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X-Plane 10.40 RC1 went live last night – see the release notes for bug fixes.

If your add-on works in 10.36 but does not work in 10.40, please tell us four weeks ago. (But if you haven’t tested your add-on, please do so ASAP!)

If you find something is broken in 10.40r1 that works in 10.36 please file a bug ASAP!

Note that we do have a number of valid bugs filed that will not be fixed in 10.40 – these are mostly bugs present in both 10.36 and 10.40. The goal with 10.40 is to get digital download final and not introduce new bugs.

If we don’t find a major “oh noes” over the weekend, we’ll look at getting rc1 onto Steam as a beta on Monday.

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.

79 comments on “X-Plane 10.40 RC 1”

  1. Not a problem with RC1, but your link to “Recent Release Notes” in the right hand column of this page under “Useful Links” seems to be broken.. The link in your RC1 post (above) works. Thanks for the great work you guys have done!

    1. Thanks — looks like the “all release notes” meta-page is borked on the web. I’ll poke the web site folks. We’ve moved the website _twice_ now in the last few months (we were -not- happy with our previous host) so there may be things that are not working properly.

  2. Great work. So many new things. Thank you Ben and LR Team.

    I do have a question, it is not a bug but for me it is confusing.

    In the Joystick & Equipment window, Buttons Adv Tab, view/ menu numbers shown in the window showing command for View:3D cockpit location # x DO NOT match corresponding command sim/view/quick_look_x.
    Numbers are shifted by one digit.

    For example command sim/view/quick_look_0 has description View:3D cockpit location # 1.

    I assigned all my quick views but it seems to be a bit confusing.

    1. Yeah – this is sort of a poor design. The command names are “zero based” because we’re programmers and we count from zero. But the descriptions are meant for normal people and count from 1.

  3. Hi Ben. RC1 looks good 🙂

    You noted that you put in the code in 10.40 to allow Seasons or the transfer of default textures, was that continued or dropped as it was not mentioned again?

    Thanks SD

  4. I notice that a cycle date for the default apt.dat file hasn’t been included for a while now. Are there any plans to change the format of this anytime in the 10.4 run? I ask because I used to poll that to create a hash table, but without a cycle date I’ll have to poll Log.txt for an X-Plane update, which is a dumb method in the sense that it may not be relevant to the file in question.

    1. That’s not a terribly safe way to deal with cache invalidation – you also can’t just look at one file – the user might have other airports installed.

      The safe thing to do is to look at the mod date for every apt.dat in the set of search paths X-Plane looks at, and rebuild if the mod dates are newer than what you logged in your cache.

  5. Looks great but when you quit the application on OS X El Capitain GM Candidate you get an error message resulting in a crash report.

  6. Hey Ben!

    It’s awesome we’re this close to release… but the cloud whiteout/greyout isn’t fixed. I did file a bug, I was wondering if the fix will be in time for 10.40 release?

    Regards! x

    1. From the end of the post: “If we don’t find a major “oh noes” over the weekend, we’ll look at getting rc1 onto Steam as a beta on Monday.”

      So…maybe Monday!

      1. Ben,

        Look at the time stamp… They posted the same question at the same time same minute. so he could not have red the answers….
        😉

        is the pink line on the horizon filed as a bug? (mac version)
        if so ok if not let me know so i can file a bug report.

        Thank

          1. did anyone tested the El capitan to is if the bug is still there? May be they change the driver?

            I dont want to be the first on that roler coster hehe

          3. Really?? Can you file a bug and attach a log – Please indicate in the bug that you have the config where the artifact is -not- present!

            I owe Apple a write-up of this, so this is pretty important information.

        2. (Sorry can’t reply to the posting directly)

          In 10.10.5, with the latest nVidia alternative drivers (346.02.03f01)

          There are alternative drivers for OS X, i.e. drivers not supplied with the OS?? Does some kind soul have a link? Thx.

  9. I am getting occasional CTDs in RC1, this last time on all three networked computers within seconds of each other, but when I look at the log.txt all it says is “This application has crashed”. There are no clues I can see. The dialog comes up to send to Laminar so I do x 3, and include my email. So my point is how would I file a bug with no data and seemingly random crashes? Do you guys get those auto reports?

    Not sure what to do with this. Any suggestions?

    James

      1. I’ve got a similar issue with X-Plane and contacting customer support was not very useful, when I finally proved that my crash was caused by X-Plane itself and not by plugin or add-on I didnt get another respond from them. Filing a bug report wasnt succesful either. I’m getting CTD a lot since 10.35 and I tested beta and rc of 10.40 and the issue is still there.

  10. Hi Ben,
    sorry for hijacking this post, but I didn’t know where to post the question otherwise …

    what is the best channel to suggest new features for the sim?

    thx

    /M

    1. For physics/flight model, email Austin. For third party interfaces (modeling, scenery), email me.

      I’ll talk to the other developers about the best channel – we don’t have a modern request mechanism because in the old days you could just email Austin for everything.

        1. Given how exposed the guy’s email address is, I’d be surprised if he doesn’t have a hard disk allocated for email alone. 😀

          1. Back in the day, when it was just myself, Austin, and Sergio part time, before we had Randy doing customer support, Austin’s phone number was the company help line too. I’d be down in SC trying to work out a scenery bug with him and mid-sentence he’d stop everything and go “Laminar Research, how can I help you.”

            As crazy as you might ever think Austin is, he’s relatively sane considering how much of that he did in the first fifteen years of the company’s existence…

  12. Hi Ben, X-Plane 10.40 hope will reflect the effect of the aircraft and the environment on the water?

  13. Hi Ben,

    The release notes mention that X-Plane now runs on Linux with the Mesa driver stack. Does this include Gallium-based Mesa drivers like radeonsi and nouveau?

    Regards, Tom

    1. I don’t know.
      – Mesa is unsupported.
      – I’m happy to fix any bug where:
      (1) a Linux developer does the leg work of figuring out what happened -and-
      (2) it’s clearly a bug in X-Plane, not a bug in the driver stack.

      That’s what this case was – the problem was on Mesa Gallium with Intel. That sack presents GL 3.0 and GLSL 130 – it’s the only stack I’ve seen that does that (everything else is really old, e.g. GLSL 120) or really new (GLSL 130) and the crazy hash of #defines I need to run on all versions of GL had this case wrong. It is now fixed.

      If you come to me and go “I run on radeonsi and I get a crash” I’m not going to touch that with a ten foot pole. The kinds of bugs I can fix are ones where there are clear error messages because it’s due to API versioning. I can’t chase down instability-type problems.

        1. Not sure – since RC2 hasn’t been cut and I’m not sure when RC2 will come, it’s tough to predict the steam build. A rough guess is “1-2 business days after RC2 is available.”

          1. I can understand that but i thought we would be getting at least RC1. i can understand not getting the others before the rc

            “If we don’t find a major “oh noes” over the weekend, we’ll look at getting rc1 onto Steam as a beta on Monday.”

            from the comments there does not seem to be any major oh noes so

          2. We did find some major oh noes – that’s why you’re not getting an RC1. (Well, really it’s a series of minor oh noes, but it’s enough to guarantee an RC2.)

            Remember: the purpose of beta is to test things, an the purpose of Steam beta is to test that the Steam build works. The purpose of beta is not to ship the product sooner or get you code sooner than it’s ready to ship. So cutting extra steam RCs when we know the RC needs a recut just takes away time that could be spent fixing the known bugs faster and getting everyone (including all steam users) a finished 10.40.

          3. Will RC2 come *after* the actual 10.40 release?

            Kidding. Apparently either you guys got out the industrial strength bug killer and fumigated the sim en masse, or someone jumped the gun in both the release notes and on the .org.

            Inquiring minds want to know…

          6. Oh – that’s normal. The build’s “R” is hidden on the inside and candidate isn’t written down. That way if we keep the RC it doesn’t need to be re-labeled.

          7. By the way, I realize that X-Plane.org is *not* the release notes. The release notes are still at RC1, in all fairness. Not sure why “the media” would jump the gun on you, though.

  15. When will X-plane get a new interface for the windows API?

    Why are the windows so difficult, slow and clunky? You cannot use the tab button to navigate around when entering data – very slow interface. It’s painful to navigate on these cramped, little windows with so little functionality. Page up, page down should work. You should be able to sort, or enter a few letters, and have it search, hit enter, up down, enter, etc. Just basic functionality could be much improved. Wish the UI was not so slow and clunky. Needs a massive overhaul.

    1. Hi Dan,

      Everyone at LR agrees with you, including Austin. Austin announced at FSConn this summer that next-gen UI was a top priority for us. Company resources are being used to do this work -now-; this is a top priority and it’s getting dev time.

      cheers
      ben

      1. That’s great news, Ben.

        However, the old UI has rather grown on me, after having used it for five years now. It reminds me of Mac OS X Tiger, which looked quite wonderful. Apple ruined Aqua with Yosemite and Helvetica Neue, in my opinion. It doesn’t look much better on El Capitan, and I’m still using Mavericks for that very reason.

        I hope whichever direction Laminar Research takes the UI in, it doesn’t take a sledgehammer and road-roller to it in an effort to “flatten” the UI like Apple (and many other companies, like Microsoft) did and make it childish, overly white and with “flat icons” that have no life. Keep it professional and attractive, but neat, clean and functional.

        Furthermore, the UI ought to be DPI-aware and scale without aliasing, accordingly. I have a 1080p 13.3″ screen, and text is far too small to see as it is, currently. I have to peer uncomfortably close to the screen, which makes it hard to use.

        1. DPI aware is absolutely on our list.

          The new UI is being built using the UI code that is already used in mobile and the Plane-Maker panel editor. (I mention that the panel editor uses this code because the UI code doesn’t imply that the UI design or icons will look like mobile – just that it is modern code that can support scrolling, transition effects, floating windows, etc. very easily.) This new UI code was written resolution-independent from day 1 to cope with Retina iPhones (and the many resolutions of Android :-), so we get to bring that back and make a scalable UI on desktop.

          Re: the look of it, honestly, I consider this to be the -least- important aspect of the UI. What really matters is -how- you do things, how information is presented, how what the sim does and what you do, what is the user experience. If you don’t like the colors, you can repaint the PNGs. 🙂 But you can’t go repaint the PNGs of v10 and “fix” the UI problems that way.

          With that in mind, while the current UI is reminiscent of the early aqua look (because that’s what there was) it’s unlikely that the new UI will look like that. While in some cases UIs have gone a little overboard with the “flat” thing, mostly I think the reduction in ‘chrome’ around UI is a good thing.

          3. it would be nice to have a new look to x-plane UI in a future major release version, just so x-plane doesn’t look “old” at first sight.

  18. Hi Ben,

    Austin talked about a weather output ‘system’ in 10.40. A way to output weather data to third party apps. Do you know if this went in with 10.40?

    Thanks!
    Ralph

    1. I have -no- idea … you’d better ask the source. Austin and I have talked about creating some kind of ADSB-like weather feed from X-Plane (but not ADSB itself because the protocol is insane), but I don’t know of any action on it.

      I can say this: we’re in RC, we’re not putting new features in 10.40. So for all questions of the form “will you add X to 1040” where X is something not in 1040, the answer is now always “no”!

      1. Thanks, I’ll ask Austin. And I understand that if it’s not in 10.40 now, that it won’t be in 10.40.

  19. Hi Ben, I understand you will realize that in the X-Plane 10 for the final release of X-Plane 10.40 judging by your words: “I have -no- idea … you’d better ask the source. Austin and I have talked about creating some kind of ADSB-like weather feed from X-Plane “…

  20. I still can’t understand why do not send the updated X-Plane in steam . I have other Steam games I in which updates 3 times a day , if not more.
    I understand that those who bought the version on Steam is coming out injured , at the end we are not receiving a deserved post sale support.
    Why I could not able to upgrade to 10.40RC1 and then to Rc2 ???

    Have not beta okay, now not receiving the RC version …
    I’m waiting for days , and I regret not having acquired the other version , with a view that are already enjoying the news.

    I hope my appeal will help shed some light on the minds of developers and have good faith to submit to steam our more than deserved update right !

    Thanks, and sorry for my complain over text but I’m not the only one!
    Att, André

    1. i can try to explain this; based on what you’ve posted I don’t think it will make you any happier, but…

      First, I think it’s clear why there aren’t steam betas – as I said, a beta has -known- bugs (that’s why it’s not a release candidate), so we save developer time by cutting only one beta (for regular users) – keeping steam out of beta cuts our beta effort.

      A release candidate is a _candidate_ – RC means we _think_ this is good enough to ship but we’re not sure. In more detail, a release candidate lives in one of three states:

      1. Good candidate – we don’t know of any problems YET. When we cut the RC, this is where we are.
      2. Bad candidate – once a show-stopping bug is reported, the candidate is now bad – it’s still a usable version of x-plane, but there’s a bug that means it isn’t going to be the final official version.
      3. Acceptance – once we wait long enough and say “good enough”, then everyone gets it.

      What happened is RC1 went from good candidate (1) to bad candidate (2) _before_ we had time to get Steam cut. Getting a steam build cut takes three different people working on it, and thus it is a slow process (compared to a regular x-plane build, done entirely by me) – builds are sent from person to person down a pipeline. Add in weekends, time zones, and travel, and the process can get stretched out. In this case, rc1 was dead before it could make it to steam.

      So now that I _know_ that RC1 is a bad candidate, I’m not going to waste my time, Philipp’s time, or Raphael’s time cutting an RC1 for steam – doing so would simply _delay_ RC2 for LR and Steam users, which is the build everyone needs.

      Once we get a release candidate that stays good for more than 2 days, we’ll cut a steam version. But if an RC build ever goes from good to bad before I can cut a steam build, I’m not going to cut a bad steam build on purpose.

      1. Thank you for your explanation , now I understand why !
        I am awaiting a good RC ! Good energy X -plane team!

        Thank you, Andre

    2. I updated to RC1 after a successful run of 10.40 Betas, and now I can’t even get X-Plane to start (fortunately the “Submit Bug” reporter gets spawned, so I get to inundate Ben with all of my failed attempts), so you should probably consider any Release Candidate to be nothing more than a Beta, and be thankful that you are being protected from any silly anomaly that slid into the release that could keep you from flying.

  22. Hi Ben,

    are any new global airports injections planned for the 10.40 final? It has been quite a while since the last batch was imported, and adding new airports should have a pretty low chance of ruining a candidate, right?

    Keep up the great work, this excellent sim is getting better all the time!

    Jan

    1. No. We’ll make a new patch (10.41? 10.45?) to take the next batch. It could be pretty soon after 1040 since the ‘major patch’ had a very long beta.

  23. To all those complaining about not getting beta versions or early RCs on Steam: Users of the “regular” version are supposed to keep the latest stable version around during testing of unstable versions so their installation is not completely ruined by a bad build and they can easily switch between versions to check behaviour across versions or simply enjoy a stable build again. This is something which, as far as I know, cannot be done as easily with Steam DRM. The only reliable way to keep a stable copy is to backup the installation via Steam which (as well as a restore) takes a long time given the huge size of X-Plane and consumes lots of disk space. In the past, restoring DLCs hasn’t worked for me, so global default scenery would likely be downloaded again after restore. Of course you can restore all add-on content from a manual backup but I would rather like to just have both versions installed in parallel but that’s not possible. This is the main reason why – even if there was something like a beta patch which could be applied to the Steam version outside of Steam – I would not like to test beta builds of X-Plane on my Steam installation. I’m fine with RCs however but as Ben already wrote there is no point in distributing a build that’s already known to contain previously unknown more severe bugs.

    If you think “but other games on Steam allow beta participation as well”, then think again: The high amount of 3rd party code/content added to X-Plane installations and simulators in general makes it far more complex to test them compared to other games. So for any unstable release you are almost guaranteed to need a stable copy to return to if you want to continue using X-Plane without any severe bugs. And that’s just not as easy with Steam as without it – backing up a 60+ GB installation isn’t as easy as backing up a 500MB indie game. So while I would have liked to test 10.40 earlier, I would have found it just impractical to do so because I need a stable simulation if I want to fly on VATSIM. A first RC is really the earliest version I would be comfortable to install on Steam but if that’s already known to be broken, what’s the point in committing any more work to a broken Steam pre-release? I’d rather be waiting a few weeks more for a more stable RC or even the final release to arrive.

    Just my 2 cents. 🙂

      1. Ok thanks

        My curiosity about this came because I looked at some shaders at the dev directory (I am one of those who like snooping around lol)
        there is a shader called “experimental” which looks really related to PBR , things like materials , reflections , diffuse bla bla 🙂

        1. You will find all sorts of crazy stuff if you look at the shader code – in fact, you’d have found bits and pieces of shadows in v9.0 – we thought we’d ship shadows but they weren’t ready yet, and the actual shipping v10 shadow shaders ended up quite a bit different.

          Anyway, speculate all you wish – the presence of unused code in the shader directory doesn’t represent a future feature spec or any kind of promise to ship a particular feature.

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