XPlane2Blender v3.5.0-rc.1
XPlane2Blender is now X-Plane 11.30 ready! Not much has changed since beta.3, just some fixes to the particle stuff.
Bug Fixes
#373 – Test Script’s –filter flags now needs less escaping for its regexes
#377 – Show/Hide animations on empties is now being exported again
#384 – Particle follow non-colocated animations
Sound Emitter has been removed from the Empty Special types menu. One day it will be back in!
11.30 WHEN you guys said last week
Different parts of the X-Plane ecosystem advance at different rates. The progress of XPlane2Blender does not necessarily reflect the current time table of the main product, nor vice versa.
This is torture.
That guy called Mo Naser said it was coming out this week. And for sure, he’s right. Right?
I’ve never heard of Mo Naser (we’re not that small a company anymore where everyone can just know everyone!), but I’m usually not in the loop on advertising and PR. Do you have a link to where Mo Naser said this?
iirc he was the LR guy at flight sim con in the UK a few weeks ago now
https://youtu.be/ZzQD2dGG584?t=4900
said “Next week” on public 11.30 beta and then NOTHING from LR since
also pick better passwords for your patch notes
So, checking multiple times, Mo Naser is not someone that most people in the company know (if at all). It is obvious he made a recording of a presentation of ours, which is greatly appreciated. I’m not sure if we asked him to. Regardless, he is not a source for release dates.
In the video Philipp (trusted and well known Laminar Research employee!) accidentally implied “next week”. This was a mistake. Laminar Research doesn’t generally discuss release dates publicly, in the blog, or in comments because it tends to get people especially excited and then a big let down when it doesn’t happen.
Laminar Research is always pushing at full throttle, we make X-Plane because we love it and love seeing other people love it! There is no incentive to slow down or delay. When will 11.30 be released? On the day that it is released. I know that may sound disappointing, but, hopefully it is less disappointing than being constantly being told “soon! Like, another X days we think.”
Best wishes,
Ted
Hi Ted,
My comment about Mo Naser mentioning 11.30 would be out last week was just “tongue-in-cheek” humor. I totally appreciate the fact that you guys are doing all you can to release an RC that will not disappoint. As a programmer myself, I also totally understand that we sometimes run into unforeseen issues that set us back.
So all I can do is wish you all the best and thank you for the work so far. I will be honest and say I am disappointed about some issues in X-Plane, but in my opinion X-Plane is the best flight simulator out there anyway.
Godspeed!
well clearly you have beta that usble because the patch notes are in the wild
ALSO at the flightsimexpo you guys said it would be out last week …
PUSH THE BETA ALREADY some of us cant patch our add ons till you do
The beta comes out when it’s ready, not before. It’s out now so test your add ons.
That wasn’t the question 🙂
Laminar Research told people, at Cosford, that 11.30 would be out last weekend. It wasn’t out. The question is when will it likely be out? Thanks!
LR should follow the simple rule: every time someone asks “IS IT READY YET?”, the launch date gets delayed one week 🙂
I feel pretty confident that rule is being followed 😉
Maybe delay for you, the rest of us want it as soon as they are able to roll it out
Not a good idea! The competition will abuse it to delay X-plane updates!
Hello,
I’m sorry to post this OT but the discussion in the previous post is closed already. Would it please be possible also add an “Expert” mapping to the new controller UI that would allow us to directly control datarefs and be able to specify on/off values and separate actions for on and off action ? It would simplify mapping our HW quite a bit – currently we have to use a lot of FlyWithLUA scripts to achieve this but with such functionality we’d be able to these things natively. I ask this because many payware planes use datarefs to manipulate controls in cockpit so this would be quite helpful. Thanks.
The complexities of this make it a non-starter for the foreseeable future.
Any further development on updating the plug-in for 3 DS Max to Support the particle system? When you switch to Vulcan, how will this affect the plug-ins?
Not sure when the 3DS plugin will support particles.
Vulkan won’t affect _any_ of this – your models just work with the Vulkan renderer.
Sound emitter!? Will it be possible to attach the sound sources to the objects anytime soon?
In short: No. When Sound Emitters are supported in X-Plane they will likely be quick to implement in XPlane2Blender.
Hope you guys are doing good.
As far as some of the WYSIWYG features that us scenery developers have been hoping for (which would simplify the placing and editing of lights for example) is that something that in the pipeline somewhere?
Thank you.
Thanks for hoping we’re good! I’m obviously pumped to get the new RC out.
Roadmap: WYSIWYG lights is a big priority, but more important than that is that an uncomfortable amount of people have work that is trapped in Blender 2.49, and on Mac the ability to run that program is literally ending! Read more here: Soon Blender 2.49 will be unrunnable for Apple Users “without compromises” or at all. One user already said that Blender 2.49 has become buggy for them with a GPU driver update. The biggest push is on the 2.49 to 2.7x converter so people can keep using those files they’ve worked so hard on. We think this will also breath new life into the scenery and aircraft development world as old users can revive projects they’ve lost interest in because its in Blender 2.49 (which, lets be honest, is not a very appealing program).
This does not mean 2.7x is getting an OBJ importer!
If people would be willing to send me examples of their 2.49 files, it would be much appreciated.
Not a problem at all (Thanks for hoping we’re good!). Thank you for the reply back.
It’s crazy to think that people still use Blender 2.49. You guys are really to even address that issue. I think you should put your foot down and just tell people that you have to move onto other aspects of the plugin and then people will make the necessary adjustments to learn the newer version of Blender if they TRULY want to create/finish older scenery projects.
I wish you guys the best always. Keep up the good work! Thanks again.
When Ben first told me about the project, I took one look at the 2.49 UI and said “How about we just tell people to switch over”. He walked me through a thought experiment of how much time and money it would take to recreate a finished aircraft in 2.78. The only thing you would have to carry over would be basically, the meshes and the Blender Animations. Some very specific simple material and textures might carry over but it would largely be lost. All manipulators lost. XPlane Keyframes (more than half the animation work!) lost. A wide host of OBJ settings lost. Not to mention parts of a .blend file that wouldn’t normally export without the new automatic transformation of data to choose new good defaults. Those would require much debugging and clearing of error messages if simply opened up in 2.7x!
In the end it adds up to months of work and $1000s or even $10,000s of dollars in labor depending on the team size that needs to do it. Between “march forward, facing forward and only forward. Stragglers get in line or get out.” and “Save an entire workflow of the scenery community” Our philosophy is “We’re making a converter only to bring past work into the present. Blender 2.49 has been and will be unsupported and the use of old files is only supported in relation to their ability to cleanly go through the conversion process and produce an OBJ that matches 2.49 visuals and behavior.” It provides the best compromise between XPlane2Blender 2.7x development and preserving old but still potentially relevant work.
Wow! I totally see your point. Again, that’s what makes you guys great at what you do; really love Laminar and their business philosophy.
Keep up the good work and hope to see some exciting new features in the plugin sometime in the near future.
Take care.
I would like to say good job on the Blender docs for v3.5! They are SOOO much easier to read compared to the v3.4 docs. I hope you keep that format for future versions of the exporter!