Editor’s note: what follows is very, very, very, very, very silly.
Last week we shipped X-Plane 12.06; since then we have found a few straggler bugs; like typical lARRge patches from the days of X-Plane 11, a few bugs escaped us until after final, including some crashes we could see in the auto reportARR.
While it’s not great to be shipping a “hot patch” to our release, it is pretty fantastic to announce X-Plane 12.07 ARRsea 1 on International Talk Like a Pirate Day (the 19th of septembARR). The rest of this blog post only gets worse; you’ve been wARRned.
12.08 Is The New 12.07
Internally, nobody is happy about this, but the hot patch bumped all of our version numbers. So the new road map looks something like this:
- 12.07: hot patch of 12.06.
- 12.08: coming soon. Flight model and systems, ATC and Networking
- 12.09: more graphics and real weathARR fixes.
12.08 (né 12.07) is almost completely integrated and should be ready for private testing as soon as 12.07 is settled.
Why Wasn’t I Notified
Since 12.07 is a new version, you won’t be auto-updated to upgrade from 12.06 while 12.07 is in testing; run the installer, update with “get betas” checked and you can get 12.07.
Crash Fixes
12.06 shipped with more sensitive internal detection for numeric problems. This is how we run the sim internally all the time – the goal is to find and squash bugs fast.
Unfortuntately there are sections of X-Plane’s simulation that are:
- Not present in an aircraft (e.g. the real aircraft doesn’t have X)
- Not expensive to run, CPU-wise
- Not visible to the user (since the aircraft has e.g. no gauges to show these systems.
As it turns out, these systems are often happily running away in the background producing absolutely bonkers values; with sensitive numeric checking, the sim can crash due to problems in a system that nobody cares about.
For 12.07, I solved the problem by muting the alarm. My expectation is that we’ll have sensitive numerics in most betas, turn them off in the releases, and work through the systems code over time. (The priority on this isn’t super high because the systems aren’t consuming framerate – if they were we’d see them in our profiling.)
The other area where we saw increased crashes was with TCAS plugins. 12.07r1 has better logging and shouldn’t crash as much – the goal here is to not brick third party add-ons.
Other Bug Fixes
Multi-monitorARR: data output was not working in full screen configurations, fixed now, and manipulators work for multi-monitor systems.
OpenXARR: HP Reverb fixed, and we finally figured out why the white board would sometimes disappear. (It wasn’t gone, it was just 20 km from the hangARR.)
GARRmin Bezels
X-Plane does not have a built-in way to remove the bezels from the pop-out avionics. To solve this, some of our user and some add-ons edit the ARRtwork inside X-Plane’s “resources” folder, setting the bezels to clear.
X-Plane 12.06 introduced new bezel variants for the G1000 to cover all of the real-world panel button configurations. This fixed the bug “the real aircraft does not have these buttons, but when you pop the panel out, the buttons appear and do nothing.”
A side effect of this is: those aircraft using the new bezels use new art files, so the hacked up no-bezel art files on longer work.
This is not a bug for us to fix; if your add-on works by modifying the internals of X-Plane, we cannot guarantee that it will keep working even when we change the sim. (The only way to make that work would be to never change the sim.) You can work around this by modifying the new bezel files.
In the future, our plan for this is to provide a real way to hide bezels in the sim as a built-in part of the UI, which should make hacking unnecessary.
What Comes Next
Hopefully 12.07r1 will be “one and done”; if so, we’ll move on to private testing of 12.08 almost immediately.
If you are a third pARRty and your add-on has problems with 12.06, please tell us four weeks agoas soon as possible!
And what about Vee ARRRRRRRRR Ben…when will that get some more love? 🙂
All I’ve got from this post is that you seem to be in a very good mood… Or maybe that’s just me projecting… 😀
Keep up the good work!
Cheers.
I have been flying X-Plane for what seems forevARR, and really loving what is cooking in the kitchen. I was curious to see how bad the crashes were , so updated to 12.06 despite the warnings….. yep…. they are pretty bad 🙂 …. was despondently looking at all the videos non-12.06 users were posting on the youtube’s, but hoping to be back in the virtual skies today … yay !!!!
Thank you , Thank you … we ARR grrrrateful !!!
All you’re lacking, Ben, is an eyepatch and a PARRot on your shoulder.
We appreciate all the work. No problem that you need to rework the road map. The map is never the terrain.
Ben, you missed a great opportunity in that last line. You could have said “please tell us farrrrty hours ago!” :O
Arrrgh, this saves Ben from the fire. I am glad too.
To be honest one of the best part of to be xplane fanboy is always tweaking soft – not because has little bugs – because carying and optimizing is like a maitancing own aircraft.
Been using XP since befarrrgh 2010 and and I’ve nevarrgh been happiarrgh with a patch than I was with 12.06.
Thanks for the harrrrd work, aye.
Hmm, first thank you for all the work, being it’s hard and deep diving, we all appreciate it even if all do not say.
I am not sure I had any crashes related to anything fixed in the hot fix. If I change my sound device while sim is loading, i.e., from external speakers to BT headphones, windows see the change, I may have to make the Headphones default device in XP, and when doing that, it crashes the sim with some warning about sound device, blah, blah. I did bug it through the report channel, and tested several times to make sure, it was not my system first.
Realize 12.08 is the ATC big fix, however, and still testing but KIAH, the ILSs are not working in the default 737-800 nor the SSG-747-8F plane. still testing so I can make a comprehensive bug report. Otherwise, all my flights have been fine.
Thank you again for a report on these issues.
You have promised to work on the lighting problem (too dark cockpits) and I don’t see anything about?
This work is not going into 12.07 (which is just a crash fix) or 12.08 (FM, systems, networking). It will go into 12.09 or the graphics update after that depending on when it is ready. We are in the process of this work now and it is not done.
I could not be happier with 12.06. Really enjoying my time in the sim right now, other than the odd weather/cloud phenomenon.
Also, I really appreciated that Q&A session on Discord. Would be great if this could be a regular thing, maybe just 1-2 rotating different members of the team talking about what they’ve been doing.
arrrrrrrrr !! haha
All-Tested KIAH tonight, works fine. I started at Corpus and input a complete FP. It’s more than likely a setting I have incorrect. Color my comment an error on my part above on the ILS please. The Sound issue, “sound banks” I can break if I change devices while game is loading. To circumvent it. I leave speakers as default and plug in Headphones into the jack on speaker for that purpose. No issues now.
I don’t know what has happened, but suddenly my frame rate has dropped from 40 to around 12! I was on 12.06 and it was fine. Now on 12.07 it’s not. Any ideas what happened? ASUS TUF Gaming F15 FX506HF 11th Gen Intel Core i5-11400H up to
4.50GHz Processor, 24MB Cache, 6x Cores, 12x Threads / 16GB DDR4
RAM / 1TB Ultra-Fast NVME SSD / 15.6′ FHD 1920×1080 Anti-Glare
144Hz IPS Level Display / NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2050 4GB GDDR6
Dedicated Graphics / Windows 11 Home (64bit)
My frame rate is the same but the graphics are very jumpy with lots of pauses not seen before loading 12.07r1. Very (pause) annoying………
What about the turbo prop beta / reverse?
Never mind my previous rant. Rebooted, reloaded without a few plugins and we are back to smooth. I’ll bug report if I find what caused the stutter.
Ben are you able to enlighten us as to what is being done with regard to Networking?
“Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit is the first real step to fixing Mac gaming”. XP12 is not on the list or not ready to get advantage of Apple’s game mode.
Can we expect in one of the next upgrades a compatible version?
Unclear. If all we have to do is add something to our manifest to say ‘we are a game’ then sure.
Thanks for answer
While 12.07ARRsea works well for most of you, I still have serious problems with 12.07. Every time I undock a Toliss PFD, ND, or ECAM window on a second monitor, it goes black for more than 20 seconds each. When I switch from external to internal view, same thing, simulator stuck for about 20 seconds each time.
If I unplug the second screen, everything seems to be fine again. My setup is TV for cockpit view and a 34 ultrawide monitor for the PFD, ND and ECAM. I have a friend with the same monitor and problem. With 12.05 everything is perfect again. Do you have any idea what it could be? Thank you
We expect to have this fixed in 12.08
Only FYI.
While I’m happy flying with 12.05
Thank you, Ben
FYI.
Also, when I load a saved flight with the Citation X (in the air) The plane loads with black garmins and the battery and avionics switches OFF instead of ON.