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Austin and I are back from Cosford (thanks to Scott, Richard and the JustFlight team for hosting us!) , and the cat is out of the bag: X-Plane 11 is coming this year. Austin and I gave a presentation on some of what’s coming in v11, and it’s up on Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPyydyyu3zE

Because of the size of the auditorium, we actually gave this talk twice; I believe this video was taken from the first talk, but there may be video of the second floating around. The content is not quite the same; in particular the Q & A went in separate directions.

Over the next week or two I will post some useful information about v11 for third party developers.

In the meantime: please do not email me asking for early beta access.  We will be doing a beta program, and like X-Plane 10, we will try to get third party developers some early access to X-Plane 11 so that we can collect compatibility information and they can get oriented on how to update their aircraft.

But for now, please wait. Please do not post comments asking to be in the beta program. Right now my in-box is flooded and we’re not quite ready to triage these requests.

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.

141 comments on “This One Goes Up To 11”

    1. I’ll have more detailed notes soon!

      We are not doing an XPLM API revision for 11.0 – there may be some stuff deprecated, and if there is, it’s stuff that you are hopefully not even thinking about using in v10.

      1. Given that there’s significant new functionality provided in the G430 and the new FMC, I’m left scratching my head, thinking… “Why not??” After all, if you gents are as dedicated to third party development as you’ve enthused about in your presentation, it would seem that there’s quite a bit of core goodness that could be and should be exposed in 11.0. After all – it’s been ages since the SDK got it’s 64 bit makeover, and that was what, three years ago? Just makes sense to me, Ben. I realize there may be a business reason not to, but I also realize that there’s also good business reasons to keep the SDK in synch with the latest and greatest features of X-Plane. Thanks for sharing the facts with us, whatever the case. Can’t wait for 11.0!!

        1. Not every new feature of the v11 run can be in the first version. So…SDK extensions had to wait for other things. It’s not surprising that user-facing features get a lot of weight in a first release of a version run.

          1. Not at all worried about first release, though – and it only makes sense that the user-facing features, the features that generate buzz, excitement and flight sim enthusiast adrenaline, are what get LR’s attention first.

            I took your reply to mean that the SDK would not get any attention in the XP 11.xx run at all. I infer that I was mistaken. Given Philipp’s not insignificant code skills, I was sure hoping he (or some other genius under Austin’s spell) would be gracing the SDK with their talents. I’d love to see per leg-type functions for the SDK, for example, so that a custom FMS/FMC (not that one is nearly as needed as before!) can use something besides waypoint connect-the-dots to draw and fly a flight path.

            Lots to be excited about anyway, Ben, and look forward to being a positive 3rd party dev at every opportunity. Thanks for the reply.

          2. Right – to clarify, in pretty much ANY case where we are talking about new stuff, we are talking about 11.0. We’re making almost no statements about future releases because in almost all cases the entire-version-run feature list isn’t well enough defined and is totally subject to change.

          3. The problem with giving more freedom to XPLMNavigation is that it creates way more new problems than it solves. It makes no sense to expose all 23 leg types with their gajillion parameters to the SDK, because no one would be able to program that.
            What I’m instead looking at, is giving you higher-order access to the flight plan. Because, let’s face it, you don’t want to insert a DME-arc-to-Fix leg into the flight plan and give it Theta, Rho, Mag Crs, DME distance, TDV, turn anticipation, and the intercept clothoid parameters… What you really want is to be able to set up an approach that also happens to include a DME Arc, and then let the FMS figure out the specifics for you!
            So, I want to make XPLM functions that will allow you to manipulate the flight plan in terms of higher order functionality.
            For leg-level access, what I really want to have is DO236 legs: Initial, track and radius. Because with that there’s no room left open for interpretation and the least potential to create a whole new class of surprising bugs.
            The combination of flight plan editing functions and DO236 legs will solve 90% of all plugin use cases. If you are in the other 10%, then you will need to keep writing your own code for that. But as you said, custom FMS solutions have been around for that, and I’m sure they will be in X-Plane 11. We are not trying to shut them out or cut them short in any way.

          4. Extremely, extremely good stuff to hear, Ben and Philipp. What you’re saying gives me more than enough reason for optimism about the SDK going forward. Thanks for that, and for clearing things up. The new customer facing features are super nifty and spiffy, but there’s something about getting under the hood that’s a lot of fun in it’s own, rather challenging way. Gives a fourth dimension to the sim experience. Thumbs up!

          6. We have plans to make a more flexible and generic EFIS map system for the cockpit. We wanted this in 11.0, but it is not ready, so it will have to come later in the version run.

            (One of the reasons why third party features sometimes have to wait is that we really need to make sure a 3rd party interface is -correct-. If we make a third party interface to the maps, and that interface has some bug, then everyone who uses it will have to change their planes when we fix it.)

          7. Hi Philipp,

            The higher order access sounds fine.
            There is indeed no need to expose all the details of each leg type when we can find the data in the navidatagraphpro files.
            For an external navigation display, we only need enough data to know what is in the flight plan, and some more info about the currently active waypoint.
            For an external CDU, we only want to interact with the new FMC, not override it. The display logic, layout and colors can be different, but underneath there is the same navigation computer. And then we can complement that with performance calculations, tuning page, etc.
            Interesting times ahead, thanks in advance!

            Best regards,
            Marc

        2. Yes, we may not need all the details, but not all FMS systems have the same UI, and without an improved SDK, we’re stuck at the one interface with its colors and ancillary pages.

  2. Great presentation, really looking forward to this release, much eye candy, UI & sound changes are things I have been hoping for. Good work guys.

  3. Congratulations for this upcoming 11th release.

    Is it possible to have an access to the beta? No, just kidding. 😉

    Do you plan to publish the bug tracker to let the users read the ticket to avoid to send duplicates?

    Thanks for your work.

    1. I thnk the x-plane bug tracker will remain private. At this point it contains internal work product, and user-submitted bugs have a ton of support noise. I realize that this is annoying to outside users; my only advise would be that any groups that want to collaborate using some standard for reporting maintain their own db (e.g. like OpenRadar – there’s an AMD shadow mozilla too) – this would allow people to be sure that bugs are reported -exactly- once; the worst is when a bug is reported to us zero times because everyone thinks someone else did it.

      1. Well, maybe we should have a second bugtrack but it could add some entropy instead of help.

        Anyway, I guess there is room for improvements to let us help you (more).

        Thanks 🙂

  4. Hi Ben and congrats on the new version and good luck on the release. I can hardly wait for attacking the PBR texturing and customizing the autogen to fit a more scandinavian look, please direct me to an email for siging up on that.

    Could you also try if able or time to blog about some of the key feature requests for XP11.
    Let me explain what I mean:

    1. Vulcan or OpenGL – DirectX or/and Metal
    – Many developers and third party vendors are frequently asking if this was mentioned at the con or not. Will XP11 benefit from something new or will it stick to what it knows best.

    2. Tessellation is an old but important topic frequently asked at least by me. I for one is hoping XP 11 will lay the foundation for such. Not sure if it ever will be noticable but performance wise I do belive XP can utilize it. Andras has if not mistaken tried to tackle the verticies in the current mesh and tweaked the heck out of it. Tessellation would be from what I know an long awaited helping hand?

    3. I would ask seasonal, but the video describes the intent good. So I rather shift and ask about file format.. Will it still be the annoying OBJ-8 format (no offence) or will the new version be adaptable to i.e. fbx, obj, max, blend, 3ds, dae, dxf or any other format like those found in i.e. Unity etc.

    4. Last but at least the water topic, the famous everlasting water topic..
    – Will there be a change, if so do you guys have something in mind when it comes to regional changes in color, wave dynamic and texture? What a about shading and or acuadynamic – Will we see plane floting more realistic i.e. with an re-design environment or physics engine or does it utilize the current established one?

    Perhaps most of these question are third party oriented Ben, but It would sure be interesting to ready your thoughts and ideas about some of these topics. I fully understand if you cannot talk about it at this time, but then feel free to generalize the topics.

    Anyway, good luck and god speed to you, Austin and the rest of the dream team.

    1. 1. 11.0 will NOT ship with Vulkan; I hope to have Metal and Vulkan -as well as- OGL as driver options during the v11 run. No idea on time-frame, OpenGL will not be dropped mid-version.

      [editors note: 11.0 will ship with Vulkan was a typo, sorry.]

      2. We will definitely ship at least one tessellation feature for Windows in v11 – maybe in 11.0, maybe later in the run.

      3. 11.0 will support OBJ8, and OBJ8 will be supported for the life of the v11 run. We may add another next-gen modeling format (obj11?) after 11.0 – we have some features we want to do that require a major version bump on the OBJ format.

      But this is orthogonal to your question: we will -never- support any other public modeling format natively in x-plane – not 3DS, not blender, not DXF, not VRML, etc. Our model will ALWAYS be based on _converting_ or _exporting_ a public format into a native format for consumption by the engine. I can comment more on this some other time but it is standard game engine practice to -convert- to a native engine format that is optimized for the engine, and not use interchange and source formats (3DS, collada, blender, etc.) directly in app.

      This is like texturing: you save your .psd file but you EXPORT to DDS or PNG for shipping.

      4. There will be enhancing water – I’m not sure what will ship when; the code is still too buggy to make a strong statement.

      cheers
      Ben

      1. Thanks, even though I have all the DVDs for XP10, I just bought the digital download, so I guess I am secured an XP11 when it comes, damn its going to be one hell of an x-mas this year, first XP11, then Las Vegas for CES2017 in January for the first time to the states ever. Only thing that could top this is you confirming Vulcan for XP11, and if not mistaken (with typo in mind) it does 😉

  5. Ben maybe you could answer this question for me will the rain and snow be improved?I found that in x plane 10 you look outside the aircraft and you can’t really tell if its raining or snowing unless you go inside the plane and see rain and snow in the windows and with sky maxx pro when it rains at night it’s like you in Star Trek where you hit warp drive and the rain looks like it comes from behind the clouds.

  6. Hey Ben,

    A question regarding WX. Right now, there is a 3 layer system in place for XP10. Will we see a revision of the WX system in XP11 to include more wind and cloud layers? This reflects better for the real world. P3D and FSX can handle a lot more wind and cloud layers referenced at a single time.

    Also, will there be more developer guides on how to develop for X-Plane? I wanted to get in on the aircraft development side of things regarding audio and systems.

    1. The initial version will use 3 layers. I don’t know if we’ll add more later; post 11.0 v11 features are NOT at all locked down (and definitely not public).

      There will be more developer guides – we want to make sure third parties can develop for X-plane!

      1. Is there any good reason to assume that “There will be enhancing water – I’m not sure what will ship when; the code is still too buggy to make a strong statement.” could also apply to cloud rendering? I do understand though that potential future cloud rendering tech is “definitely not public” and perhaps TOP SECRET need to know.

        1. They aren’t in the same category. We have in-progress water code and the question is what will be done when. We don’t have a partly done cloud render re-build that might make it into 11.0 or not.

      2. Hi Ben

        I am a bit disappointed that not a single weather related update was done , Frankly the weather depiction in XP 10 is really bad , even with 3d party like Skymaxx 3 .
        I know at the presentation it was mentioned that there would be a look at the weather at some point , V11 . ??? , I am just wondering why ? I know some developers have asked and emailed on many occasion requesting more wind layers , a change to the turbulence model and cloud rendering modeling ,to name a few .
        So in XP 11 for the next foreseeable future we are stuck with a sub par weather system ..
        Regards

        1. For pretty much every feature X that was -not- mentioned in the presentation, if the question is “why didn’t you update X”, the answer is pretty much “because we updated some other thing Y instead”.

          In other words, flight simulators have gotten big and complex enough that we can’t update every major subsystem in a major way on every major release boundary.

  7. Ben, Congratulations to you and all the LR team, I love the pics you have shown so far, specially the one of the cessna taken from below, that thing looks real…. not plausible, not realistic…..REAL!

    The FMC looks great, can’t wait to see what other surprises xp11 will bring us.

    This:

    “3. 11.0 will support OBJ8, and OBJ8 will be supported for the life of the v11 run. We may add another next-gen modeling format (obj11?) after 11.0 – we have some features we want to do that require a major version bump on the OBJ format.”

    won’t let me sleep for a while…can’t wait!

    Thanks a lot!

  8. Firstly great news Ben and congratulation for the anoucement and the hard work that Lamimar doing.
    We will looking from close for beta to test and and eventual updates of our scenaries to v11.

    Only a few cuestions
    1) reflective material will be availble in building objcts, like a glass reflexions for windows?

    2) scenaries for v11 will work in v10, clearly without the features of v11, or we will have to mantaine 2 versions of each scenery by version?

    Offtopic: i wrote you about a question about ATC routes in 10.50 at LEBL. I know that you are busy, but i will apreciate a anwer.

    Thank you, and good luck!

    1. 1. Yes, but two limits:
      – The “glass” mode for reflections on glass -while- having a very low alpha is only available for aircraft in 11.0. We may be able to extend this to the scenery SDK later. So for 11.0 your building glass may have to be heavily tinted or mirrored.
      – The reflections aren’t going to be -accurate- on the buildings – we don’t have enough compute power to separately reflect every surface in real time. The shooter games solve this by -pre-calculating- those reflections and saving them to disk. (Someday we may try screen space reflections in HDR mode.)

      2. Probably not – it is certainly NOT a goal to make a new v11 scenery work in v10.

      Re: ATC routes, I don’t know when I will have time to look at that – I am very busy right now!

      1. First of all, thanks for the hard work yous guys are doing at Laminar and congratulations on the launch of XP11. It certainly came earlier than expected.
        Too bad reflexive surfaces will not be available to scenery developers on 11.0, but you mention the possibility of adding a new OBJ11. Could you elaborate in what are your plans to include? Multiple UV maps? Shaders (decal) for non draped objects?
        If I understand correctly, the PBR effects on surfaces will depend on two properties, smoothness and shine. We already have the ATTR_shiny_rat, will the smooth value be added in the same manner?
        Thanks for your time and keep up the good work. Can’t wait to upgrade.

        1. First, to be clear, you will be able to use reflective surfaces in sceney in 11.0. The limit is that since the reflection image data is collected around the plane, the reflection may be inaccurate.

          This means two buildings that “mirror each other” in a down-town won’t show the right reflections — that’s the limitation. But you’re still going to see the right general reflection colors (blue-ish tones on sunny days, gray on cloud days, etc.) that make the materials look right.

          In terms of OBJ11, the two major features that would cause a file format “bump” are:
          – multiple UV maps (particularly so that the emissive texture map doesn’t have to exactly parallel the albeo) and
          – Skeletal animation with vertex blending (e.g. how 3-d modelers do animation). This would make deformed surfaces like cloth possible and make landing gear assemblies quicker to develop.

          Once we have multiple UV maps we can revisit non-draped decals.

          In v11, ATTR_shiny_rat controls the glossiness/roughness parameter. I do not know if we will have an ATTRibute way to control the metalness parameter. So far our artists have needed the normal map for most aircraft, and the metalness parameter is jammed in the blue channel. You can always make a tiny 4×4 normal map if you don’t need it for anything else but materials.

          1. Does this means one object can only has one roughness? I though we were using some kind of roughness map so different parts of the object can have different object, especially for liveries.

          2. No. You map roughness to the alpha channel of your normal map and it’s per-pixel.

            (You can also use multiple ATTR_shiny_rat declarations to change the overall roughness but I do no recommend this – the per-pixel texture map goes well with what the hardware wants.)

          3. “First, to be clear, you will be able to use reflective surfaces in sceney in 11.0. The limit is that since the reflection image data is collected around the plane, the reflection may be inaccurate.”

            Will the reflections still be inaccurate even if the object is close to the aircraft (i.e.. while sitting at the gate) or will we be able to see the aircraft, ramp, etc reflecting in the glass?

  9. Ben, a question about the weather.
    The clouds are shown tangentially to the Earth’s surface at all SIMS. Is there the possibility to adjust the clouds of the earth’s surface? I mean that the clouds are only 5,000 ft in 50 nm, as well as below me now.

  10. The PBR in version 11 is great news, as a developer are looking forward to have more detailed information on this topic.

    Many questions have crept into my head about what we can use to take advantage of the shader; Setting base materials,
    Energy Conservation, Albedo, Microsurface, Reflectivity, Fresnel, Ambient Occlusion, Cavity etc.

    I think that for Developers Third Party these are essential News, given the importance in version 11, and I hope to see them documented soon.

    Thank you!!

  11. Hi Ben,

    Looking forward to the next release of X-Plane. Hope it all goes smoothly for you (is that possible, LOL).

    One thing if I may Ben, and it concerns water bodies. In X-Plane 10 there were quite a few water features (rivers, lakes etc) which were missing in the default scenery, so my question is, will these missing features be included in the default X-Plane 11 scenery?

    Cheers

    Dom

    1. More will be included because we are using much newer OSM data. But some will be -intentionally- eliminated to keep the scenery size down. I don’t know what the cutoff size will be for water bodies – we’re not going to loose a really huge lake, but some small details may have to be sacrificed. It will always be possible to build higher res base meshes for specific areas that have all of OSM’s detail.

      (The need to have a higher detail cutoff comes from OSM having grown a huge amount since we last took the data.)

      1. Will the default global scenery grow in size to partially accomodate for the new data? Is there going 1 or 2 more DVDs than in v10? Otherwise I think that to accomodate for more osm data you have to cut off on DEM data.

          1. Will it be possible to run a raw/untouched osm base layer with no polygons erased or smoothed out to save space? I have a 1TB ssd and I’m not concerned about storage. If Europe can be 100 instead of 10 GB I’d be very thankful! Thanks for your efforts, Ben and team! /Fan since v6.

          2. I don’t know, because I don’t know how “big” such DSFs would be. LR has no intention to ship an unprocessed OSM layer, as it is impractically huge.

          3. Well, I really hope that you are not going to reduce DEM data to fit in the 8DVDs. You know, while we have free HD data for all of the Americas, Europe and Oceania, there are still many area of the world that are only covered by the default data and it would be important to maintain at least the current resolution.

      2. Hi guys,

        Two things about “full res” OSM data:
        1. You can still continue to use HD / UHD Mesh Scenery from my website in XP11. It might lack some latest tricks from the scenery generator, but it might still be good (and it contains all OSM water features … at least from the date the HD / UHD mesh got its OSM data).
        2. I am thinking (not promising) about creating a new version of HD Mesh Scenery (possibly v4) and UHD Mesh Scenery (v2) when the dust of the XP11 release has settled. Possibly sometime next year. And that would quite likely contain all OSM water features.
        I repeat: this is just a plan / idea, not a promise (I am like Ben … I do not promise something where I am not 100% sure that it will really materialize 🙂 )

      2. Ben,

        You say that “it will be on the short list once we ship” but I think the presentation gave us a different story.

        (01:08:00′): “With the Steam VIVE [meaning HTC VIVE]…. now we’re getting something we can use; the resolution is still too low, to read the interface that we’ve got in the cockpit and the user interface itself, so we have tried it, I have tried it, it’s amazing, it’s not quite ready for release yet”

        Which indicates that X-Plane’s UI is not designed for VR. Furthermore, since VR headsets and GPUs are far from supporting 8K or 16K resolutions, to allow tiny text to be read from a distance, it’s clear that X-Plane 11 cannot support VR anytime soon. Hence, “now we’re getting something we can use” and “it’s amazing, it’s not quite ready for release yet” are quite misleading.

        A clearer response is given by your developer:
        “We had the Rift Development Kits working, but the code we wrote to make the developer kits work doesn’t actually work with the full Rift.”

        Fill-in: “Oculus have changed their standards….”

        Hence, I understand you’ve experimented with an early Oculus Development Kit (and corresponding API, which has changed since then) and you gave up development. If that’s not the case, why don’t you explain how and when you really plan to deliver a meaningful VR experience in X-Plane 11?

        Please don’t get me wrong! I’m an X-Plane fan and a VR enthusiast, too. Hence, I’d love to play X-Plane 10/11 in VR.

        Having said that, I realise VR may not have the resolution we need for a cockpit with readable instruments, in which case you shouldn’t try to sell X-Plane 11 on a promise that you -most likely- can’t keep.

        1. Here’s the deal:
          1. We did early dev on the Rift beta and Oculus changed their API over and over, invalidating all of Philipp’s work. So we put it down to let the API stabilize and decided we couldn’t afford to throw developer time at it until we could write something that would go into production.

          2. Austin doesn’t like that shipping VR devices are low res.

          With that in mind, VR _is_ on the short list. Once we ship, we can let Philipp take some time to re-try VR on whatever API he feels is stable, whether that’s the Rift, the Vive or both. I don’t think we’ll hold back on shipping the experience because it’s low res as long as:

          – The code is going to keep working for a while and not get obsoleted and
          – The product is usable in at least SOME situations.

          I have no idea how the new UI is going to look in VR because Philipp’s VR prototypes (on the MUCH lower res dev kits) were already broken by OcRift beta changes before the new UI was usable.

          Something can be on our short list of things to do AND have Austin be unhappy with the hardware at the same time. No one needs Austin’s blessing that “I approve of this hardware” to use it.

  13. Hi Ben ,

    Loved saying Hello to you at Cosford ! , you are an amazing guy , i had one Question Regarding Nav Displays in the Stock Aircraft , In X Plane 10 in stock Aircraft we have the Horrible Red Line with no Proper Nav Display look to it , no Naming of the way-points or anything like that , i just wanted to ask will the NAV displays be updated to support a more high end look ? , thanks for your time

  14. One of the biggest questions about X-Plane 11 is, are bodies of water that were fine in version 9.XX but went missing in version 10 going to come back? There were entire rivers that went missing. This was one of the biggest disappointments with version 10 and we were told it wouldn’t be fixed throughout the entire 10.XX run.

    2. Chances are good, that most of the water bodies (and much much more than in XP9) will be there in XP11. Remember: X-Plane gets all of its water data from OpenStreetmap. And that project has and is growing at a very fast peace. Since the release of XP10, the data in OSM has grown extremely.
      If you look at http://www.openstreetmap.org and can see your water bodies, then it has a good probability that it will shop up in XP11 (if Ben – as he pointed out above – doesn’t optimizes it away to keep the size of the default scenery at a reasonable size).

      1. What would be nice is if Ben could write some code to smooth out the ugly sharp angles you see in rivers and coastlines !

        1. Two things on this:
          1. Some of those sharp angles come from the raw data (you can browse OpenStreetmap and will see, that in some regions the coast are super smooth … while in others it can be very rugged).
          2. What is often not known – or overlooked – is the fact, that all water features in X-Plane (at least until now … and thus valid in XP11) are part(!) of the base mesh. And the more detailed a coastline is, the more triangles it indues around it in the mesh. This – of course – costs you additional triangle count (and thus DSF file size) and in some situations even performance (if you get – say – additional 500.000 triangles in places with a lot of very detailed coastlines). So… especially because of the size “limitations” imposed by the DVD distribution, Ben needs to simplify coastlines to reduce the triangle cost … which in the end can result in a few sharper corners.

          (in the HD Mesh Scenery I try to keep this simplification as low as possible – even though I can’t avoid it completely – thus there the coastlines tend to be smoother … but again … it depends on OSM data too).

          1. OSM editors often aim for accuracy, rather than plausibility of rendering in X-Plane. So even the raw data is, at times, “spiky”.

            At some point we will have to reconsider how we render coastlines; when we created the beach/water/base mesh system, the coastline raw data tended to be much lower res than the mesh we could ship; this has clearly changed.

          2. Wouldn’t this be a great place to introduce a low level form of tessellation to act as a sort of polygon anti-aliasing that could be done (at least in my wild imagination) on the fly procedurally, instead of relying 100% on OSM?

          4. That was the effect I was implying, Ben, if with a perhaps inaccurate metaphor. Thanks for the clarification.

            Are there any procedural elements to terrain depiction at this point? If not, have you considered that to be an option? Tessellation is, I guess, procedural, but in the past while you’ve indicated it wasn’t on the road map for 10.xx. Is it at least more likely in 11.xx, given that 11.xx features have yet to be locked down?

          5. The terrain UV map and texture application is already algorithmic – it’s been that way for a long time, particularly in anticipation of tessellation-enhanced detail, which we have done a few mock-ups of (using non-tessellating hardware just to see what it would look like).

            We also push the unreduced 90m DEMs in the DSFs, also in anticipation of tessellation hardware being able to utilize it. So we have a road map and we have already made some progress on it.

            There are still some scary loose ends, like: how are DSF edges matched when tessellating? If a draped polygon sits on top of tessellated triangles, how do we handle that?

          6. Understood that edge matching is a bear. There are places that I’ve flown over in Alaska that seem to have this problem in the HD mesh, and it’s probably something that seems to get worse as the latitude increases.

            I don’t know about these things, I’ve only got a layman’s POV to the problems you face here, Ben. But I was wondering if a DSF tile might be made something like a quarter mile larger than the coordinates it’s designed to fill, with some sort of procedural alpha blending along the edges. This is just an idea – likely one you and Andras may have already considered, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn.

  15. You are doing such a great job and I am happy that X-Plane 11 is coming!

    Please, please take into account to add something like an aircraft library with XP11, so that it is not important anymore where we sort our addon aircrafts or how we name their folders. At the moment we have to compare each aircraft folder before we can start a flight in multiplayer.

    Carsten

  16. Hi , I already purchased a key for xpl11 and cannot wait to get my hands on it

    Im wondering what improvements are planned for glider pilots

    1. No. We may look at using multiple GPUs for multiple monitors, but I don’t think we will spend any time making two GPUs feed one monitor. It’s poorly supported in OpenGL, entirely app-provided in Vulkan (which means the cost isn’t worth it), and frankly for a single monitor, a single big GPU is the better investment.

  18. Will we be able to pre-order the DVDs like XPX and have them by launch? Or will it be digital only at launch?

  19. I haven’t seen this mentioned anywhere, but will there be any changes to the night lighting draw distance? Flying at night large areas of lighting tend to “pop” into existence, and cities are not visible from a distance. Reducing visibility helps some but leads to night flying being in a “black hole,” so to speak. There were some forum posts on the issue a while back, and I believe it was stated it was “hard coded” and unrelated to world draw distances.

  20. Hi Ben,

    Many users of the multi-player mode (which I never tried) report being unsatisfied
    about the way different meshes lead to their friends planes being either buried or
    floating in the air (and they don’t wish to uncheck the “runway follow contours”, which
    I can understand e.g. in the Alps).

    I guess (I have not seen it documented) that your present rule goes roughly like
    – “external” plane sends LLE
    – “local” X-Plane turns LLE into local XYZ (internal equiv. of XPLMWorldToLocal)
    – “external” plane is traced at XYZ.

    Could something like the following be considered instead :
    -“external” plane sends LLE + “external” y_agl
    – “local” X-Plane turns LLE into local XYZ (at this stage Y-y_agl is only an approximation of the height of the local mesh in XZ, since y_agl is relative to the “external” mesh)
    – “local” X-Plane does XPLMProbeTerrainXYZ with input X,Y-y_agl,Z. Now the output has the (exact) local mesh heigth in XZ, let’s call it Y_mesh.
    – plane is traced at X,Y_mesh+y_agl,Z

    The advantage is that whenever y_agl=0 is sent, the plane is traced on the ground in
    the local mesh.
    Of course nothing comes totally for free and the disadvantage of the latter is in
    tight flight where one plane could be seen “jumping” relative to the other as the discrepancies between the two meshes.
    I would imagine the first overweights the second, but one could also
    elaborate like :
    – present rule applies when y_agl >= some threshold (500ft?)
    – a new rule like the proposed one applies if y_agl <= some lower threshold (300ft?)
    – linear transition in between the two thresholds.

    Did you ever tested something similar ?
    And in case you would not be in favor of such a move (maybe I am just totally wrong), could you confirm that writing a plugin to do so would only conflict with the internals and is therefore a no go.

    Thanks (and congrats for XP11!)
    Didier

  21. Ben, in my last post I forgot to ask about some features like taxiways underpasses that doesn’t work since 10.5, In KORD and KPHX I made them with drawing order and hard surfaces, but now they don’t work, Is there any way to fix that?

    the mesh will be the same that we already have? is there any plans for a graphic mesh editing tool? there are some tools for that now but the problem is that in practice you can only have one custom airport mesh per tile.

    Thanks!

  22. What default airport will be used for the X-Plane 11 demo? Will it be in Europe to showcase the new European autogen?

    1. I’m happy to see new European autogen, but unfortunately now the whole of Europe is filled with German styled houses.

      Come to think of it: it looks as if the Third Reich has won WO2. Is this some political statement of Laminar?

      *sarcasm off*

      1. Too soon! We did suggest in Cosford that the Brits could have a referendum if they thought the European landscape was too heavily dominated by Germany. We have to start somewhere with a theme, we can subdivide the region more in the future as we get more art.

        1. I think people should be happy to have german houses all over Europe! They are sturdy, neat, and can store tremendous amounts of beer in the basement!
          Who knows, maybe some people will see the light and even start driving on the correct side of the road, following X-Plane´s example 😉

          Cheers, Jan

  23. Ben maybe you could answer this question for me will the rain and snow be improved?I found that in x plane 10 you look outside the aircraft and you can’t really tell if its raining or snowing unless you go inside the plane and see rain and snow in the windows and with sky maxx pro when it rains at night it’s like you in Star Trek where you hit warp drive and the rain looks like it comes from behind the clouds.

  24. Hi Ben,
    congrats for the next version.

    Reading on forum (so it’s just not me) I have the feeling many users consider XP10 vegetation way below competitors. Sometimes (especially 2 X crossed billboards with certain light and at certain time) trees look very dated instantly killing the best scenery immersion.

    Since I read no mention to that for 11.00, are there any plans after 11.0 to improve trees, brushes and grass look.
    Thank you for your hard work.

  25. Hi Ben.

    Will we be getting any new lego pieces for WED airport creation in XP11.

    In particular, Terminal/Hangar/Building facades sized for smaller airfields.

    We really need some smaller scale buildings for creating smaller airports.

    I’ve got a lot of airports for my area (Bahamas) I could upload to the gateway but I want to have more appropriate sized buildings.

    If I could have only one new facade it would be a single story building that I could choose plain walls, windows, entrys, roll up doors, hangar doors.

    This one facade would help tremendously!

    Thanks

    1. There will be new lego bricks at some point in the v11 run; we wanted to have some new ones for 11. but they aren’t ready yet. The ground vehicles include new vehicles never available as bricks, as well as some static turned to dynamic; those will be in 11.0.

    2. Hi Mark, I (and every WED artist) second your request for more options – and I know Laminar is acutely aware of the need.
      For now try to experiment by combining the facades (in misc buildings) of the cargo terminal, the warehouse and the office facade. You can overlap, attach, mix and match and get a pretty good and versatile set of heights and wall options that way.

      Cheers, Jan

  26. as to next gen API not shipping will we see at lest an proper mutli-threaded OpenGL engine thats not sitting around waiting on the flight model to render the next frame?

    1. At least -sometimes-, yes. We’re not entirely sure what set of features you’ll get when legacy non-FMOD planes are in use. We certainly expect two FMOD planes to have AI sound, but we may be able to do better.

  28. Hello Ben,
    Congratulations on this new version release!!
    First sorry for my rough English, it’s not my native language. Now that I’ve said that:

    1- Will some change be introduced to the mouse pointing system?

    I mean, something like in Falcon BMS where the mouse cursor is fixed to some point of the screen until you reach a knob or switch, it will then stay at that switch/knob even if you look around (with head-tracking device).
    Idea: For dual concentric encoder type of switches I’d like to see a shift key system for mouse wheel behavior. You turn wheel normally and you could rotate upper part of the knob, and holding shift-key you could turn lower part.

    2- Will I have to download all the scenery again for X-Plane 11?

  29. Thanks for all the information in the answers. It makes me pretty excited about XP11!

    I think the new fog rendering is what I find most appealing. How far is this implemented? Will it be used just for visibility, or also for things like ground fog? And maybe even for clouds instead of the whiteout?

    One thing that bothered me about the visibility is the real weather METAR 9999 problem. So you’re almost always in artificially restricted visibility. I like real weather to have something variable and unpredictable, but this is exactly the opposite. Any chance on having something else substituted for 9999?

    1. I’m pretty sure the METAR visibility problem has been solved a long time ago. Sometime in 10.30 we added code that when the METAR reports unlimited visibility, the actual visibility depends on the dew point spread. The larger the spread, the higher the visibility gets.

      1. What I noticed with this change is, before 10.30 when the max visibility don´t change with dew point, we always get 20 or 25 sq, after 10.30, generaly I have 16sq (when 9999 is reported on metar), with this value the amount of “haze” effect on skycolor is bigger than the “clean” ratio, I checked this on the “special -> show skycolors” and due this I never more get a real “clear sky” skycolors… If this ratio of haze skycolor could be ajusted (put to be 100% clear when scattered clouds and visibility bigger than 12sq), I thing that we can get more clear skys with this ajust

  31. For those of use using multi-PCs for multi-views, will there be any help on using one PC/graphics card for multiple views? Will X_Plane 10 USB keys work for 11?
    Thanks!!!

    1. v10 USB keys do not unlock v11. v10 DVDs do not unlock v11. v10 steam licenses do not unlock v11. v10 digital downloads before we started selling dual-product last week do not unlock v11.

      You can do two views on one PC but the performance hit is quite large – you’re using one PC to do twice as much work.

  32. Hello.

    Regarding X-Plane v10 3rd party plugins running in v11, will they automatically draw their dialogue boxes in the new 11 screen style or will they still be v10 grey boxes?

    I’m currently writing an X-Plane 10 plugin and wondering ‘out of the box’ how the plugin will look in v11. Will plugins automatically inherit the v11 style?, will the v11 style be something we can access from calls within the SDK?, or, is this something we’ll have to hand code ourselves?

    Thank you.

    1. They will look like they always have – we can’t “auto update” their look.

      We do not yet have a way for plugin authors to access the look of the v11 UI. The existing APIs (widgets, etc.) are pretty inadequate for what the v11 UI does, so we are still considering what the SDK interface should be.

  33. Good day gentlemen
    Will you include a feature to make runway intersections look more blended i.e. not like one has been pasted over the other as is the case at present? You do it already for some roads, it shouldn’t be too difficult. Yes, I know some punters have slammed me on this because some runways do look like that on your favorite satellite image view, but take for instance runway lights, you won’t find any in the intersection.
    Cheers
    Raffles

  34. Hi Ben,

    although understanding you policy of not committing on future releases I am bit confused about statements like “Not in 11.0”.

    Does this mean “not in 11.0 but maybe in 11.xx” or rather “Not in 11 but maybe in 12” ?

    1. It means not in 11.0, unknown about future v11 updates. Since we know what’s going into the FIRST version, we can state what things won’t be available instantly on first run.

  35. What is the best means for a commercial developer to advise Laminar Research that they would appreciate being on a list to acquire the early release beta version so that they can assess the impact of 11.0 on their product, be it an aircraft or a plugin?

  36. Ben,

    For the Aircraft selection menu in V11, will all aircraft always have a preview image
    Or will only the default included aircraft?

    1. The preview must be a new type of “icon” png in the aircraft package.
      X-Plane 11 contains the code that creates these previews, so third party developers can easily generate a picture of their aircraft that is exactly matched to our visual style – no photoshop or hand post-processing is needed.

  37. Ben

    I just thought of one more question, but to make it easy- I will recap both here for a one stop shop reply.

    1- regarding the preview image files of aircraft in the v11 acf selection menu, will all planes have this or only default planes?

    2- “be advised” warning boxes, ie scenery issues etc, will those be back in V11?

    1. I don’t know what you mean re: scenery issues – v11 has the same scenery check logic as 10.50, and none of these warnings ever went away, unless you turned them off in your prefs.

  38. The gray text boxes during loading of x-plane. The heading says. BE ADVISED. It occurs if a scenery file has an issue. I once asked if you can build in a away to disallow such warnings if a user knows they have a problematic scenery pack thus to save load time.

    In relation to V11- will these same warnings occur but just in a new interface ? Or will there be more options to turn them off

    & can you please comment on the aircraft image preview question when you have time

    1. Ah.

      NO! There will NOT be a way to hide scenery authoring ERRORS in v11!!

      If your scenery pack is broken, someone should fix it. We are not going to pretend the scenery pack is not broken, because if we do that, then on average more scenery packs will be not broken.

      If you don’t like the message, don’t buy or download scenery from authors who ship broken scenery packs!

      (I am VERY adamant about this because in the old .env based scenery system of v7, errors in the scenery pack were silently ignored. When I went to write the backward compatibility code to load old scenery into the new engine, I was horrified by the number of scenery packs that were just completely screwed up.)

      cheers
      Ben

  39. Ben, is there any way we could start developing airplane sound packs in advance before the X-Plane 11 release? I mean, is there any documentation on how the FMOD engine is linked to X-Plane? Which events will fire and which parameters will control? With only this information a lot could be done until it’s released and then complete the work.

    Thanks!

    1. Unfortunately, mostly no. The problem is that the third party interface for FMOD is not finalized. I’ll talk to Chris about how much we can reveal how soon to at least help people get started, but there is some trickiness specific to X-Plane to using FMOD in x-plane. (Basically: FMOD’s model is one big FMOD project for the entire game – to make your third party FMOD project work with ours, special steps must be taken.)

      With that in mind, the system is pretty simple: you can use datarefs as your parameters in your FMOD project, and an .ini file on the aircraft describes (1) what FMOD events are on the airplane and (2) when they are playing.

      1. Did you actually just describe our beloved flight _simulator_ as a…a…a…….. _game_?? 😉

        1. Absolutely not. X-Plane is an advanced numeric simulator.

          But it looks to me like FMOD’s original deployment model is for games and game engines, where the entire title can be packed as one unit. X-Plane’s platform-like situation is a weird fit. Fortunately the FMOD team has been insanely helpful in making this work.

          1. Okay, I misread your depiction of FMOD the wrong way. My bad! Naturally looking forward to this – the C172 sound space presentation was incredible. All 1’s and 0’s, though…

      2. Thanks Ben! I figured it would be some problems adapting the FMOD “entire app = 1 project” model and I wonder how did you solve it, but the rest of the integration sounds wonderful. I look forward to learning more about this, I think X-Plane was lacking a nice soundscape to complement the excellent fleet available and this will be a turning point to the series.

        1. The FMOD developers modified FMOD to allow for the loading of multiple master banks -as long as- the master BUS has the same GUID in both master banks. FMOD is reference counted and objects are globally identified, so when you load the third party master bank with a GUID-matched master bus, FMOD goes “oh, I already made the master bus” and figures out that the third party mixing elements “plug in” to FMOD’s master bus.

          We found we could achieve this by modifying the XML inside the FMOD project file to change the master bus ID in a third party project; our intention was to provide some kind of script that third parties could run on their FMOD projects to validate that they were correctly structured for X-Plane and to do the GUID changes.

          Our expectation is that aircraft add-ons will want to replace major parts of the mix environment…e.g. you want to hear our environmental sounds through the ‘sound proofing’ effects of YOUR aircraft when inside the plane. To that end we are working on a spec for what buses an aircraft -must- provide, e.g. every aircraft should have a “world” bus, with processing such that when inside the aircraft the world is muted, and then when the doors are open or the camera is outside, the muting is removed.

  40. I am not one to usually comment of such things, but I was curious as to when we could expect more news regarding X-Plane 11. I understand you are quite busy, Ben, and I am excited to work with X-Plane 11 when it comes out, but I found it strange that there have been no updates in content to the website since the announcement on October 8th? (I think you guys also had a glitch the other day when the site kept directing to a page called “Knowledge Base”).

    I only say this because you told the community there would be weekly updates. I don’t have much of a problem with this, though! Before I veer too off topic, I just wanted to say I am glad to have heard the great news of the new sim and am excited to see what the future holds!

    – Joe N.

    1. Hi Joe,

      I’m not sure how soon the marketing people are planning updates – it might be weekly, it might be every two weeks, and the calendar might be on hold – as you saw, the web site went -absolutely haywire- the other day, and this was a huge problem for us, because it killed our shopping cart/web store. So Tyler’s been totally focused on having the web site actually work right, as opposed to content updates.

      The programmers and art team are also completely maxed out trying to get bugs fixed.

      So more info _is_ coming, but please be patient….there’s a limit to how fast we can get the word out.

    2. Hi Joe,
      Our plan is to have an announcement every Friday. We announced more information about the UI on Friday Oct. 14. There were posts on the site and on our social media.

      The change on the website is pretty subtle–there is a small grey bar called “The latest” that lists our blog posts. I would recommend following us either on social media or our blog so you don’t miss tomorrow’s post.

  41. Awesome! Yeah, I thought the website was strange when I had looked at it that one time. Take your time, though. Time is your friend in the development world! Keep up the great work.

    ~ Joe N.

    1. That would be nice… as in a more gradual loading of the lights? I also find that at night, the lights seem to spawn in noticeably large grid-like patterns instead of from a gradual radius around the aircraft. They both have potential drawbacks.

      But I think it is often confusing when you call it a “bug”, @kais. I wouldn’t consider it a bug, but rather the way I think the lights were designed to spawn. It is not the way I would prefer it (if the aforementioned is so), but I don’t really mind, either. 🙂

  43. Ben, is networking support on the radar for a future extension of the SDK? It would be very welcome for designers to be able to provide features (synced controls and instruments on aircraft, traffic that moves across all displays, …) for those of us running a networked multi-machine set-up.

      1. I had not noticed (probably because I have it off), this is a bug then of 10.5x. File a bug report and I will too after verifying it on my set-up.

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