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X-Plane 10.45 Beta 1 is out – here are the release notes. This is a small update in terms of code change; the new feature is updated global airports and nav data, as well as a bunch of bug fixes; the beta period should be relatively short.

To get the new beta, run the X-Plane installer, update your copy of X-Plane and make sure “get new betas” is checked.

Prop Torque

Prop torque is fixed in X-Plane 10.45 beta 1; the calculation was incorrect (causing too much torque from props) in previous versions of X-Plane.

In order to get the new correct physics, you must resave your aircraft in Plane-Maker 10.45 beta 1.

We have heard of authors doing a number of things to lower the effects of prop torque in old versions of X-Plane, including having plugins apply a counter-torque and tweaking the physics parameters of the aircraft itself. Because we cannot know if an aircraft has such work-arounds applied, the prop torque fix is applied only to aircraft resaved in 10.45 beta 1 or newer. This way the fix takes affect when an aircraft author can remove work-arounds.

 

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.

59 comments on “X-Plane 10.45 Beta 1 Released”

  1. Hello, thank you for this, haven’t you thought about updating the world scenery? I think the current scenery comes form 2011, 4 years is a long time.. :/

    1. …and ending 2015, it’s time to say this again:

      Major world landmarks ARE navigation tools.
      Shouldn’t a collection of maybe 10-100-500 of them be in the stock scenery?
      Most (if not all) have 3D models in the public domain, you don’t even have to remake them, just port them.

      The first consumer (games in fact) flight simulators 20+ years ago did have more than stock X-Plane.

      1. I don’t disagree, but X-Plane from the beginning has been about instrument training, so while landmarks are mostly used for navigation in a VFR environment, the focus was on IFR. The main, points that X-Plane was designed around in the beginning were accuracy in instrumentation and flight physics. It grew from there, but most of the conversations that I had with Austin in years past always left me with the impression that looking out the window other than to see the runway was not what X-Plane was designed for, thus making the fact that other flight simulators had more major landmarks (not to mention accurate taxiway layouts, airport buildings, etc…) 20+ years ago unfortunately irrelevant .

        Now, I think that Ben and company have done a remarkable job in bringing X-Plane out of the 1980’s Level-D simulator style graphics, but they are a small team, and probably too small to effectively develop all that we want in the same time frame as anything that Microsoft or Lockheed Martin are able to do. Thus, one has to rely on third party developers. However, with X-Plane, there just isn’t the user base buying enough of these third party add-ons to justify most people trying to make a living out of it, which is really what needs to happen to get the amount of 3rd party support equal to that of MS/LM. The amount of money that a third party developer for MS/LM makes compared to what an X-Plane developer makes is not even comparable, and the amount of time it takes to develop high end packages is considerable. My hat is off to anybody who can find the time to dedicate to making this hobby more enjoyable for the rest of us, freeware and payware.

        I would love to see more VFR checkpoints in the simulator (including golf courses). I started to look at developing a World Landmarks package because like you, I totally agree that not only does it give a pilot the ability to practice VFR/Dead reckoning navigation, but I think it also gives cities and parts of the world character. But the list was fairly extensive, and in order for me to dedicate the time to such a task would not only require a small team to shorten the development span, but also for me to quit my real job so that I could dedicate the time needed to effectively develop a quality package without spending 3 years on it. Porting (at least from the sources that I looked into, like TurboSquid, SketchUp, TF3DM, GrabCAD, etc…) is not an option as there are ownership and legal issues, and most of the models are not optimized at all, so it would be lethal for people with older computers from a frame rate perspective. Thus, all new scenery would need to be built from scratch and optimized with both creative poly counts and LOD’s. None of that penciled out for me personally, so my attempt at such a project was scrapped.

        The real question that should be asked is; What are people willing to pay for [insert scenery/aircraft/functionality request here]? That is what will ultimately determine what, if anything, gets done outside of what Laminar provides.

  2. I am quite excited about the new release. Finally, time to clean up my custom airport directory. I am not sure whether to report it here or on the scenery gateway: Now that the lego blocks version of EDDT is in, the rather rudimentary Aerosoft version should be removed from the distribution. Otherwise, buildings could be duplicated, if the scenery order is incorrect, since the Aerosoft scenery does not have exclusions (and looks a bit … outdated).

      1. I think, the “rudimentary Aerosoft version should be removed” in general, because it is build without much knowledge of X-Plane (looks bad, performs bad). Simple conversion of FSX-scenery parts.

        Just an idea.

  3. Hi Ben, I want to even notice the fact why in the X-Plane 10 during the cold season in the cities to the Russian Prieur in lawns and other landscape field does not have the character of the winter, and vice versa green trees but the weather there is a decent snow looks very ironic. Fix this issue to the X-Plane 10.45 to the release date. Thank you.

      1. Hi Mario,

        don´t feed him – he comes on here every time that Ben posts something, and asks for either Antarctic scenery or adding winter to his homeland of Russia. Often his comments are even in Kyrillan letters, which give his demands some kind of urgency – or maybe thats just me being a cold-war child 😉

        It´s becoming somewhat of a running joke…

        Cheers, Jan

      2. Why developers do not want to add seasonal textures to the release of X-Plane 10.45, and only some minor changes?

        1. 1. 10.45 is a small release in terms of technical change. So no big huge things are coming in 10.45.
          2. Making seasonal versions of every texture in the sim is a huge job.
          3. We are not going to release seasonal versions of the default textures for X-Plane 10. You can stop asking now.

  4. Thank-you for the update. X-Plane just keeps getting better! Ramp start gates at KORD are corrected in this release.

      1. Unless it has been updated recently, Butnaru’s KORD does not have proper exclusion zones so the X-Plane delivered global airport shows through his KORD. I created an exclusion zone for his airport but I should not have to do that for payware. I would rather just use the default delivered airport. Maybe something has changed?

        1. Foolishly, last night I updated to Butnaru’s latest KORD-HD hoping the exclusion zone issue was fixed. It isn’t! So no, updating to this airport does not make the point mute for me. I am reverting back to the X-Plane delivered airport and will consider the investment in this payware a lesson learned.

          Other payware I have purchased respects the exclusion zone requirement. The only suggestion I have received from Butnaru is to delete .dsf files from global airports so it does not conflict with his. That is completely backward and requires maintenance every time I get an X-Plane update. I am not doing that.

          I have read multiple times in this blog about exclusion zones and the design of scenery.ini allows X-Plane delivered airports and custom airports to work in harmony when properly implemented. Unfortunately, the only way to tell with payware is to actually purchase the scenery and hope it is X-Plane compliant.

          1. Hi Ronald,

            There’s another thing you can do if you can use WED for 10 minutes:

            1. Create your own pack (Ronald-KORD).
            2. In it, draw some exclusion zone rects that kill the gateway airport stuff. Export this pack.
            3. Set up scenery packs ini to prioritize like this:

            1. KORD-HD
            2. Ronald-HD
            3. Global airports

            Your pack will exclude the gateway but not the payware.

            the advantage of this is that the exclusion zones are outside both the payware AND the global airports, so you can update EITHER the gateway airports (via an x-plane update) OR the pay-ware (if new versions come out) and your exclusion zones won’t be affected.

            I’m going to talk to Jennifer about doing a tutorial on how to do this. I don’t like the idea of users having to do WED work to use payware scenery, but it is not that hard to exclude, so a video tutorial probably would be useful.

            My view is that for a -payware- pack to be -updated- and not have exclusion zones is pretty bad. I’m sympathetic to the difficulty for payware authors who forgot to use exclusion zones in doing an update ASAP when we come out with gateway airports, but if you’re in WED anyway updating the pack, it’s not up to commercial quality to not fix this. And we’ve had the gateway for a while now, so no one should be surprised.

  5. Regarding the prop torque bug, are default aircrafts already corrected or they too must be opened and re-saved in Plane Maker?

      1. What about 3rd Party prop planes from developers like Carenado? Do we need to have new versions downloaded from the dev for (all) other planes in order for it to have the correct Prop torque applied to them?

        1. They will need to re-issue their planes if and only if they need the torque bug fix from the physics engine. If they have already worked around the old torque model by applying a plugin or acf mod, then the aircraft will work as is.

  6. How noticable will the torque fix be to users? I opened and re-saved our own vFlyteAir SR20 (which doesn’t have any custom ways to counter torque) in PlaneMaker 10.45 (without making any further changes), but it behaves as in previous versions.

    1. This isn’t hugely surprising…Andy Goldstein’s comment is you’re more likely to notice in a P-51 than an SR20. You’re also more likely to notice if you don’t use trim. 🙂

  7. Hi Ben,

    Was the spelling issue also resolved for autogen strings? I had this problem when I was creating autogen for Norway and couldn’t work out why always the smallest out of my spellings was always being chosen.

    1. Y’know…this _does_ potentially affect AG strings…it’s not where we noticed the issue because AG strings will re-try and fetch more spellings.

      Please try your autogen in 10.45b1 and email me to let me know whether (1) this fixed things or (2) it’s still borked. I don’t _think_ I have a bug report from you so if it’s still borked I’ll need a real bug report with a test case.

      1. Thanks Ben

        The reason I didn’t file a bug report is I thought I was doing something wrong in the AGS file as it has many undocumented options. I’ll give it a try and if it’s still a problem I’ll produce you a test case and email you.

  8. Hi Ben,

    Not really a bug I suppose (it may be a ‘feature’ 😛 ) but I have just run into an interesting difference that I hope you might speak into. Certainly I’ve read nothing in the release notes of late as 10.4 climbed the ladder.

    I have recently developed and released a rather large freeware scenery for both 10.42 and 9.7 X-P versions. I developed a draped .pol for a dock ramp start with a surface so that float craft could ‘slide’ off of it and gently bump up onto it. (using SURFACE command in script).

    This works very well in V9.7. It does not work at all in 10.42. The craft has a hard crash upon exit or attempted entry.

    Did the physics change somewhere that I didn’t notice? Is there anything you could point me to to allow a transition from water to land without a crash.

    Sure appreciate any pointer or direction from you.

    Cheers,
    Joel

    1. Hrm – the mystery is why that works in X-Plane 9, not why it’s a hard crash in X-Plane 10. The problem is that the draped polygon establishes a hard surface at the top of the water. When the float plane is floating, assumably some of the plane (e.g the wheels) are underwater as it achieves equilibrium.

      At the instant the wheel is “over” the hard surface horizontally, the collision detection code discovers that the aircraft should be much higher and you get a hard crash.

      The fix has to come inside the engine and it’s not simple:
      1. we need to have separate Y testing for the water surface and hard surfaces.
      2. then you can build a real 3-d obj ramp that goes down UNDER the water.

      One you do that, the wheels will collide with the exact top of the hard surface while under water, and you’ll get a smooth transition.

      I don’t know why it works in v-9…my guess is it’s a bug in v9.

      1. Yes, the ultimate point was to add an underwater object but nonetheless I thank you for your reply.

        Rather than all of the convolutions, I think I will just release my plugin for a tie-down feature thus solving the issue at hand, which was for the user to have a stable craft during startup and be able to follow correct docking procedures.

        Marry Christmas and a Happy New year sir. Keep up the great work please 🙂

        Joel

  9. Hi Ben,

    Just a quick note on a self-sorted issue that I encountered with this update – might be useful for anyone else with a similar experience.

    I’m running an iMac with OS 10.11.3. I ran the updater (with beta option checked) but noticed that neither X-Plane nor PlaneMaker appeared to have updated – both still said 10.42r1. I ran the updater again, double-checking everything, and again no change in version. This was also confirmed by the “Get Info” box when checking the application details.

    Eventually I trashed the X-Plane applications then ran the updater again. This time it took much longer, updated both apps to 10.45b1, and also downloaded a bunch of DSFs that definitely weren’t downloaded in the 2 previous attempts.

    Not sure what it means, but it’s updated now and working fine.

    Al.

    1. This should not be necessary. You just have to run the updater with “get betas” checked.

      I do -not- encourage people to go around trashing their entire x-plane folder every time something goes wrong, as it burns server bandwidth.

    2. Hi Al,
      I noticed in the past that the indicated version is updated only after the first run of the updated version, don’t ask me why but this is what I noticed (since Yosemite, I’d say, both with beta and final releases of OSX).

  10. Hi Ben,

    Just a quick follow-up on my hardened surface .pol file issue back a couple of posts.

    I thought you might be interested to actually see what I meant about the behaviour of the .pol in V9.7. This has a surface of concrete with a texture order +1 above terrain and is a standard no_wrap.

    If you catch it from 1:55 to about 2:10 then you won’t waste time watching yet another flying video 😆

    https://youtu.be/jriJDh3lTXU

    Cheers,

    Joel

    1. Oh that is surprising – I don’t know how the aircraft can interact with the surface’d draped polygon without the wetness being affected, changing the vertical location. That’s definitely not something the scenery system is supposed to do.

  11. Thanks Ben,

    Turns out some others are reporting similar experiences in the ShoutBox but have since discovered that it seems to happen when using older updaters. They’ve since downloaded the most recent updater and now it’s downloading 10.45b.

    Al.

  12. This latest beta causes the right engine on piston twins to feather (visually), while still making thrust. Tried it on the stock Baron and payware Diamond DA42 Twin Star.

  13. Hi Ben,

    is it possible to flatten the area for Gateway default airports. Trying to create airports for my country (planning to create all “X-plane default only”) but having terminal buildings flying a few meters above seems weird, so i paused working on them.

    1. There isn’t a good way to fix this. If you have a boundary polygon on your airport then when the DSF is recut things will look a lot better.

    2. When using facades for buildings you can determine which side is No.1 – you can rotate the facade (use CTRL-R). The No.1 side is shown as “whitish double line”. This side determines the “height” of the facade. The other sides will sink a bit into the terrain, but it looks better than floating.

      So determine which side of the building is on the “lowest terrain”, then rotate facade until first segment is on lowest terrain.

      Jan

        1. Currently the problem solved by dividing big terminal buildings into small blocks. As Jan stated underground is better than floating.
          I thought first SNAP point was register point! Thank you for the info, you made my day 🙂

  14. Airport Scenery Gateway will install automatic the airport?????? this well be a great update!!!!!!

      1. hmm then sales 3rd party devs needs to have there stuff on sale on there own sites too or the aircraft should work with any copy of xplane

          1. if your going to let steam sell aircraft they need to work with ALL versions of Xplane

            or you need to enforce pricing across all versions

            ie if the steam aircraft are one sale then the non-steam one must be as well

          2. We can’t enforce pricing for sale of aircraft for any third party vendor, or enforce price uniformity. Stores are free to sell their aircraft at whatever price they want, in agreement with the aircraft’s authors I suppose.

  16. http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/96877/en-us

    http://www.nvidia.com/download/driverResults.aspx/96883/en-us

    https://developer.nvidia.com/opengl-driver

    “These new OpenGL 2015 ARB extensions require NVIDIA GeForce 900 series or newer GPUs:

    ARB_post_depth_coverage
    ARB_fragment_shader_interlock
    ARB_texture_filter_minmax
    ARB_sample_locations
    ARB_shader_viewport_layer_array
    ARB_sparse_texture2
    ARB_sparse_texture_clamp”

    Does X-Plane use these OGL extensions on GeForce 900 series Maxwell2 cards?

  17. Hi all,
    perhaps a little off topic but it’s just me or the link http://gateway.x-plane.com/utility/release/diff/from/10.40/to/10.45r4 (is 10.45r4 right?) doesn’t work?
    As per description I’d like to see the complete list of only 3-D airports in the X-Plane 10.45 release plus the new airports with 3-D scenery but using that link I always get the login page and then the search scenery page, not a specific list, so I wonder if I must do a specific search (New Approved Airport Submissions, maybe) instead.
    Many thanks in advance.
    Best regards

    Angelo

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