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X-Plane 11.01 beta 1 is out now – to get it you have to check “get betas”. Since we now have a stable release version, my suggestion is: don’t check the box unless you are an add-on developer or are willing to deal with some beta-crazy. We try to make sure that every beta works, and things are less crazy here now that 11.00 is out, but you can read the release note history and see that dead betas still happen regularly.

Linux Users: if you use the Aerosoft DVD and have been using the special posted build of the sim to unlock the DVD, please use 11.01 beta 1 – the Linux fix is incorporated.

I’ll post some pics of some of the graphics changes in 11.01 in another post.

A note on the various SDKs: we made a real push to get the various authoring SDKs stabilized for 11.00, but there were things we missed. Most of the authoring SDK changes in 11.01 are:

  • Bug fixes.
  • Removal of old datarefs and features that didn’t work anyway and hadn’t been “cleaned out”.

One exception where an authoring rule is actually changed: during the betas and in 11.00r1, the prop disc is blended using incorrect gamma, matching X-Plane 10 behavior. Not changing this was an accident; all other alpha blending in 3-d is gamma-correct in X-Plane 11.

For 11.01 I chose to change the prop disc now to make everything completely consistent across all interfaces for the rest of the X-Plane 11 run. This isn’t ideal, but running the prop discs with incorrect blending would be a performance penalty for the entire rest of the version run (we’d have to change rendering passes in Metal/Vulkan to support this) so I figured best to rip the bandaid off quick.

As with all gamma-correct blending, the most likely problem with this that the mid-alpha parts of your texture appear too bright in 11.01b1. Incorrect blending loses energy, so the natural authoring work-around is to make things too bright to compensate; now that you are seeing too much light energ you may have to back things off. Looking at our Cessna, the white paint on the prop disc is a little bit too bright with the change.

In other SDK notes: I’m part way through writing draft FMOD notes – one that’s done, Jennifer can turn that into something human-readable. We will probably do an 11.02 to collect gateway airports; WED 1.6b2 is out now but it’s not approved for gateway use yet; we’re waiting to get some test time on it. If 11.01 goes final before gateway airports can be pushed, we’ll do a separate patch to get those airports released.

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.

57 comments on “X-Plane 11.01 Beta 1 and the SDKs”

  1. I may have missed it in the release notes, but does 11.01 fix the ‘report runway’ bug that crashes the entire sim?

  2. Interesting information Ben. So as it stands for now, we “pilots” will still need to wait a while before we see any improvements from the initial release? I think i speak for a great many that there are still some bugs that we would love to see fixed, especially the lower framerates.

  3. Excellent news, updates are always welcome.
    However I found this to be the most fun bug fixes of them all

    “XPD-7899 Fix for allowing the user to click the “Add AI Aircraft” button 20 times, when they can only have 19 AI planes.”

    🙂

  4. Today I noticed a new option in Installer, Update Scenery Online.
    But I did not find a list of modifications.
    What is the main reason for a large download of 42 GB?

    João Alfredo

    2. I 100% recommend downloading the 42GB scenery update. It won’t actually add 42GB to the size of X-Plane. It replaces many of the meshes. If you downloaded the entire world, as I did, when still in the early beta it will actually decrease the size of the scenery by(If I remember, could be more) 15GB. So you would be reclaiming a significant amount of HD space. While adding in the ‘missing’ sceneries of the extreme north and south of the world.

  7. Hey Ben, Great work. Just curious whether there will be buildings and taxiway signs added to the rest of the default airports? Really helps with online flying from and into default airports. Thanks again for all the work

    1. Almost all of the airports buildings and signs were done by community members; we intend to keep adding airports made by the community in future releases.

  8. 11.01 b1 is causing crashes in my plugin, X-Camera. Looks like something around the XPLMGetNavAidInfo function. I’ll debug it, it might be something in my code and if not I’ll write up a bug.

    Mark

      1. Ben,

        I did submit a bug report, you can see a brief over view a little further down in this blog. I’m holding off increasing the buffer sizes until I hear if this is a bug on your part or if indeed the call to XPLMGetNavAidInfo needs larger buffers.

  9. Hi,

    The weather is still not auto-refreshing; I thougt this
    “XPD-7799 Weather is no longer regenerated (and METARs no longer re-downloaded) unless you actually make a weather change.”
    meant this bug had been corrected.
    I filed a bug some time ago and I know other users have also done the same, so I don’t understand the meaning of that sentence.

    Best regards
    José

    2. And be as specific as possible about when it is not auto-refreshing! What I have confirmed is that the time stamp of the real weather files in your X-Plane folder should update in sync with the download interval you set in the UI.

      The exact details of the bug fix are:

      Weather is no longer regenerated (and METARs no longer re-downloaded) unless you actually make a weather change.

      This fixes a long-standing issue in the weather system. Every other component of flight configuration is idempotent: that is, if you say “set this system to configuration x,” as long as x never changes, you’ll get the same results no matter how many times in a row you ask. But, the weather system introduces intentional randomness. If you say “give me weather configuration x,” you’ll get some particular configuration of clouds… and if you ask again, you’ll get a totally different configuration.

      The problem was that every time you hit “Apply Changes,” we were saying “okay, give the user the weather they asked for.” That meant if you just changed, say, the time of day, you’d still get brand new weather.

      Incidentally, this also meant we were re-downloading real weather unnecessarily.

      1. Jennifer,
        There are really no details to give; the weather never auto-refreshes. From what I read in forums, several people are noticing thsi and I tell them “Pleas file a report”; I’m almost certain that a couple of people really filed a report in XP11.0. I have now filed another report on XP11.01, per Ben’s request, but I have to say that I returned to the stable version, due to other issues.
        José

  11. Ben,

    11.01 b1 has injected a buffer over run bug for the OutName parameter in the call to XPLMGetNavAidInfo. The SDK documentation says that buffer should be 256 bytes but 11.01 b1 is clearing it to 500 bytes. This causes memory / stack corruption for plugins that defined an OutName buffer smaller than 500 bytes. I submitted a bug report.

    It would be good to know if this is a bug or the OutName buffer really needs to be bigger than 256 bytes, i.e. documentation is out of sync.

    Mark

  12. I see white flickering in the cockpit with the new update, only when clouds are present!

  13. The images in the Weather and Time-of-Day selection boxes (setting up/modifying a flight) now have an unnatural white haze over them, before the colors were much more saturated.

  14. I am on Steam edition, and I am still on 11.00r1. Is this the latest release?
    X-Plane 11.00r1 (build 110025 64-bit)

    Thanks.

    (If I try to run via Remote Desktop, it closes without any error message. (I know, obvously not this is the way how it should be run, but usually a program give us some friendly error message in this scenario. 🙂

    WARNING: extension missing proc glActiveTexture. This is a problem with your video driver.
    WARNING: extension missing proc glTexImage3D. This is a problem with your video driver.
    WARNING: extension missing proc glTexSubImage3D. This is a problem with your video driver.

      1. Ok, thanks, and is 11.00r1 the latest public version? I think, it is the Release Candidate 1 and not the 11.00 final.

  15. Returning to subject Update Scenery option.
    If I go through add remove scenery, then I remove all my old scenery, when add again will be installed last version of scenery?
    I believe that through Update the download will be unique, or through Update will be offered option to download regions?
    I have installed the latest version of X-Plane 11 Installer, but at the moment of continuing with Update Scenery I decided not to continue until the end
    Thank you

    João Alfredo

    1. Only if you would like to re-choose which parts of the scenery you want to install it would make sense to remove the early beta scenery first. Otherwise you can just let the updater do it’s thing. Either way it will always install the latest available version of the scenery.

      Ronny

  16. Ben,

    What’s up with the S-76 she just rolls easily like a toy ? Can the real one do that ? There is no inertia.

    Overall the performance is better

    Rgds.

  17. I’m worried about updating new scenery since the last scenery update (beta to rc1) took away some realistic landmarks and flattened some buildings. It was like a step back in realism. Will this update flatten more buildings?

  19. Hi Ben, noticed the runways and taxiways in XP 11 have a brown look, shouldn’t they be light greyish, will this be addresssed in the 11.01 lighting update ?, although more needed FPS is the priority now.

  20. Ignore my bug report on XP11 dark interiors—internal spill lights are fine in Sierra, dead on OS X 10.9.5. XP-11 sure works a treat. When we get an updated Nav SDK and cockpit map I’ll be hopping.

  22. Please do not forget to check for the wind turbines spinning, Ben.
    Yes, it is the least important thing ever for a flight sim – but I think this should be fixed although… *g*

    Regards,
    Marc

  24. Pingback: X-Plane 11.01 Beta 1 and the SDKs - Feediu.Com

  26. Before Update Scenery, Global Scenery folder 64.6 GB and FPS between 22 and 39.
    After Update Snery, Global Scenery folder 49.6 GB and FPS between 20 and 23.
    Restoring Global Scenery folder copy.

      1. Yes, the folder is shrinking, no problem, I found that poor performance blamed me, there were programs running in the background. Sorry.

  27. Is there a workaround for making the cars move during replay? Why can’t they just go endlessly in a loop and be independent of whether u go forward or backward in sim time?

    1. Vk, I noticed when you first load a replay, the cars move. It’s when you start dragging the playback slider back and forth, or use the high speed playback button, then they stop. (most of the time 😉 )

      1. Right – here’s what’s going on:
        – The “local” position of the cars is based on a strict time-based interpolation between its source and destination end point on a given road segment that has no branches or merges. We don’t even save the car position – we save the segment and calculate the car location on demand if and only if it’s drawn. (We know if it will be drawn by the overall size of the entire segment.) So change time and replay works great.

        – Buuuut we never save the history of driving decisions the car makes. If you back time up to a 4-way intersection, we have no way of knowing if the car went straight, turned left or right to get where it is, or was spawned. So we simply clamp the car to its past position rather than changing its segment.

        I’m not sure if we’ll ever change this…we get a lot of requests for better car replay because people want to make videos, but there are a LOT of cars in the x-plane world and they would generate a pretty long driving history pretty fast.

        There are “clever” things we can do (e.g. use the car’s ID to make a pre-determined set of navigation directions, then we can know how it went without storage) but it’s also a question of time – do you want me working to get us to 60 fps and stutter free, or really making the greatest traffic-jam sim ever.

        2. Ben,
          Thanks for taking the time and explaining.
          please focus on the 61FPS and VR support 🙂

          Although interested if you (LM) are thinking about outsourcing some non-critical tasks to partners (addon developers) or community. The whole traffic engine could be improved by an addon? Assuming the current SDK can handle Replay info.

          BR and keep up the exceptional work!
          Khaled

  29. After upgrading to X-plane 11.01 Beta 1, my X-crafts E195v2 does not feature SID’s and STAR’s

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