Last week Marco and I were on a live stream and had a chance to talk about some of the upcoming developments we’re working on; next month Marco will be full time with us, but for now here’s a few notes on things making progress in the lab. I’m sure publicly discussing them on Friday the 13th will have no unexpected consequences. (Knocks on wooden desk repeatedly.)
We should hopefully have a release candidate for 12.1.2 next week – this week the team was fixing crash bugs, and we’re down to trying to finishing up stability. Crash rates in the beta look good enough to ship. (Please consider turning on analytics – we don’t collect your personal data but we do record crashed vs non-crashed sim runs – this is how we know whether stability is getting better or worse!)
12.2.0
Dark Cockpits: Art team is evaluating Maya’s exposure fusion work. Generally things look better than the shipping product, but we discovered yesterday that the indirect lighting environment is pretty weird on cloudy days. We’ve been fixing bugs, removing old hacks we no longer need, and I’m optimistic that the update should be both better looking and closer to reality.
We also have some fixes to the PBR material model that may get X-Plane closer to Blender and Substance Painter 2. This is a double-edged sword: we don’t want to change the material model such that everyone has to repaint everything (that would be too much both for our team and for add-on makers) but we do want X-Plane to be as close to WYSIWYG possible to make development faster. Art is evaluating these changes too.
We’re targeting 12.2.0 (a “major free update”) for these changes so we can run a substantial alpha and beta program and give add-on makers time to report bugs.
12.1.X
ATC, Weather: we have two minor releases before 12.2.0 making their way through testing. The first is ATC with SIDs and STARs – as of now it looks like that will ship next, but all releases are subject to change based on bugs.*
The other update is a weather update, and it looks like it may have some substantial features:
- New in-cockpit weather radar, with SDK support.
- Fixes for real weather bugs, including jumps in pressure altitude (which are driving the autopilots crazy) and some fixes to cloud visuals.
- Plugin-controlled weather across multiple locations.
- Better weather sync over the internet.
As of now the weather branch also has network sync of trucks and jetways to external visuals. This only affects users using external visuals but for those users, it’s a big feature, and it’s also an important foundational technology for us.
* In the past we have announced “X” is next and if that code was buggy, we’d just delay shipping anything until we fixed it. We’re trying to be more flexible and ship what’s ready first, so good code doesn’t have to wait for unrelated bugs.
Great article for my evening reading.
With the new radar: will different users get the same locations for dangerous (red) systems or is it different per user? In online environments that could lead to possible deviations being requested by every single user at different spots (aka “chaos”).
The weather data users get is the same, and weather visuals is seeded. Unless you start modifying the weather or use an alternate program, the depiction should be the same.
You’ll get the same red weather if the weather source is synchronized between the machines. Whether this is the case will depend on the flying network. This is something the devs of the flying network client software should contact us about – for example, XSQuawkBox used to (twenty years ago when I coded it) inject VATSIM weather into x-plane to try to make the process consistent across machines.
Will persistent snow be a part of the weather update? Currently xplane only shows snow on the ground if it’s actively snowing, it doesn’t account for snow already being on the ground.
It will not. The update is for fixes and radars.
You know, we have some code for that but it’s not finished; I think it will have to wait for a different patch, but we’ll see.
My questions would be:
1 – You indicate that you plan 12.2.0 as major update, is 12.2.0 still for pyshics only or it will include dark cockpit alongside PBR bug fix changelogs too?
2 – Would it be possible to add screenshot tool more options including colors the way how sim remembers rcas option each time you run, just for user customization?
I thought this was going to be paid update, jokes away! 😀 Thank you for the amazing blog post, can read these multiple times a day without getting bored. Best regards, Hakan.
Our aim with 12.2.0 is to include both Physics and initially planned 12.3.0 content.
We want to tune in, but for one Discord is (seriously) hard to use to find anything? time differences (Australia) don’t link in with general American timings (usually 3am in the morning) either, so you miss these live streams… can you make it (just a bit) easier to know when you do these Q&As Ben, or record them for the rest of us
The Q&A’s do get recorded. They take a while for processing before they are published. We have no plans to deviate from the Discord Q&As for our smaller developer talks.
“major free update” as opposed to…? Are you going to charge for some updates now within Xplane 12?
No. It’s an emphasis on the difference of major updates (12.1.0, 12.2.0) vs minor updates (12.1.1, 12.1.2, 12.1.3).
There’s no business model change here. 11.40 and 11.50 were free updates and they had a LOT of stuff (FM update, Vulkan), and 12.1.0 and 12.2.0 are big free updates too.
On the changes for things like PBR ones: I guess it’s non trivial to implement but a versioning of that would solve it for everyone. If somehow encoded into the textures itself, it would even work for liveries.
Thanks for the writeup and update. Much appreciated 🙂
Lighting can’t really be versioned I’m afraid, although its a nice thought 🙂
Are cirrus clouds going to be back in real weather?
Looking forward to the releases, it seem that in the one of the last few beta’s that live traffic on the traffic screen in the G1000 no longer shows up. It does however show up fine on the main MFD Map screen. Is this fixed at some point in the future or is there something waiting to be fixed so traffic shows up again on the traffic screen or should report as a bug in the bug tracker?
Please file!
The main map screen was missing the traffic altitude labels. This is fixed in 12.1.2r2.
I really appreciate these little dev talks – thank you for taking the time to do them.
Been eagerly waiting for the ATC improvements since they were mentioned on the .org. I’m more than happy they are planned to release with 12.1.x 🙂