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The next beta will be out in a day or two, and it will be 10.50 release candidate 1 – that is, I’ve just finished off the last few bugs holding us back. A few quick bug notes:

  • Beta 7 has a major bug in how AI airplanes can park at airports – this should be fixed in the RC, resolving a lot of confusion by authors.
  • The KLAX tall-buildings-in-the-approach path are fixed – this is an art fix.
  • Alignment of water reflections with the terrain is slightly better.

On this last bug, three things can go wrong with the water reflections, and only one of them is fixed:

  1. The Earth is round, but X-Plane has to pick an arbitrary flat plane to pick as “the water”. If this flat plane isn’t pretty close to the triangles where the reflection is closest to land, then this can cause error.
  2. Similarly, since the Earth is round, any time the water isn’t perfectly flat, weird stuff happens.  This is normally not a problem, but sometimes if airports have been flattened this can cause crazy reflections.
  3. There was a small permanent offset in the reflection noise texture, partly due to mipmap rounding error and partly due to a 0.19% rounding error.

This last one is what’s fixed in 10.50 and it should remove small errors where the reflection plane is picked right in (1) and there isn’t goofy shaped water (2) – which is to say, it should help some of the time.

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.

33 comments on “A Few Quick Notes On Bugs Fixed”

  1. Great Work! Thank you…

    What about the not Loading Tiles or Scenerys?

    Since the Beta b5 i and other peoples with good Hardware have a Problem that during the Flight the World Tiles are not loading correctly, also the Airport on which i land does only show Grass Texture. (Scenery not Loading) this happens on different (also standart X-Plane Airports)…

    Link to the Thread at x-plane.org: http://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/105448-scenery-missing-at-arrival-1050b5/

    1. You and any other users who have this problem need to _file a bug_ ASAP.

      We looked into this and we think we know what it is, but we had VERY few direct contacts, and the users we did have contact with were unable to try the tests we needed and get us good feedback.

      There is an art control in the RC we can use to experiment with tuning, but we don’t see this in our lab machines.

      So any users who have this need to file a bug.

      Talking about this in the forums does _not_ at all count as having filed a bug and is not at all useful to us.

      1. Ok, thanks for the Reply…
        Will fill a Bug Report 🙂

        Thanks for your hard work!

  2. Some good fixes there.

    Any fixes for the atc altitude assignment issues on descent?

  3. Nice to see you found the AI bug. Big thumbs up.

    The only thing that’s missing for me now is the lack of a turn-around time for the planes when they’re at the gate/ramp. A simple timer with 60 seconds should do the trick imho, so the gates aren’t blocked for too long.

    1. Errm, you want the planes to leave the gate again after 60s? If you have any idea how to accomplish this, my airline will hire you and your knowledge for a multi-million dollar salary immediately 😉

      Usually planes are lucky if they get a turnaround of below 25 minutes…

      Jan

      1. It is very simple – he just needs to skip a few things like:
        – Turning off the engines.
        – Putting the blocks down.
        – Removing anything on the plane from the plane.
        – Loading anything new onto the plane.
        – Changing crew (sorry, once you start work, you can never leave :-).
        – Refueling.
        – Checking for any maintenance issues.

        I think I may have been on a Southwest flight that did that once… 🙂 🙂 🙂

        1. Hehe, I know how long it takes Jan. 😉

          My 60 seconds was just an arbitrary number because I thought you wanted the AI planes to not block the gate for too long or the waiting behavior would have been implemented AGES ago. 😀

          It looks just so silly atm when the planes are back on there way the moment they arrive at the gate. Like the captain has forgotten his wallet and is like, oh s**t, cu later.

          1. The current time is actually LESS than zero. ATC marks you as “done” a little bit before you pull up to the stop line due to the internals of how it tracks planes, and at that point the AI immediately files for a turn-around. If you aren’t listening to the delivery or ground frequency, that transaction is done -without- audio* and happens at the speed of computers talking to each other (e.g. instantly) and gets a taxi route without even pulling in.

            I’ve been avoiding fixing this because we don’t have push-back trucks right now, and the closer the planes get to the terminal, the more likely they drive through it.

            * Because transmissions in x-plane are slower than real world, we intentionally allow not-heard AI to operate without audio. The theory is that this will help ATC avoid missing turns to final, landing clearances, etc. and generally compensate for ops not going as fast as the real world.

    1. Probably about 24 hours after the regular sim gets it. It takes a little longer to kit the sim build, so usually we start kitting it once it’s been out for desktop for a few hours and we know there aren’t any “oh @#$@#” bugs that cause an instant recut. I have already cut the Steam Mac builds (that’s my part of the multi-person process) but it takes a while for everything to get through the pipeline.

          1. No. It’s in the works, but it involves multiple people and companies putting it together. I’ll post when it’s live, but I don’t have an ETA.

  5. Hello, I filled on the bug reporter (but I don´t know if this is really a bug), that when using the real weather and when there is only one weather station over a large area, the cloud coverage don´t match with the reported metar, one scattered cloud layer looks like the broken layer (comparing with the manualy assigned without real weather), and the broken layer looks like scattered.
    There are new estimates to adjustments weather engine and new weather features planned to 10.5x??

  6. Thank you and your whole team for your tireless work on making XP even better! The command_knob and dataref_knob manips are working great on our updated (beta) models so far! I was thrilled to see the release of the new AC3D plug-in, making my animation tasks much easier than hand-coding the OBJ files. Nice!! Any chance that the radio volume data refs will make an appearance in the RC candidate? It would be cool to have a COM1 and COM2 volume control.
    Cheers!

  7. Thanks for fixing the water reflection offset. This has been an ongoing annoyance for me since the bug was introduced in X-Plane 10.10 or 10.20 (it looks fine in the original version on the DVD).

      1. We shall see when it comes out. I noticed offset reflections some time around 10.30 and installed the original 10.00 version from the DVD alongside it, and it didn’t have the problem. It’s very obvious for example when taking off southbound from KORS.

  8. Great job here! Looks like your all on your last lap for 10.50. I’m going to jump in with this released RC!

    Thanks for all your work!

  9. Hi Ben,

    I would love to hear what that “big bug” was about, as in what it did and how it impaired intended behaviour?

    Also, a lot of us are standing by with our airports ready to upload to the gateway for 10.50 – you told us to hold off for a while until WED 1.5 is validated a bit more – will you give us the “all clear” in time so we can get them into 10.50?

    Thanks, Jan

    1. I need to talk to Julian, but my thinking is that we’ll do a 10.51 for airports. The issue is that X-Plane is nearly done and WED is not. From a work perspective there’s not much difference for us between cutting one more RC and cutting a 10.51 update for airports.

      The major bug with airplane parking was that my stupid code (due to a typo) was checking only the FIRST parking spot for compatibility with the AI plane. In my test cases this was okay because of what was in the first parking spot and the particular aircraft I used.

  10. Ben – What does this mean? “Phase alpha and beta out to 0 at 0 speed – this prevents jitter of alpha and beta when plane is not flying.” Thanks!

    1. The alpha and beta calculations depend on airspeed – when the airspeed gets close to zero, the calculations degenerate into noise. Austin put a calculation in that phases them out to zero as the airspeed gets close to zero so that you don’t see crazy alphas and betas while sitting on the runway on a calm day. We already have such smoothing on a lot of other variables.

      1. Still not clear. What are “alphas and betas?” Are you talking about scenery object jittering?

        1. They are aerodynamic values from the flight model. If you don’t know what they are, you probably shouldn’t worry too much about whether they are more or less smooth.

  11. My X-Plane crashes when I connect the XquawkBox, it happens since I installed 10.50b7.

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