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X-Plane 11.51 Beta 2 is now available. (Release notes here.) Here’s a few more details on bug fixes we are working on.

Device Loss Errors on Windows

A device loss error occurs when shaders running on the GPU crash. In the old days this might hang or blue screen your computer, but fortunately we live in the age of enlightenment – the GPU catches the error, stops running X-Plane’s shaders and leaves a note for the Vulkan driver to tell X-Plane “hey, you your code died.”

NVidia’s “Aftermath” is a diagnostic tool that can tell us why our shaders crashed on the GPU. When we tried to use it in the past it crashed, but NVidia has since updated their drivers, so we are trying again.

Aftermath can collect lightweight or heavy crash info; the lightweight crash info doesn’t hurt FPS, so it is now always on. Heavy crash info significantly lowers FPS, and must be turned on by the command line –aftermath flag.

So…we are looking for a few brave volunteers. If you:

  • Have an NVidia card with driver 457.09 on Windows 10 and
  • Sometimes see device loss errors during your flights and
  • Can live with some FPS loss for a little bit to fix these errors

Please run with 

--aftermath
and auto-report any crashes that come up. If you get a device loss error with Aftermath running, the automatic crash report will contain all of the info we need.

Device Lost Errors on OS X

Device loss errors can happen on OS X in Metal, too – the mechanics are the same as Vulkan. We are aware of one AMD driver bug that caused them which we have worked around in 11.51b1. If you still see device loss errors in 11.51 betas, please file a bug, as we don’t have automatic reporting for these.

HP Reverb G2

We are looking into controller problems with the HP Reverb G2. In X-Plane 11.51b2, the grip trigger should start working again, but the default configuration will still be weird.

The problem appears to be that SteamVR identifies the first-gen and G2 WMR controllers the same way; we are still looking into this. If you have these controllers and haven’t yet sent us a bug report, please try them with 11.51b2 then send us your log with the additional diagnostics.

Clicking Settings Crashes on Windows

A few users have seen crashes when opening the settings menu on Windows, before ever turning on Vulkan. As best we can tell, the crash happens when we open the settings screen because we have to go inspect the Vulkan driver to see if it is usable, and that code goes off the rails. We have a possible fix for this; our theory is that it happens to users who have various third party “layers” (layers are basically plugins for the Vulkan driver) that have gone off the rails.

Gateway Airports

We are still fixing bugs in the Gateway airports export; it’s not ready for beta 2, but it should be in the next beta after this one.

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.

24 comments on “X-Plane 11.51 Beta 2 Bug Fixes”

  1. I know we are all anxious about getting the Reverb G2 controllers to work in Xplane. When the Honeycomb yoke first came out, Laminar was johnny on the spot with getting a new joy config file for it and I’m hoping they can do the same with the G2. Very frustrating to have such a great HMD and not have the controller functionality necessary for basic menu control. Thanks to the Laminar team for all their time and hard work.

    1. The problem is that the G2 controller isn’t like past WMR controllers, but it IDs itself as the same as the past ones, so it’s using the config for the old controllers, which … doesn’t work. We’re scratching our heads about what to do about this, as it breaks a bunch of assumptions from our VR system.

      1. Thanks for looking into this! It’s certainly a pretty big roadblock not having the controllers working correctly. I sent in a log, hopefully that can help you all out.

  2. Unfortunately, b2 broke my Reverb G2 controllers worse than b1- the trigger is now not working either. Logs sent to bug report.
    Is there any hacks to try besides to reset the joystick settings in the xplane joystick config GUI?
    Looking forward to getting this sorted out- its my first VR experience and looks amazing!

  4. Great, finally a way to test the device loss error; I alone must’ve submitted something like ten crash reports with that bug in the past week. One in every three flights crashes. The Vulkan update is great for framerates and improved (read: increased) CPU usage, but it somehow feels like X-Plane is always on the verge of crashing if you even *look* at it funny.

  5. Hi Ben,
    Hope I will get your attention here:

    Question regarding VR headset with very large FOV (Pimax).
    We are couple of users , running xplane and observing that It is not optimised for this specific headset. To see normally in xplane, it requests to activate parallel projection” in the Pimax Pytool software. The consequence is a loss of Fps. For your information, this specific setting is not requested for other sims.
    In their website, it seems that Pimax proposed any help to any software/ app developers I order to improve the performance of their sim, but not sure if you are in touch.
    See the discussion below:

    https://www.reddit.com/r/Pimax/comments/g9ie1t/xplane_11_and_pimax/?utm_source=amp&utm_medium=&utm_content=post_body

    Any chance for a brighter future for us?
    Kindly
    David

      1. hi Ben, regarding Pimax. This is something I would be very much interested in as well. I actually have several of the headsets, including the newest 8KX, as do several the persons in our group, including my own brother.

  9. Is the crash reporter updated to catch all the new info that are being capture specially with –aftermath flag?

    I had many crashes and the crash reporter doesn’t come up anymore. Is it possible to invoke it manually after crash? (It is a much easier to report through reporter than opening a bug)

    1. Yes – the auto-crash report vacuums up all device loss info, including the aftermath stuff. If it doesn’t auto-invoke, it’s likely the report isn’t on disk in a complete form we can use. If you are seeing crashes that aren’t plugin based and can’t auto-file probably you’ll need to file a bug.

  10. I’m pleased you are getting some brave souls to help you fix this. I’ve chickened out (on Jennifer’s advice) and rolled back to OGL (with a few sliders moved to the left to match the Vulkan performance) as I can’t stand the embarassment/waste-of-everyone’s-time of constant but random CTD during online flights with VATSIM and IVAO. The exact same evil mix of orthos, overlays, LUA scripts and online clients does not crash OGL, but it crashes Vulkan (but not consistently). It’s a shame, as Vulkan will let me have (on my mid-range rig) more objects, ground shadows and better AA…but until it is stable there’s not point. Since rolling back to OGL I’ve had over 30 hrs online with all my badness and no issues. I’m on XP11.51b2 but assuming you’re only really expecting crash reports with Vulkan and NV457.09+ ?

  11. Ben, should we be noticing any performance changes when comparing this Beta to the non-beta version?

  12. Hello, installing macOS Big Sur on my iMac27 and trying to open XP 11.41 (I have also another XP11.51 file on my desktop) I get the hint :Be advised Failed to initialize UDP network connectivity. (RAKNET) This is almost certainly because you are already running another copy of X-PLANE ON THE SAME COMPUTER….. Another possibility is that you turned off IPv6 support in your operating system… Be sure that IPv6 support is on… I don’t understand what is IPv6 support and how to turn it on and also surprised that I cannot have a second XP installed on my computer . Need explanation and help. Thanks

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