I’ve been way behind on blog posts over the last few weeks. Basically, the more we are doing, the less I manage to blog about what we are doing. (Instead I put off writing a blog post until it’s really late and then decide at 11 pm that I’m too tired and I’ll do it tomorrow.)
So here’s a partial list of X-Plane 10.50 features. This is not even remotely complete, it’s just some “headline” features that I can think of now; the release notes will be comprehensive.
New Autogen: We have new US tall building art assets that will make cities look better.
apt.dat 1050 with Static Aircraft and New Models: A new revision of the apt.dat file provides information on parking spots so that we can place static aircraft models inside X-Plane, based on the library and rendering settings. X-Plane 10.50 will ship with a bunch of additional static aircraft models, and third parties can add more via the lbirary. WED 1.5 will have new features to edit this information.
For airports created before WED 1.5 (which is nearly all of the approved airports), we are working on tech to auto-upgrade the gateway airports to use the new static aircraft; third party scenery will simply not participate in the new feature until updated by the authors.
Global Winds Aloft: X-Plane 10.50 will use global NOAA data for winds aloft, rather than a US-only data source.
ATC Fixes: X-Plane 10.50 has a number of ATC bug fixes to make ATC a lot more usable. No more “you are off course!”
New Manipulators: We have added a few new manipulator types as part of an effort to make 3-d cockpits more usable. Yes, the scroll-wheel is accessible. (We have not rebuilt every 3-d cockpit in our fleet. The feature here is the capability in the engine, for us and third parties to use.)
Update King-Air and Baron: we have, however, redone the Kingair and Baron, fixing a number of issues and getting them to a whole new level for IFR flight. These planes use the new manipulators for their 3-d cockpits.
More Airports from the Gateway: as with all releases, we’ll include the latest airports from the X-Plane airport gateway.
Those are just the “big” things – there’s some huge number of other changes, some of which may be really important to some of our users. I still have about half a dozen items on my todo list to get to a 10.50 beta, so I haven’t worked up complete release notes yet.
“No more ‘you are off course!'”. THANK YOU!!!
Great, Ben please fix the sound in nav range of the vor and adf, I think since v10.40 when you are in range of vfr we can´t listen it.
Thanksss
Please file a bug.
” ATC Fixes: X-Plane 10.50 has a number of ATC bug fixes to make ATC a lot more usable. No more “you are off course!” ”
SWEEETNESS!!!!!!!!
You (LR) are on the right course. Thanks for this.
When Ben, give us a hint please!
Apart from the US tall buildings, would there be any new art assets of interest to airport authors?
Only the static aircraft. We have not one a general addition to the airport library.
Great news! Thanks
Can you please enhance the distance of the street lights billaboards?
BTW is there any dataref for this so we can play with it maybe?
And another question , is there any performance imporvement expected in 10.50?
Not any time soon – the lights are limited by how far out we build the 3-d at all.
Slight perf improvements for CPU use with autogen in 1050. It may be countered out by the new buildings, I haven’t measured the weight of the new art assets yet.
Hi Ben,
maybe I didn’t understand what you mean by “limited by how far out we build the 3-d at all” , but the limit of the draw distance for light billboards doesn’t apply to all lights.
I made some tests a while ago , airport lights actually renders in the far distance.
Then I though maybe it’s something with the default objects for street lights.
I took some of them and placed in a custom scenery I created , just to test.
And they also rendered in the distance.
My conclusion was that the limit applies ONLY for the auto-placed lights nearby highways , or whatever kind of road.
I found out the roads.net file* , maybe there is some sort of setting in this file?
because to me it seems the engine is actually capeable of rendering lights to a further distance , it works in a custom scenery pack , even using the objects that comes with the simulaotr.
* I did some tests on this file while trying to force Xplane to load more street lights nearby more types of roads .
I managed to do that eventually , now cities and villages are propely lit to my taste.
There also some files modified roads.net files to eliminate lights at highways in europe , just like real world.
Anyway , the Winds aloft in 10.50 is something Im waiting to try , combined with Real weather connector and Skymaxxpro we can have an amazing weather experience in Xplane!
There are two components to LOD: how far away an element is DRAWN and how far away it is BUILT. If the 3-d is never made, whether it would be drawn is irrelevant!
X-Plane builds 3-d as you fly in a radius around the aircraft. While the lights sometimes “escape” the draw distance limits of their parent OBJECT, they do not escape the BUILD distance of their 3-d objects and surrounding components because the lights exist as a by-product of building 3-d from the art asset.
The problem is: the roads don’t build that far out, and this isn’t something we can increase without some pretty massive changes to performance. I’m still looking for a better way to solve the problem, but there’s no quick edit.
speaking of datarefs and art assets is there any chance to have the water reflection shaders modified or maybe open to public so 3rd parties can try to make modifications to it?
No.
You want to have a go at fixing the reflection plane bug or something? I did have a look at that in the water shader, but I didn’t see an easy way to fix it or make it better. If you’re really good at that stuff, you might be able to make something better. I didn’t get much further than increasing the reflectivity at closer range to get more sky colour in and make it less dark.
Thank you for the continued support , x-plane is the best sim!
Are there any new ground textures in the works for the 10 run? Also have you thought about ways to improve the way coastlines and rivers are drawn ? The sharp angles you see in the scenery can look really bad. A example would be the Florida Keys.
Very good news. I hope there could also be a solution for moon/sun see through ground/mountains soon.
Good Features! Winds alof of all world is a good one.
One question, I saw that in version 10.40 has new ways to add other weather stations and add more wind aloft nodes. I had one idea to use this to populate with other weather sources the default x-plane real weather, but its not possible to edit wind.rwx and metar.rwx and after that reload x-plane real weather by the buttom “read weather right now”.
There are some kind of sdk release or newer datarefs for weather control in 10.50?
I don’t understand what you mean about it being not possible. You turn on real weather usage, turn off download, and send a command to the sim to reload weather when you or your add-on is done editing the weather files.
Becasue when I change the metar.rwx or wind.rwx after the x-plane start, disabling the automatic download and pressing the “read weather now” it doesn´t load the weather from file, it load the previews weather before the change.
If you can reproduce this in 10.50 beta 1 when it comes out, please file a bug.
Sorry, I was doing by the wrong way, there isn´t a bug! This new features with real weather of version 10.45 are really good. I only think that if exist a way to change the turbulence with real weather without disabling the real weather, something like a dataref “real_weather_turbulence_override” or delimit turbulence areas (or radius) at an external file (similar de winds.rwx) it will give a lot of options to developement of weather plugins.
Another thing is occasionally add cirrus clouds at weather stations without using the 3 layers, it´s nice to pass at high speed at this type of cloud and overall scene get more beautifull
Heck, if this new feature list is the result of you not blogging, please blogg less. Its both a win win situation and a double edged sword to us. We love to read you blog, and we love new features.
Hello Ben;
I would like to ask if we will have option to detail edit the gates? Instead of Heavy, GA, Jets etc, are we going to set gates according to Wingspan, Size or Select from a List (like 330, 319, 767, Atr-45 (this is not logical 😀 )?
E.g. currently 747, 777, 747-8 and 380 all heavies, but i have to ban 747-8 and 380 in some of my airports, or i want to allow jets to some gates but ban big propellers, or only want to allow 737, 319 and 320 to use the gates etc.
Gates will have an ICAO based size list, e.g. categories A-F. if you don’t want the A380, remove category F.
Thank you so much for the info & update.
When can we expect access to the new version of WED? I would be quite happy to update my airports on the Gateway to the new version, perhaps even before the 10.50 patch is released.
WED will be beta before 10.50 is final, but probably won’t be public beta before X-plane is public beta.
Hello Ben !
Maybe this is a little bit off topic but as we speak about new features, I was wondering about something…
You may know Dovetail Games is going to sell a new flight sim, rather similar to FSX or prepar3D even if, apparently the product is not backwards compatible…
In the eventuality Andras Fabian would decide to stop working on developing the DSF tiles you are using for XP, have you thought about making a partnership with Orbx just like Dovetail to create the “next generation DSF” – or whatever the format – for XP v11 ?
I know it is early to speak about XP v11 as it is at least one year away… But have a backup plan, sort of ? Would you consider to use a totally new way of creating world tiles that would force 3D-parties to redo their work. It sounds silly but Dovetail is apparently doing that with their product even if 3D-parties products are huge commercially speaking in the FSX/prepar3D world compared to products available for XP.
I don’t if that makes sense, I know that the DSF format continually evolves but I was wondering if you have some plans or ideas about that in the future…
Thanks.
First, more than anything I hope alpilotx does -not- stop making things for X-Plane. His work is really wonderful! I -believe- that I have the right setup that I can still cut DSF tiles even if he cannot do so, but he does a much better job than I do at data acquisition.
Regarding Orbx, I have never had any communication from them, and my impression is that in the past they have made strong statements that they will not move to X-Plane. My door is always open to all third parties, and I would be glad to help them to develop for x-Plane just as I do any scenery authors, but at this point I would be very surprised to hear from them because I would expect that whatever agreement they have with Dovetail would lock them in to Dovetail’s new sim.
Finally, I am -not- considering a total breaking change in how scenery tiles are created that would force 3-d parties to redo their work — there isn’t a strong need to do that and it would be a big slap in the face to content developers who work on X-Plane. The FSX community has a strange challenge ahead of it – because FSX has been a “dead tree” for such a long time, third parties have gotten used to perfect unchanging backward compatibility, no matter what they do. There is mathematically no way Dovetail can maintain that level of compatibility going forward, since that kind of “nothing changes” compatibility comes from doing nothing (e.g. having the sim not being actively develope) – as soon as they write even one line of C++, third party authors will have to figure out what will remain working and what will not.
That kind of approach (just leave it alone) has never been okay for X-Plane; instead we actively maintain a level of backward compatibility to give authors a window to evolve their work. This means large projects can have a reasonable shelf life but X-Plane doesn’t have to be anchored to the past. The “window” of time for old features varies – I’m willing to leave backward compatibility in for longer when it isn’t actively dragging down the sim, but at a minimum we try to keep airplanes working for a major version, e.g. X-Plane 9 aircraft (saved in 9.70) work in every version of X-Plane 10; in some cases the experience is rougher if new v10 features aren’t adopted, but it’s not a total reset. The old ENV file format (x-plane 6, 7) was supported in X-Plane 8 and 9 and dropped in 10.
We don’t usually drop a piece of technology until a better replacement has had time to be adopted. In the case of DSF, there isn’t some new “better-than-DSF” format that would replace it, so it’s way too early to even talk about dropping DSFs.
With that in mind, I expect DSF to evolve – DSF is just a big geometry container, so unless we stop using geometry, we’ll have DSFs. We’ve moved toward having more raster and less vector data in DSFs and we may be able to take further steps in that direction; there may someday also be a new set of binary encodings in DSF for better efficiency. No matter what, I expect there will be compatibility code so that no one has to wake up and go “oh noes, I have to rebuild all of my DSFs right now!”
Thanks for the clear answer Ben, it is very interesting !
Cheers.
Good news on the scroll wheel manipulators, will you publish details to enable 3rd party addon developers to implement them in due course?
Yes – in fact, support for the new manipulators is already available in the Blender 2.49 (my fork) and blender 2.73 (new 3.3 version) scripts. I also have ac3d support; I wasn’t planning on doing another ac3d plugin release but I would probably trade one more release for a good bottle of Scotch.
This is great news, I’ll check it out in Blender. Thanks Ben.
I’d be willing to offer two bottles for an updated ac3d plugin. I use blender only occasionally but I prefer AC3D.
As I am currently on designing a new aircraft model in Plane Maker I found a flight control feature missing…:
On my canard design it is necessary to match the incidence of the horizontal stabilizer to the angle of attack of the aircraft to provide propper control and handling. For testing purposes I am currently using the workaround as follows: At the Wings definition window I have selected “incidence with elevtr 2” for the Horiz Stab. Additionally I have selected “incidence with trim” for it. At the Control Geometry window I have set a range for “all-moving stabilizer trim”. With this done I currently try to match incidence to AOA manually in flight. As there are many canard type aircraft out there using this feature it would be great, if you could add an automatic incidence matching for the all-moving stabilzer.
Many thanks & cheers
Alex
You should ping Austin about this.
Nice list! I like the winds aloft from NOAA, worldwide coverage. But there should be maybe an easier way to print out the metar and wind information for the flight at this point, without using the map I mean; or maybe there is and I missed it 🙂
Great job anyway
As I understand, X-plane doesn’t use the second GPU. That may change when you are using METAL or Vulcan in the future (perhaps in X-plane 11 or 12).
But could you use the second GPU for rendering the co-pilot’s view in future version of X-plane 10 (without METAL or Vulcan) or X-Plane 11 (with METAL or Vulcan)?