Back in the day, the way you put in a feature request for X-Plane was to email Austin – his email address was all over the website. So was his phone number – if you really wanted the request you could just call him, but it might hurt your chances. Austin had a big text file where he copied all of the emails, and then he randomly jammed things into X-Plane. It was the wild west.
Fast forward twenty years – we have a development team, we have customer support, we have an art team, and X-Plane has a lot more users than it used to. So we made an official place to record feature requests: feedback.x-plane.com.
The feedback request board allows for voting, so please look through the existing requests and up-vote it if it’s already there–this lets us easily find very popular requests.
The request board covers X-Plane desktop and mobile. You can also request features for end users (“better clouds”) or for third party developers (“scenery packs can edit the mesh around airports”)–it’s all good.
Looking through the “most wanted” right now, it looks like our internal high priority items (most of which are in progress) match the most wanted list pretty well, which I think is a good sign for our upcoming dev work.
Which means, stop spamming the blog with feature requests!
Ha ha ha ha … people are welcome to leave feature requests here — my main concern is that they get LOST. Every comment to this blog is read (cuz we have moderation) but they’re not tracked, they don’t become bug reports, they’re not “in the system”. So the feedback site provides something that’s kind of self-organizing.
Hi Ben. Is there any news on Austins hint of a big scenery upgrade in 11.6 or 7? As an X Plane 11 exclusive youtube channel the last 3 years. I have about 200 videos! It feels like X Plane has gone quiet since 11 50 was finalised. Thanks for any teasers. LFVFR Youtube Channel. 😉
Uh, we have made no announcements about any kind of big scenery upgrade in 11.6 or 11.7, and honestly in this case I have no idea what Austin would have been talking about.
Thank you Ben. I will be in touch
Suggestion: Make soft weather updates. When the sim gets news about weather the plane may jerk on wind changes, also clouds would appear or dessappear instantly.
As people in the US are no doubt tired of hearing…
Vote!
(FWIW, you don’t actually need to vote on this one, because we’re very aware of the community’s desire here… it’s the #3 most voted-on feature.)
This is great. However I am a bit concerned. On one hand I’d like to see a lot of stuff implemented that users feel is important that maybe Laminar didn’t (‘or didn’t have the time’ is a more realistic theory), on the other hand, I’m not sure if the majority of users on here (who are most likely asset creators of some description) would be aligned with what’s necessarily good for the sim. I’m sure that Austin still hold the veto button in his hand though 😉 Thanks for taking this step anyway, I think its a positive one.
For what it’s worth, third party devs also are in direct contact with us, so while they can’t numerically up-vote stuff, they do know where to find us.
I started to read the comments, and most were items we already had in X-Plane???? Better rain, got that (Librain when fixed), snow and Ice, got that, movable jetways (addon) but got that also, Wet effects on runways (god what blanket has this guy been under), Aurora Borealis (northern lights), Tire smoke and tire screech on landing for all aircraft… ???? and on and on… are they all using the same simulator?
I do want puppet Thunderbirds animated pilots though! Scott Tracy forever!… no Virgil.
I think it’s very reasonable for people to request things that are available _only_ in add-ons…another way of saying something is available in an add-on is to say that it’s missing to every new user as soon as they hit ‘go’.
When something just exists as plugin, its not part of the sim.
Its boring to search x plugins for functions which should be part of the base.
And its more boring regulary check for updates of all this plugins.
Currently when the sim changes and the plugin does no longer work, the feature is (temporary) lost, like librain.
When plugins are bad for the XP infrastructure then its bad, too .. like GroundTraffic Plugins for too many airports. I have deleted all GroundTraffic Plugins.
When the dev of the plugins retire, the plugins after some time will stay way behind the simulator itself like GroundTraffic and Autogate. They were good at their time, but now i would like to get rid of it.
Features like this plugins should be as base in the simulator and best with dev interfaces to improve or extend. When building the base, the LR devs see where are the problems to implement these parts and can adapt to this.
I would f.e. like to see something like passengers walking into aircrafts, but as i understand its not easy possible in current sim. When there would be a base implementation of free walking people it would be easier to add things like this.
Above are just examples not my requests
I found a link that detailed user specs, ie graphic card manufacturer, operating system, ram, most used airport etc, is there another page which details a list of processors used, which graphics cards etc? Would be good to know what consumer baseline is.
At some point, we’d like to be able to break down the “dashboard” data in this way (I have a feature request filed for it), but it keeps getting pushed off because the people who can add it are also responsible for major sim features… the sim features win out in terms of priority.
If somebody would like to hack on the dashboard (it’s written in Python), the project is open source. I could give you pointers in the right direction for doing more hardware analysis.
Ben,
I think it’s great that community input is being put front and center – I’m really looking forward to seeing what X-Plane 12 has in store for us.
The the layman, some of the reason for denial of ideas isn’t very… Clear. I put a feature request in for easier connectivity to the sim and got back a message about making specific suggestions for improving the SDK. To be clear, I’m not a developer so I was immediately put off from following up on it.
In short, I was comparing the ease of connecting to simulators that use SimConnect with X-Plane that relies upon XPUIPC, a now-abandoned piece of software with varying versions floating around on the internet and plugin devs all asking for us “end users” to use different versions. (e.g. 2.0.3.8, 2.0.4.8, 2.0.5.9, etc.) – It’s a minefield and makes connectivity a complicated task.
What will X-Plane 12 have in store for us regarding connectivity? Will it be simpler? Could the feature request have been clearer?
Hi Craig,
I think there are two very different requests here, and they’re both sort of problematic.
“a feature request in for easier connectivity to the sim” is a request for a feature that would face add-on developers, cockpit builders, etc…so we’d want specifics because we want to hear from the target audience about what _they_ think is easy…whether it’s a cockpit builder, add-on developer, or whatever. If someone thinks it’s hard, we need to know what easy is. We have a C API to talk to X-Plane via datarefs and we have UDP IO and maybe someone thinks that isn’t easy, but we’d want to know why. (E.g. “I couldn’t figure out the UDP docs” or “I’m working in C#, not C”.)
But…I think maybe that’s not actually your request? Is your actual request “make the XPUIPC experience for users not be a mess” (or the more specific “Laminar should replace the third party XPUIPC add-on with its own FSUIPC-compatible interface”)? That’s not really a request to make connecting to X-Plane easier..it’s a request for LR to adopt and fix or replace a specific add-on.
What I find interesting is that we have quite some plugins for out-of-process applications. Mainly for flight tracking.
Examples:
– SimToolkitPro: https://simtoolkitpro.co.uk/help/sim-setup-xplane-11
– Little Navmap: https://github.com/albar965/littlexpconnect
– Navigraph Simlink: https://navigraph.com/account/downloads/simlink
I would have expected that the UDP interface to be enough for this usecase. Maybe there are examples/documentation missing?
Hi Ben,
Thanks for the reply.
In connecting with MSFS and P3D, I can use SimConnect. FSUIPC is a third party program that connects to SimConnect, as do other third-party add-ons. I guess what I was suggesting was an X-Plane equivalent of SimConnect, but I believe that’s what you have explained is already provided through the UDP interface, in which case I understand that my request is unnecessary.
Well, there may be UDP features that people want that aren’t there yet, whether or not it is more or less capable than simconnect. The UDP interface does not have all of the flexibility that the C API has.
Hi Craig! I’m the guy who closed that request. I wasn’t trying to be obtuse when I said “we have the X-Plane SDK”—it’s the best way for add-on creators to interact with the sim. The UDP interface is another option if you don’t want to dig into code.
I consider FSUIPC a bit of a duct tape solution, though—the whole idea is to take add-ons written for MSFS (or its descendants) and make them automatically work with X-Plane. This works fine where X-Plane’s ideas about the world/aircraft/flight model/etc. match up with how MSFS does things… but it breaks down in the (numerous) places where that just isn’t the case. It’s a bit like using Wine to run Windows applications on Linux—when it works, it’s awesome, but it’s not really surprising when it breaks.
This is why XPUIPC is inherently a minefield, as you say… and it’s not something we can really fix without committing to emulating Microsoft’s implementation, and maintaining that forever.
Thanks for the reply Tyler.
My post here was more to query if there were any plans to provide a LR backed solution (emulating MS’s approach, as you say, or doing something altogether different) or whether I could have structured my feature request better.
I believe you and Ben have answered both points.
Are there any surprises? Items that slipped your radar or items you through were low priority but got surfaced and reinforce by the feedback?
To make MSFS look like an Xbox game! Oh, it is. 🙂
About to upgrade my 10 year old 4790K to a 10700K, but will retain the 1070 GPU, be intrigued as to what performance increase I get on vulcan ad as to where it introduces new issues. Let you know
Suggestion: New aircraft or new FMOD sounds to your Colombia, 747 400 and 200. Also new FMOD MD80 sounds would be great! Like when you open the windows then it makes a good opening sound like the the FMOD MD80 preview you showed us. Please make this FMOD to all default aircraft:)
Can you state when you will announce new features and when they will be completed? For example, when will better multi-core utilisation arrive? When will better graphics arrive?
We definitely cannot pre-announce when future features will be completed. We could in theory pre-announce when we -estimate- that they will be completed, but that’s about as useful as taking a hammer and smashing my thumbs…it escalates any internal scheduling issues from a project management fire to a project management and marketing fire.
I think there will be some road map that we can announce in the future so that people can have at least some sense of the -order- we are approaching things, but we’re not going to be able to be more specific than that.
Any info would be interesting – the more specific, the better 😉 If you announce something and it gets delayed it is much better than not announcing anything. Thanks for your reply.
I’ve been thinking about this a bit, Ben, since many if not most users are not likely to upvote (or even understand) SDK related requests.
As a third party developer, I do know how to bug you directly, and I appreciate every minute you spend and/or waste on me. 😉
The perception that I have, which may be a misperception, is that development tends to be just like the core sim: single threaded, even though I would like to think everyone else at LR is madly working on their own chunk of the sim.
A few years back, I think many of us hoped that XPLMNavigation was undergoing an update, or would get some attention soon. But, with VR and the rendering rewrite being huge, introducing something that could be almost as support-intensive was not going to happen. This was how Philipp kindly explained things to me back at the first FSExpo, and it’s understandable.
It just seems to me that a more granular relationship with developers could expand the productivity of the team overall. This would allow you to add “nice things” to the sim in semi-parallel with the big pushes like VR and render engine rewrites. You might even get some “side beta” testing done in the process. I’m thinking of major functional areas – Plane Maker instrumentation updates, the SDK update(s), scenery, ATC, weather, etc.
Divide and conquer.
Development already is parallel – which LR devs are in the dev-lobby slack chat is not a good proxy for the dev team.
Roadmap would be fine.
Requests…
As one said earlier, what’s getting a lot of votes (might) not be best for the sim.
Right now (as in the next 2 years) I could see a huge advance for X-plane to “do more” for helis and missions.
MX&S2020 got none of this, and tbh. I doubt they can make “something” that would be useful because of Bing map use.
Lots and lots of pictures with strange houses etc etc.
Yes, helis and missions is what I like and what I want.
But I see also helicopters (and “war stuff”) together makes the 3rd. biggest pile of user whishes.
I would imagine a 3rd of the “war guys” to feel amazed by missions like SAR (vs. “fly from this airport to another – repeat”).
Mission-X and other add-ons are great, but can be tough to edit.
All in all I’m saying think of making a mission editor for “not_so_advanced_in_programming” users.
And pleeease allow stackable user objects!
For now, if you try to stack, the top one sinks down into the bottom one then magically floats up (if you’re lucky).
Ooh.. and the muttaf….ing outdoor camera view.
Help the heli guys and help yourself 🙂
will you add boeing 787 On X-Plane mobile ?
Vote! 🙂
To paraphrase a complete tool… “X-Plane is the greatest thing ever made, in fact there have never been a flight simulator greater than X-Plane. Laminar Research is an incredible institution and force the sight of America have never seen before. Tremendous progress has been made over the last 6 months and it still going, they will “MAKE IT GREATER THAN EVER BEFORE”.. We tested positive for enthusiasm but we have never felt better after the release of the feature feedback. Continue to make X-Plane Great Again and god speed.
What is development without a tad of humor?
Cheers guys, and have fun doing it. 🙂
Keep politics out of here. Too many areas are already infested with people “virtue signaling” and voicing their ill-founded opinions and insults.
Wondering: Will I have to perform the E-Mail confirmation every time, assuming local cookies will be lost? Why not have a usual login (with a password)?
The “passwordless” login thing is here to stay, yes.
Feedback request board! Great idea! I went ballistic in there 😀
I’d wish one could also downvote a feature request. Being able only to ignore or upvote isn’t very realistic. Maybe every user should have a few votes for downvoting (per day or week or month).
I’m not a big fan of down-voting – in my experience most of the objections to feature requests in this discussion board is based on other users assumptions that features are zero sum and they can predict their dev cost, and therefore it is important to down-vote X so Y will happen faster. This isn’t useful on the feature board, where relative strength of voting completely captures this. The only useful down-vote would be if something is an anti-feature, e.g. “I feature request that there is no P-Factor” – “I down-vote because I think P-Factor is important for realism.” In this case, a polite, well written comment is the most useful thing.
In bug triages of my past, so often ‘insignificant’ issues are deprioritised in favour of all hands on the big ticket items. And who wants to do bug fixes and refinements when theres new code to write?
So, I’m hoping there is scope in your process to prioritise the low-cost + high-value/visibility requests alongside the attractive new features.
(Eg on my agenda: the vr jump-out-the-cockpit-to-the-ground – who said that?)
This is great to have a place to vote for this and I will do just that. In short, my vision would be:
– Make it look like MSFS2020. So that encompasses weather, scenery, lighting etc. But nothing else like MSFS 2020 🙂
– Realistic AI aircraft that follow real-world schedules and actually look decent.
– Realistic ATC. I.e. that is smart and behaves like real life, sounds realistic and not a computer reading generic sequences of words.
– Keep everything else as it currently is in XP11 i.e. flight dynamics, models etc. And keep the look and feel of the UI as it currently is, not like an Xbox game like the other one 🙂
My add to the wish list was declined..
Too many infos at one time I guess, but the full idea is gone then.
“Please allow stackable user objects”… how many will vote for that when they don’t know the reason for it or what it can be used for?
🙁
I wish Austin saw my full wish list..
He’s my helicopter protector 🙂
Add external camera/improve FLIR.
Stackable user objects for missions.
Maybe a “more pro” mission editor (you guys should know how to make it)
But even the first 2 alone would make a big difference for heli missions.
Ben.. please read and nod 🙂
One feature per request is easier to handle for the developers and easier to vote for by the community. You had missions, stackable user objects and outdoor camera view in a single request.
Just make multiple single request if they don’t exist yet. And I’m sure they will stay up.
I would suggest resubmitting the items individually with a good enough explanation that other users understand the purpose. This way the community would get to vote on your suggestions versus it being just one person’s voice in this blog.
We’d welcome these as individual requests, we just don’t want “laundry list” posts of many logically distinct features—those actually make it harder for us to gauge what people want.
I actaully appreciate these ‘update posts’ and also the comments
left below. I feel closer to Laminer R than just reading my fellow
sim’s putting in their t’wopenny-worth on the dot.org.
More posts from you guys would always be appreciated and let
us know you are working on ‘Something’….
… and now to that ‘Features Update’ link … here we go ! :O)
Oh these posts are great. But then sometimes we see Ben reply to a troll and I can’t help but think that is taking valuable time away from him taking advantage of that new Vulkan overhead and getting us better weather, etc for the next iteration of X-Plane.
Hi i bought X-Plane MOBILE PRO version the game is PERFECT PLEASE add BOEING 787 with realistic cockpit and with access to all buttons on the cockpit Where can we vote for the BOEING 787 and what are your plans in the next updates? PLEASE add more passenger and cargo aircraft there are very few passenger and cargo aircraft with realistic cockpit and with access to all buttons on the cockpit.
THANK YOU IN ADVANCE FOR THE ANSWER
Hi,
I deleted our additional comments requesting mobile aircraft. Please do not repeat-comment the same request here. Also, this isn’t the right place to make feature requests – that was the whole point of the blog post.