X-Plane 11.05 is Final

45 comments on “X-Plane 11.05 is Final”

1. anyway to release the landmark buildings for all the cities showcased already sooner, since 11.20 is now not coming in the summer.

2. Hi Ben!
   “We are working on VR in parallel, and can hopefully public beta VR as soon as 11.10 is out of beta”
   This is very exciting news, can’t wait to play with the fantastic manipulators implementation shown in the FSCon video.
   Also, I’m very eager to try the upcoming changes in 11.10. Please take the necessary time.
   Cheers,
   Pascal

3. This is great news Ben!

   I know you guys are extremely busy, but I still try: it would be great if we could remove the visual models for VOR stations and other navaids using exclusion zones. I’m working on an airport right now where the VOR’s visual model just won’t line up with the ortophoto. I’ve reported the bug on the Gateway, but it would be great if exclusion zones would effect the visual models of navaids, too. The other thing is, it would be nice to have an official 3ds max exporter plugin. SteptoSky makes an excellent job, but it’s not the best thing when your design pipeline relies on a third party software which may or may not get refreshed, especially when the new .obj specification rolls out. I know I can convert stuff to Blender, and then use the official exporter, but it would be nice to have one for 3ds max as well. I’m sure you have a long list of stuff which you want to implement at one point, it would be nice to include this, too. Thanks anyway, and you guys are doing a terrific job! 🙂

   1. The step2sky one is official — LR sponsored development of the latest version, and it is now open source. I’ll post more about this in another post.

      1. will we ever get a way to hand edit mesh with GUI? it would super useful for fixing highly slopped airports

         1. Not from me. I’ve written about this before, but the short version is:
            – I think it _is_ useful to be able to overlay terrain elevation data for a small area from a scenery pack. So while this is hard to do in our engine (and requires a lot of code to make it possible), it is what we want to do in the long term and would make it possible to build a custom airport with controlled elevation.

            – I think it is _not_ particularly useful to hand-edit DSFs. They contain millions of vertices and hundreds of airports, and are generated by robots. So hand-fixing them strikes me as a bit futile – unless everyone very, very, very carefully collaborates, you end up with random DSFs that fix some errors in some places. If I have a DSF that fixes KJFK and one that fixes KLGA, and they’re not the same DSF, I’m toast. And then we recut the scenery and all that work is instantly obsolete.

            That doesn’t mean others aren’t welcome to provide tools that do it. But since I don’t think it’s a useful work-flow, I’m focusing my efforts elsewhere.

            1. why not move to a height map and let the gpu deal with it? then editing the terrain is as easy as editing a texture

            2. X-Plane’s authoring system allows for planar geometry on top of the mesh, e.g. a lot of the details for airports. If the GPU has a height map, then this airport detail would have to be ‘baked’ into the texture that is going to be height-extruded on the GPU. This isn’t impossible, it’s how most engines work, but the resolution needed for the baked tiles may be significantly higher than the VRAM required to show the source material, because the source meshes come in at arbitrary resolutions (some very, very high).

               In particular, the decal system can add data to the texture down to a hundredth of the scale of the original texture — to cope with this we’d either have to bake at decal level (too much VRAM) or somehow memo-ize the decal parameters into each _pixel_ of the tile, which is exciting because they can each use their own texture (plus, with 12+ parameters, baking decals would get expensive for VRAM too!).

               In other words, the existing scenery system takes advantage of things that are easily done when the mesh is _not_ entirely GPU-baked tiles to get higher quality with less resources, and reproducing that in an alternative architecture is quite difficult.

            3. uhh you might want to go look at Elite and KSP they do WHOLE PLANETS with height maps and shaders

            4. you guys are soo under using what the GPU can do wile every other game engine on the planet is offloading to the GPU your still doing most of your setup on the CPU… geometry shaders and tessellation are are things you should have had in in the engine already

            5. I feel like you didn’t understand any of the actual issues that I brought up in my comment.

4. Hi Ben,

   I understand there will be a lot of work done on the rendering code for optimization purposes and then for the introduction of Vulkan.

   Will this work also be accompained by some new feature or improvements in the rendering engine, or should we expect no visual changes at all?

   1. Engine wise: there should be no major visual changes in 11.10 – we may have bug fixes that make visual changes, but we were going for “what we did before, but faster and more modern”.

      I find it useful to separate changing what we look like from how we do it — this means we get good deltas and can see if we’re getting faster or slower.

      We are shipping new art assets and these do change how we look.

      1. We know the new lego brick clutter and landmarks are coming.

         Are those the art assets you’re referring to, or are you including some new model/texture replacements that we don’t know about yet?

         1. New autogen is coming – it was announced in Hartford.

            1. I forgot about that. Thanks.

5. Thank you Ben for the info!

   I’ll be waiting for some more info about what’s changed for 11.10, but as a regular user, I’m not developer. Still I like knowing what’s under the hood, at least just a bit.

6. 11.05 has broken Helicopter rotor shadows. Although I missed it, this was reported during the 11.05 beta run and made it into the release version anyway. Please consider adding major known bugs like this to the release notes in future so people can choose not to upgrade if they find it effects them.

   Hopefully it can be fixed soon.

   1. I _think_ Sidney’s already fixing this, but if you have a _specific_ aircraft that shows this, please file a bug, it’s a useful check-off for us.

      1. Will do. Thanks Ben.

7. I hope you will release the first beta in September with the euro autogen and landmarks that you showed at the flight sim con.. The rendering engine optimizations will take lot of time and pls don’t hold back the other eye candy stuff in 11.10 on account of that..

8. Excellent news! Very much looking forward to 10.10 and the new rendering stuff. Hopefully VR wont be far off either. Im also very happy that you choose to go to Vulcan.

   I have a question regarding Joystick Calibration and setup. Will there ever be a proper system for specific aircraft and a curve setting where you can reduce the deflection given by the stick like the one they have in DCS World? This is really something that’s lacking in X plane. I fly a number of different aircraft and helicopters and most of them need different deflection to be 1:1 with the real stick. Its something that i very much need, and i know most users of x plane would really appreciate.

   Thank you and keep up the good work

   1. I’m not familiar with how DCS World does this… Are we talking something like X-Plane’s “control response” and “stability augmentation” settings being set on a per-aircraft basis?

      1. Thank you for the reply. This would be a control setup per aircraft with the ability to fine tune the curve manually. What i mean by that is that you will still have sliders but you can see the curve you are manipulating and you will also have the ability to shorten the curve so it will use less of the joystick deflection and be more sensitive. To specify if you shortened it to use only 70% of full deflection on the physical stick that 70% would do 100% deflection in the sim. This happens to be the perfect setting for a 1:1 setup in a Huey helicopter with a TM Warthog on a 18″ extension with is about 7″ at grip level. The eurocopter AS350 on the other hand is about 5″ so that would need a 50% reduction of the curve(it would be a linear one) to match the real world stick. Having to alter or try to calibrate this everytime you choose a new aircraft is a pita as im sure you can understand. So if you could add this or even just a 1-100% slider for reducing the deflection it would be fantastic. Of course of a per aircraft setting

         1. Interesting. I’ve never heard of someone wanting to shorten the curve before, but I can see why you’d want that in your case. I’ll file a bug for both shortening the curve and allowing per-aircraft curve settings.

            1. Please allow us to adjust the curves, sensitivity, etc. for each Axis used AND aircraft specific. Not just roll, pitch and yaw. One example: i use a CH Pro Throttle as Throttle for Single Engine Pistons and as Nosewheel Tiller for Jetliners. For the tiller function to work realistically, it needs a Deadzone. Now i have to set that manually in the Joystick settings.prf each time.

      2. Ability to have global settings and than aircraft separate settings that have higher priority would be amazing. For every aircraft I fly right now uses different binding for disconcerting autopilot and I can’t use the same button on all of them right now, which to me is one of the biggest issues X-Plane has right now.

         1. Or being able to manually load a preset for each HID would be partially a solution.

9. De Biarritz
   Merci Ben et à ton équipe pour X11.
   Je me régale
   Un point La scenery
   Cordialement
   Philippe

10. Great news Ben. I will start building my AMD Threadripper 16 core / 32 thread monster now! VR is fantastic in XP11 via “other” software. I am sure it will be more stable and integrated in 11.10

11. Hi Ben,

    This question may be a bit off topic but are there any plans to add rain effects on runways, taxiways and aprons any time in the future? I am not asking for any certain version number. What I mean are reflection effects on tarmac when it is wet:
    http://blog.aopa.org/aopa/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/wet-runway.jpg

    I think this does not require any new textures – so this should not belong to the seasonal effect questions that you have already written about in the past.

    Regards,
    Marc

    1. Someday yes – it’s on our road map. We’ve wanted to do that for a while and now we have the lighting engine for it.

12. Hello devs!
    Do you have any plans on updating the magnetic declination algorithm? For what I know, X-Plane uses a static declination which do not change at all under time.

    So the question of mine, why do not implement the WMM2015 dynamic model to simulate magnetic declination of the 5 year period?
    https://www.ngdc.noaa.gov/geomag/WMM/DoDWMM.shtml

    Next update will come in 2020, for yet another 5 year period.

    I found this good dynamic code for these calculations:
    https://sourceforge.net/p/flightgear/simgear/ci/next/tree/simgear/magvar/

    Is the problem to update the slaved variation of beacons the cause of your approach?
    I’ve noticed that Navigraph and (I think) Aerosoft updates the earth_nav.dat for XP11. Though I’m not sure if the slave variation is updated, but if that would be the case, it would be very nice to have an option to activate a dynamic magnetic declination algorithm for current date.

    Hence to clarify, an option to either use static magnetic declination as of what you use now for default users, or a dynamic magnetic declination which changes per date, for users which subscribes on Navigraph/Aersoft.

    1. Magnetic variation in the real world varies continuously, while the calibration of real world nav-aids changes periodically when a technician re-calibrates them.

       So we could implement a dynamic mag-var model for the physics of the compasses – this is orthogonal to the nav data!

       But if we are shipping older data because the user does not have a Navigraph subscription, we’re not necessarily helping them by moving the mag-var model forward all of the time..on the other hand if they _do_ have a subscription, we’re not helping them by keeping it static.

       1. Thank you Ben!
          It sounds like the options between the two would be the right choice, and not so hard to implement, and you sparkled a longing for it to happen now, no pressure, just slightly. 😉

13. Good morning , x-plane 11.10 beta 1 relased this weekend ?

    1. no

14. Any chance X plane runs with the Ubuntu operating system? Support of this OS? I really hate Windows 10 with a passion. No support from Microsoft for windows 7, so that’s not an option.

    1. It does indeed. We test on Ubuntu 14.04, but there are people online (e.g., in the X-Plane.org Linux forums) running on a variety of distros and versions.

15. Hi Ben,

    I just bought an Oculus Rift, and have been using the free demo of the “other” software to try X-Plane 11 in VR (my main reason for buying a Rift). I am on the fence whether it is worth paying the relatively high price for the “other” software as Laminar will ‘soon’ release VR natively. I know you cannot give a precise date but do you think the update will likely be released before the end of October?

    I am willing to invest in the “other” software if it will be more than a 2 month wait for native support. This would be a great help in making a decision whether to part with my hard earned cash or not, or to just be patient. I literally love what I have seen so far in VR.

    Thank you and keep up the amazing work you guys do.

    1. I’m sorry, I can’t give release dates for native VR support.

    2. Hi Steve,

       Maybe it will help your decision the fact that with the “other” software you can import windows into your cockpit, which will help with your charts and stuff. Not sure if you knew about the features or not.

       Cheers!

       (By the way, I am waiting for native support, but I might be more on a budget than you)

16. Any chance of an 11.06, just to add the new Baron 58 sounds?

    1. No. Baron sounds will go in 11.10.

17. Will 11.10 fix the ultrawide monitor cloud blurry bug? The built-in clouds are very blurry/pixelated when running XP11 on ultrawide monitor (21:9). I submitted bug request long time ago but no response and there is no response in XP.org forum as well. But a lot of ultrawide monitor users have found this issue which is annoying. Any thought here?

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