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X-Plane 11.30 beta 7 is out – full notes here. Hopefully the next beta will be a release candidate; we’re down to a small number of bugs, almost all of which are in the particle system, or are regressions (meaning the behavior was fine in 11.26 and is borked in 11.30).

If you have a bug that dates back to 11.26 or earlier and it hasn’t been fixed yet, it probably is not getting fixed in 11.30 – we’re out of time with this release.

Here are a few details on bugs we’re still working on and bugs we recently fixed.

Drawing Callbacks and Plugins

Beta 6 fixed a bug where plugins would receive extra window-phase drawing callbacks if a modern plugin had a new-style XPLMDisplay window on screen. This should fix a wide variety of plugins-interfering-with-each-others-drawing bugs, particularly where the “culprit” was a new plugin and the victim was SASL-based.

As a general guideline, please use XPLMDisplay windows with the modern SDK and new APIs whenever you can – it will give you the most compatible results going forward. The only drawing phase we recommend at this point is the panel/gauge drawing phases for custom panels.

N1/N2 for Turboprops

X-Plane’s free turboprop model uses the “N1” engine dataref to represent the gas turbine speed, and ties “N2” to the compressor tied to the prop.  When you turn on the starter but don’t bring in fuel, N1 will rise up to 16%, but N2 will stay much lower.

11.30 introduces the “new” free turboprop model – a second engine model that’s designed to more closely emulate the PT-6. For most of the beta, Austin was using an opposite convention: N2 represented the compressor turbine and N1 represented the prop turbine. Austin’s logic was that this was analogous to a high-bypass jet engine: N2 makes the high pressure and N1 spins the big fan-like thing.

In beta 7, Austin changed this; the new free turboprop model now follows the same convention as the old free turboprop model. This should make it a lot easier in the long term for authors whose aircraft have real PT-6’s to use the new model and take advantage of the improved accuracy.

Particles In the Cockpit

In beta 6, we fixed the bug where the new partilcle effects could not be seen from within the cockpit. This had the unfortunate effect of making them visible when the particles were inside the aircraft. This problem can be hard to avoid – depending on the wind and location of the exhaust on your aircraft, it’s possible the smoke just blows through the cockpit, making an artifact.

This is my plan for how we will ship particles in 11.30:

  • Particle emitters attached to objects with “outside” lighting objects will create particles that appear outside the aircraft; they will be masked out so that they don’t appear in the cabin.
  • Particle emitters attached to objects with “inside” lighting will be ignored and produce a log warning.  We are reserving this capability for a future update when we can have interior-pass particles; for now, don’t use this capability, as you can’t know how it will look in future versions of X-Plane.

This is one of the scariest “not done yet” parts of 11.30, because the logic to control interior vs exterior drawing is very complicated – it has to take into account different hardware capabilities, different rendering settings, etc.

Particle Light Levels

I am still working with Alex on particle light levels.  A recent beta included logic in the particle lighting code to match the clouds (e.g. direct sun makes them brighter) – without this, contrails don’t match the clouds.

But with this logic, particles look too dark on the ground. So we are tweaking things. The take-away here is: don’t ship your add-on with particles until we go final, as these things are subject to change during beta.

Automatic Toe Brakes and the C172

Automatic Toe Brakes is a feature where X-Plane automatically applies toe brakes when a user who does not have toe-brake hardware deflects the rudder pedals to near their maximum position. The idea is that on some aircraft, you can’t steer tightly or hold a heading in a cross-wind without the toe brakes. (This feature does not run if a plugin is controlling toe brakes or hardware is available.)

Early X-Plane 11.30 betas caused us to apply automatic toe brakes to aircraft where it was not appropriate, e.g. airliners. X-Plane 11.30 beta 6 removed this behavior from the airliners but also removed it from some third party GA aircraft where it was accidentally (but usefully) being applied.

We’re looking at this now, but at a minimum, I expect we’ll restore legacy aircraft to acting as they did before, and probably widen the steering range of our 172 a bit. I’ll write more in a separate post once we make a decision.

 

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.

89 comments on “X-Plane 11.30 Beta 6 and 7, and Winding Down the Beta”

  1. The new beta thankfully brought my VR framerates back to normal! Unfortunatey, I still see exhaust smoke in the cockpit. 🙁 Bug logged.

  2. Thanks Ben for the great work on 11.30 but please don’t forget to address the flickering cloud shadows! They’re really bad! Thanks.

  3. Hmm, running an update (from 11.30b6) tells me “You are about to download 1mb data to update to 11.05r2”. Whaaa? no thanks!

  4. I think it will be a long time before I update to 11.30. So could you please add a feature to turn off the New release notice on when I start X-Plane.

    1. I think this feature exists – run the X-Plane 11 installer.exe to be found in your main X-Plane 11 folder. Choose “Update X-Plane”.
      Make sure you have the checkbox “Check for new betas as well as updates” UNCHECKED.
      Let the installer check for new files (it shouldn´t find anything) then exit. It should save the checkbox-choice.
      From my experience, running X-Plane 11.26 on my laptop, this will never ask wether you want to download a new beta.

      Cheers, Jan

      1. It is possible to ignore *betas* by not opting in in this manner, however once a version is considered final, X-Plane will start nagging for you to update at every launch. This is by design as we want everyone to update since the latest version has the most bug fixes and features. It is not possible to turn this off.

        1. Is there a way to revert back to previous version if you ever wante to do so? Let’s say you are on 11.30 final and wanted to go back to 11.26r2 or even 11.10. Many users may have multiple different installations, i.e. For helicopters, for testing, for ifr, for vfr, ga, etc. Not all updatedes to latest version due to bugs, installations processes, hardware, drivers, scripts, etc?

  5. Thanks for the update Ben. A major regression I think is that autogen buildings are now only appearing / popping up under the immediate flight path of any aircraft being flown.

      4. I now notice that there are other users reporting this pop up autogen issue on the forums under “11.30 beta 7 is out”.

      5. I see the same problem. This only started with 11.30b7. It was fine with 11.30b6 (and of course 11.26). Def something that needs fixing before 11.30 final is rushed out the door imho.

        1. Agree, add another one to the list

          PS Great work anyway Ben, Seasons greeting to all the Dev team.

      6. Hi Ben, I can confirm. The LOD itself is the same and much the draw distance. The BIG difference is that the objects now pop in when 100% viewable, the fade-in is lost. This leads to the impression that draw distance is reduced because all the faded objects are missing.
        And it “kills immersion” (I hate this wording!) because objects just plop in from nowhere. I will make videos of a comparable sitatution in 11.26 and 11.30 and post as a bug report.

    3. I also have this autogen problem with 11.30b7. It was fine with 11.30b6 and of course 11.26. I am using the same rendering options and no plugins. I hope this gets fixed before 11.30 final is rushed out the door. Thanks.

      1. I have tried this again with world objects = max and this seems to bring the autogen distances back to what they were with world = medium with b6 and 11.26. Kinda kills my FPS though. Likewise, autogen distances WO = High with b7 look ~ the same as WO = Lo with b6 and 11.26. I am not using any plugins or custom anything, 100% stock. You should view this at Las Vegas (KLAS) since there are a lot more buildings along the strip and hence it becomes more obvious. BTW; Pause does not catch up. Free viewing towards the missing autogen areas makes them appear if you free-view quite a bit closer to them.

    4. I just did a comparison of KBFI on final with 3 autogen levels in the same location, b6 vs b7 and I see _no_ change in autogen.

      Are you using some kind of add-ons that mess with X-Plane’s LOD (e.g. FWL scripts or other hacks)?

      If you pause the sim, does the autogen “catch up”?
      If you pause the sim and use free view to go to the missing autogen area, does it fade in or is it just gone?

      1. Buildings are popping into existence, and it appears the LOD is much shorter, I mean by that there are much less buildings in the distance. Also there appears no logic behind, some buildings disappear at a very short range. More like the whole building gets removed, instead of details of it (for example usually in Europe the dormer windows would not show up at a distance, but now the whole building gets killed). So some building would pop into existence into an otherwise populated area. This is most noticed when using ff_library_extended_LOD and xEurope.

      2. Today I went from 11.26 to 11.30beta 7 and also noticed the late pop in and late/sporadic shadow rendering.

        No LOD addons or scripts, but I do use UWXP so I will disable and try.

        The autogen simply fades and sometimes pops in a lot later than usual.

      3. Can confirm Ben’s observation that on stock XPlane 11.30b7 with no additional plugins the autogen has no issues. I fly at EETN. On autogen department everything is as expected.

      4. Hi Ben
        No add ons and the effect is the same whether custom autogen or default autogen – very, very obvious pop in.
        For example just took off KEWR default Cessna (no custom scenery) and you only see buildings much nearer (maybe at least 5 times near or more) than before and even then there is pop in with details or maybe textures on those buildings. Pausing the sim just stops the autogen.

        This is a clear bug and very obvious to anybody who has used Xplane previously so no idea why it isn’t apparent in your build.
        You should see pretty much as soon as you are in the air in built up areas with autogen.

      5. Hi Ben, no plugins all 100% stock everything. If I pause autogen does not catch up. If I free-view to missing autogen area it slowly fades in the closer I get. Looks much more apparent flying the Vegas strip (KLAS) in a heli or ultralite. I could see the same things at KBFI but this is not a good area to test this since autogen buildings are pretty sparce.

        If I change world objects from medium to max the autogen distances look fine but this kinda kills my FPS. To me, autogen distances for b7 w/world = max are about the same as b6 w/world = med. Likewise, b7 w/world = high looks about the same as b6 w/world = low. So, I think something has knocked down autogen distances for world settings below max.

      6. I am not sure if this is the same issue, but looking around an airport from Tower view, zooming in and out a bit makes the parked aircraft appear and disappear!

      7. In my case if I pause the sim the autogen formation also pauses and does not “catch up”. Using freeview with the sim paused also has the same outcome. I tested with no addons to my sim with the same result. My previous Beta 6 install worked fine with no popping.

      8. Hi Ben,
        Noticed the same thing on stock LSGG, but I noticed something interesting – Buildings were switching from ‘brick style’ (european?) to white style (american?) every second or so.

      9. Hi Ben,
        I made the video linked to above. Here’s another one with shots from less customized and default scenery:
        https://youtu.be/lGB7-9ydiME

        What the videos don’t show much is how heavy all the small clutter objects are affected. Even at grassroot low altitudes they pop in when I’m almost over them or even disappear right in front of me on initial climb on my home airstrip.

        “Are you using some kind of add-ons that mess with X-Plane’s LOD […]”
        No. Never did. Also happens with no 3rd-party plug-ins loaded.

        “If you pause the sim, does the autogen “catch up”?”
        No.

        “If you pause the sim and use free view to go to the missing autogen area, does it fade in”

        Yes, of course only until I gain a certain distance (I’d guess at least some 20mi) from the plane’s position, then it stops loading autogen and textures become blurry but that’s normal behavior I think.

        Could it be that this doesn’t bug doesn’t exist on Macs again?

        Best,
        Ollie

      10. It catches up. But the scenery does not _fade_ in over a larger distance, it _plops_ in once you a relatively near or zoom in to a certain Level.
        Too mee it looks as if scenery fade-in is broken (on Windows?).

      11. Hey Ben,

        I just figured out by accident how to reproduce (or not reproduce) the autogen issue. Try loading in at KBFI again and switch your AA to 4x SSAA or higher, that should do the trick. Works for me everytime and everywhere with vanilla 11.30b7.

        Greetings!

          1. OK, tried this again and with AA set to 2xssaa+fxaa or lower this seems to help the autogen quite abit, esp if WO is medium or higher. Makes everthing shimmer and look pretty crappy though. Thanks for figuring this out LimaFox.

          2. That is interesting. I submitted a bug report on this beta run before b7 that there was something funky going on with AA and setttings.
            For example I wuld need to use x8 to get a satisfactory result I used to get with x4. With just HDR there was no performance penalty but with SSAO there was huge penalty.
            The x4 seems better again with b7 but maybe that is just placebo as not tested much but jaggies were bad with b6 even at x4.
            Lastly I am getting lower frames with b7 even though it seems to be doing less rendering work with this autogen bug. I am also getting stutter every several seconds of half a second or so, quite jarring.
            Good luck with a fix and thank you.
            Merry Xmas 🙂

  6. Hi Ben.Do you notice the fps suddenly drop for a few seconds during the flight looks like loading tiles or something.This issue is bad experience to the flight sim. For example take off from 07C EDDF and Heading 180 after airborne go straight for a while the fps drop must happen.How could we resolve it.Thank you.

  7. Fps is lower in b7 than b6; ie even on initial load on the runway. Wasn’t sure how to report that as a bug. On Mac.

  8. One question about new PT6 model

    After changing N1/N2 nomenclature I tried the new model flying the B200 from Carenado.
    After a little bit of tweaking it looks usable, but some questions came up to my mind.

    ITT looks to be significant higher, in climb reaching 700° at about FL110,
    but here is something that looks wrong for ME:

    Flying level at let’s say FL200 with Prop 1900 RPM (out of climb) will result in some values for torque, Prop RPM, fuel flow and ITT.

    For my knowledge changing the prop RMP results in increase of torque,
    but RPM x torque = power is constant, N1 at about 96% doesn’t change.
    With the new model changing prop RPM also changes ITT and fuel flow, not only torque.

    Ist this something for filing a bugreport?

      1. Your KingAir still uses the old free running model.
        I tried it with the new model, result is the same as by using the B200.

        I’ll talk to Austin.

        1. Thanks – by using our aircraft you eliminate a ton of ‘things LR does not know about happening in a third party aircraft’.

          If you REALLY want to get into the details, ask him for his personal model of his Evo. 🙂

    2. I don’t think you should try this on a third-party aircraft! Especially not one that uses custom scripting.

      This change does NOT affect any released aircraft, including the Carenado B200, because all released aircraft (saved with non-beta Plane Maker) will have the old model, which is not affected by the N1/N2 change.

      So the Carenado B200 is not affected, only YOUR B200 is affected, because you edited it with a Plane Maker Beta.

      If you want to play around with Beta Plane Maker, you should
      1. Do it on a plane with no scripting, like our King Air
      2. Expect to have to re-tune parameters as the beta progresses.

      1. Thanks Phillipp,

        I know about the problem with 3rd party ships.
        But the behaviour I wrote about is based on the new model (XP engine), not of scripting.
        I have the older Version of the B200, this version didn’t encrypt the lua scripts so it is possible to read them.

        Proof: the C90 acts in the very same wrong manner.

        I didn’t say there is a problem with the B200, I only reported a strange effect that COULD be a bug in the new model.

        But I got the message, if I will find some strange things using the B200 I will crosscheck it using the C90 first.

        By the way, how to report broken compatibility with 3rd party products?

        1. I’ve dropped the new engine into the C90 and don’t understand what you think is wrong: bringing the prop control back does increase ITT, because it increases the slippage between the turbines (generator turbine still turns with same speed, but power turbine now turns slower, so we get more exhaust gas backed up in there). The power turbine now has to create roughly the same power at lower RPM, that causes the temp to go up.
          So from what I can tell, the EGT behaves correctly.
          If you disagree with this, you should talk to Austin directly.

  10. I see none mentions on the rain inside the cockpit and the particles in replay are fixed or being looked on. Maybe its good to have a more updated “known bugs” thread..

  11. Hi Ben,

    I’m still in trouble with the att_hard object behaviour it seems still present with layered obj files. I’m in contact with some users and Jennifer.
    It makes impossible to use some freeware and payware sceneries where this technique is used to build helipads or taxiway… Now the question is what has changed on this objects why in this version we have this odd behavior?

    1. There should be no remaining bugs with this. If you see a problem in b7, you need to get us the actual scenery pack that is failing ASAP.

      The big change is that X-Plane is now capable of detecting horizontal collisions with vertical walls if they are marked hard – the plane is repelled laterally. In past versions this collision would not work or would rocket the aircraft _up_, destroying it; this has been fixed.

        1. What on earth is going on with that video? 🙂 It reminds me of this.

          https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZK-EMUBbRT0

          Aircraft moving at high speed are still -incredibly- sensitive to spikes in the first (or even second derivative) of the terrain height…IRL you don’t want to hit a pot-hole in your 737 at 120 knots if you care about your gear.

          The main thing this solves is you can make a building with a solid roof and not worry that driving “under” it will blow up the sim – you can just make the sides solid.

          The motivation for this feature was to be able to make the sides of docks solid for sea planes, so that taxiing into the dock will ‘repel’ the aircraft instead of blowing it up. There’s still a lot to do for sea-plane dynamics but that’ll be for another patch.

          1. > What on earth is going on with that video?

            Hahaha I remember that was a badly built third party object, I think it was a small fuel canister with a hard surface (why?) on one of its sides, out of the screen in a hangar. It seemed like the hard property of the side of the object extended indefinitely in the lateral axis, so it invisibly crossed the runway, repelling all AI and user aircrafts 😛 It was fun trying to find what the object was in a scenery with 50 decorative objects.

    1. Agreed. Also lower fps. I get freezes of about half a sec or longer every 20 seconds or so.

  13. beta 7 draw distance has been drastically reduced and is VERY obvious in VR. this must have been done to help framerate issues that many complain about. sure it increases fps but the buildings popping in as you fly near them is very bad. not sure how Ben can say it is exactly the same as beta 6 or 11.26.

  15. Ben, are we going to see a fix for this one:

    Known bugs

    XPD-9388 Software hangs upon exit when using VR.

    I know this came about as a result of one of the Oculus updates, but they insist it is the sim and not their software. However, since it is listed I assume it is at least acknowledged. I still also see the issue with the splash screen appearing “behind” the concrete square in the startup screens that came about as an earlier Oculus update and that has been a while ago now. I hope we don’t have to wait that long for this “hangs upon exit” issue to be sorted out.

    I also am having the buildings pop into view issue others have described above. Definitely came about with the beta 7. And no settings have changed.

    1. Re: Oculus:
      – Their Z buffering is screwed up in the load screen. I can’t fix it. It’s specific to Occ+NV and goes away when the safety mesh is drawn.
      – Crash on quit is technically in the NV driver when VR is used.
      So I don’t know when these get fixed, as they require coordination between us, Oculus and NV.

      2. Please coordinate in order to get rid of the VR crash on quit bug. Using task manager to shutdown for over 3 months now is getting pretty old. thanks.

      3. A workaround for the crash on exit is to first quit X-Plane with “Quit App” (“Oculus Button” on the right Touch controller) and then close X-Plane from the desktop.

  16. Will there be another extract of airports going into release candidate? This has been a long beta cycle and there are probably many more airports that are worthwhile to include.

    I myself have done KDMA (Davis-Monthan) and KNFW (Fort Worth NAS JRB), the first one being one of the remaining Class C airports that need updating to 3D. There is now only one more to be done.

    Just curious, but hopeful!

    1. No more airports in 11.30 – we’re too close to landing. We will do an extract for 11.35. There’s always another train coming to get airports out.

      1. Since gateway only accepts airports that are created using release version, what is the reason for this gated release? I would love to see XP client detect new version of approved airport and download it real time from Gateway.

        1. This has come up a couple times in the past… Here’s what I said last time:

          We too would like to see more frequent Gateway releases. It’s a little bit scary because it’s always possible that a new Gateway airport could introduce issues with the sim—for instance, I remember a particular scenery pack in the Portland area that would take upwards of 10 minutes to load in 10.50! And of course it’s always possible (albeit unlikely) that some airport could cause an outright crash.

          That’s part of the reason we’ve been making Gateway releases a part of the normal beta process. (The other reason, of course, is that doing so requires no new infrastructure on our end! ) Thus, any plan on our end to decouple Gateway releases from the betas would have to figure out how we handle problem airports.

          But yeah, it’s definitely a long-term goal of ours to push Gateway airports more frequently!

          It is not the case that moderator approval is sufficient to ensure an airport won’t cause problems… interactions between airport can also cause issues, which is why we always want some sort of beta period before kicking them out the door.

  17. Hi Ben,

    I know it’s off topic, but where else should I ask! Are there any plans to introduce a temporal AA solution to X-Plane? Right now, even the highest setting (8X+FXAA) results in bad image quality with flickering borders and shimmering textures all over the place. In the past, I was able to countermeasure this by increasing AA through datarefs, but since 11.30 (I haven’t checked the latest betas though), this would result in a graphical glitch (half of the screen filled with lines). It’ really hard to enjoy X-Plane when even a 1080ti can’t deliver a clean, soft image, and I suppose temporal AA is the only way out here…

    1. Temporal AA – maybe someday; I’ve also looked at using the MSAA hardware with deferred rendering, although that isn’t necessarily a slam dunk either.

        2. I guess that’s what they were trying to avoid with the simplification of controls. The idea, if I remember correctly, is to avoid having a huge number of controls to compensate for incorrect implementation of features. Ideally, if everything is working properly, the number of controls will be small and meaningful.

          But I think here the problem is the same as with every software… sometimes the attractiveness of working on new features outweighs the motivation to fix/refactor existing ones…

          1. only EVERY FREAKING GAME IN THE LAST 4 years has ADD MORE options

            the issue isnt to many options it lack of telling they user what they do which most AAA games have finally fixed

            lets look at the options for say DCS or IL-2 or Elite

            this isnt a cell phone game and VR needs more granular control put it behind an “advanced options” button then

          2. Elios, I understand what you are saying, but most people don’t care, don’t need, and even should not have more options. Because more options also means more support (because people will mess it up and then ask LR for help).

            Even I, a programmer by profession, head of quality management of an IT company, I get home, I get ready to play GTA 5, and what do I do? I go on NVIDIA experience and I click on “optimize” settings for GTA 5. I don’t waste time on adjusting anything because it just works, and that’s the way it should be.

            So, even if EVERY FREAKING GAME IN THE LAST 4 YEARS has these options, it surely doesn’t mean that _that’s_ the way to go.

            You are frustrated because you want to fix something that is broken using more controls, when it shouldn’t be broken in the first place.

            I’m not saying you are wrong to ask for more options, I am just saying that there is a reason why LR is trying to avoid providing them.

          3. I wondered independently some time ago: Can’t X-Plane pick some “magic fixed example scenery (dynamic or not) and view(s)” to be played in a loop while “auto-tuning” the graphics settings until a good frame rate is acchieved?
            That would give the users some starting point. I personally have the feeling that the hint texts corresponding to “affects GPU/CPU load” aren’t really true: IMHO clouds are the real (only?) performance killer since many versions.

          4. @Elios, It also appears LR have professional users with different licensing models – so I wouldn’t classify x-plane under the game genre.

  18. I had filed a bug about logbook entries being screwed up (landing airport is always the same as departure airport) but I didn’t receive an email from Jennifer confirming the bug. Should I refile the bug?

  19. I was testing a rework of CYPK in B7 real socked in Vancouver weather and like a flick of the switch rather than fade in the approach lights and runway lights came on, not very realistic. B7 sits all by its self on a usb3 external 3tb drive. I have also noticed in fairer weather buildings poping up rather than fading in.

  20. Is there a work around to the duplicate FMOD sound bank issue in multiplayer? If we both load the Baron, it crashes the sim.

    1. This problem will not happen if you keep the aircraft in the same location on disk so you are flying the _same_ Baron. We’ll have a better fix in a future update.

  21. “If you have a bug that dates back to 11.26 or earlier and it hasn’t been fixed yet, it probably is not getting fixed in 11.30 – we’re out of time with this release.”

    Would that implement the fact that certain bugs will never be fixed or did you mean just for 11.30 – Still waiting for the long over due XPD-8564. However the recent XPD-8660 I know will take some time.

    Sure hope these two bugs will see the light of day down the line, and while waiting for the release candidate, i’ll wish you all good luck : )

    PS.
    On the bright side, icing in 11.30 has totally ruined many of my flights due to no anti-ice protection or to little to late.. So kudos on the new tech, love it 🙂

  22. Ground shadows popping in much too late and far too close when ground shadows are turned on for the Linux version of 11.30b7. I filed a bug report with two avi movies showing the difference between 11.26 and the current beta. The effect is quite startling and immersion breaking when taxiing and flying at low altitude.

    1. I don’t know if it’s your case but if you have BetterPushback installed the default pushback vehicles are hidden, so when a AI aircraft pushes back the cart is not shown.

  24. Given the delays to 11.3 live will you now be adding the new landmarks/custom objects you had lined up as a later update to in this 11.3 release instead of adding in a separate update?
    If you are still planning to add as a separate update to 11.3 when can we expect it?
    Thanks.

    1. Dubai shipped in 11.30 – one of NY or DC will ship in a separate update. This was actually always our plan – the marketing materials for FSExpo were wrong. 🙁

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