that we do not continuously reload art assets based on the dataref changes – you have to induce a full scenery reload.

      The mechanism is appropriate for major changes like ‘change the season’ but it is NOT appropriate for animation.

      1. For the record, since a few messages have been ditched because WP cut part of the post, I asked why my code didn’t work for dataref driven scenery loading.

        Ben,
        Ok, I could verify that my code actually works in case of a manual scenery reload.
        But, changing the date within the sim doesn’t initiate a scenery reload. So, I guess we still need a plugin for that in order to load another season ? That makes it much less useful (and accessible) than I thought.

        Using the local_time_sec dataref was just a quick way of testing this. Of course, I wouldn’t try to animate something with it. But I could have seen some useful possibilities, for example changing some baked shadowing a few times during the day.

        Cheers,
        Pascal

        1. Hi Pascal,

          You are correct that the functionality is -much- less useful because it is a full scenery reload and not a dynamic animation of all possible scenery elements at any time due to datarefs.

          The goal was only to replace the process of editing X-Plane’s file system with a library-based process that would avoid (1) restart and (2) editing files that can confuse the installer — that is, it makes scenery add-ons much simpler to install and deploy.

          The reason why we don’t dynamically replace stuff is this: at scenery load time X-Plane merges all scenery elements with the same shading and layer into a single “bucket” around one shader. In some cases, even the meshes generated by those elements may be merged. So for example, if you have two facades (a.fac and b.fac) in a custom airport and A and B use the same shading state, and the placement of A and B are near each other, X-plane will generate a -single- giant mesh with both in it, attached to a single shader. This gives us the fastest possible rendering.

          If you then use a dataref to change the library asset mapped to A to a NEW facade with a DIFFERENT shader state, we have no way to ‘undo’ the merging of these elements in order to change the shader of JUST A and not B. We’d have two options:
          – Never merge across art assets. But this would be a huge performance penalty — we very carefully built the airport scenery library to use only about 4 or 5 textures (with similar state) for ALL elements so that we could heavily merge the library internally and get optimal fps. Not merging wold make all airports slower. Or…

          – Reload scenery completely, which lets us redo the merge (and not merge if needed). This is, of course, what we actually do.

          Since a reload is expensive, we wait for you to trigger it.

  11. Hey ,
    Nice job guys with the 10.40 and the new extended terrain , enhances graphics alot when flying with airliners.

    I have a couple of questionsfor the short-term (or in other words for the V10 run):

    – Is there any plans to make water better? AKA real 3d waves , maybe using this:

    http://sundog-soft.com/sds/features/ocean-and-water-rendering-with-triton/

    This IMO will be great graphics-wise mainly when approaching airports like KSFO which the runways are over the sea.

    – As for time and sun , currently for example in europe at summer it gets dark and hour too early IMO , is it something that should be considered a bug?

    Thanks for your great job so far!

    1. If the sun is setting in the wrong place for the _GMT_ time in Europe, this is a bug – please report it. The bug I am aware of is the moon position being wrong – that’s a known issue that we will fix at some point.

      If the sun sets in the wrong place according to the _local_ time, go enter an offset in the date/time window. Local times are political – that is, an arbitrary area on the planet picks a time zone and that’s it. In the US they’re all weird shaped, all of China has one, and one US state (cough cough, Indiana) has TWO. So X-Plane does not attempt to know what the politics of a local area is – if the time zone isn’t “ideal” (e.g. centered on a 15-degree longitude band) then you have to customize it yourself.

      That’s not that different from what a real pilot must do – reset his watch to local time when he arrives.

      We are not, in the short term, going to implement 3-d water.

      1. Thanks for the response!

        Well I actually never noticed this GMT option LOL , thanks.

        As for water , the link that I brought , it also has a cloud engine , the same that SkyMaxxPro is based on.
        It’ll be great to see also this 3d water combined , maybe not by you , rather the same team that created SkyMaxxPro.
        But accoridng to the forums there when people asked for it , they can’t do that because of a limited SDK for water or something.

        My suggestion is maybe giving the ability to change water engine , just like it’s possible with clouds ?

    2. That did look like 2008-09 kind of wave tech. I think if the devs of X-plane want to take the approach towards 3d water then this probably would feel closer to hand, especially taking into consideration that developing a new engine for water maybe takes 1-3 years *from now*:

      https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iilqtDkeIBE

  12. Hi Ben I’m interested in the question whether there is information on the development PMDG aircraft for X-Plane 10?

    2. They are currently beta testing their DC-6 , and on some magazine they said that the first boeing airliner shall come in 2016.

  13. Just a question. I did not understand the new entrance of the ATC . When I press Enter on the keyboard now only shows an input and I do not know where I can put the departure airport , destination and altitude.

      1. Yeah , you right . thank you! I am embarrassed now. I didn’t notice it. Thank you again.

  14. Glad to see screenshots being put into the outputs folder. Suggested this years ago, but it never came … unlike the USB stick.

    Looking forward to the 9.40 final 🙂

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