Well, the paint is barely dry and we already have an X-Plane 9.01 RC1. Here’s what’s going on and how you can try it.
9.01 is the first of what may be a few small internationalization and localization patches. 9.01 adds German localization and updates the French strings. 9.01 also has a handful of very minor bugs; Austin will probably post the bug list shortly. 9.01 is already RC because the code changes are really minor.
After 9.01 we’ll do another localization patch (probably in the next month) that will include unicode and true-type font support. That build (902? 905? Who can guess what number Austin will pick!) will probably have a formally named beta because the unicode changes are extensive.
900r3 is still the latest final build and it’s what you get if you update your copy or run the web demo installer.
To get 901r1, go to the updater options and check “get betas”; update your sim and 901r1 will be downloaded. Please try it!
I just added this article on version numbers and betas to the X-Plane Wiki. A few notes:
- You can select to update to new betas using a check-box in the X-Plane Web Updater. Previously there was a special updater for betas – now it is a preference, to cut down on the number of applications we have floating around.
- Release candidates do not get re-released or renamed when they go final! A release candidate means “we think this is totally done and can be released”. It is declared “final” when, after letting people use it for a while, we decide that there probably aren’t any bugs left that we will fix in this release. So 900r3 is the final version of X-Plane 900.
It took us three tries (900r1, 900r2, 900r3) to get the final version of 900 right. So we will not rebuild the sim just to remove “r3” from the app version…900r3 is the latest – if you have it, there is nothing to update.
And of course, my usual rant about betas: betas aren’t free candy, they’re an attempt to work the bugs out of buggy software! If your goal is to enjoy your X-Plane experience, the safest bet is almost always to not download the beta. (An exception would be if there is a work-around for a driver bug that affects your hardware, available in a new beta.)
If you are a third party developer/author, please do download the betas, early and often! It is much easier for us to fix bugs early in beta.
We have an X-Plane support Wiki: http://wiki.x-plane.com/.
I’m not sure what will end up there eventually, but it will include some airplane development info, a lot of trouble shooting tips, and general instructions.
It will not contain scenery or plugin development info, as they have their own full websites.
I encourage you to edit the wiki and help organize – I am putting information up there as I think of it, but I need help editing it for organization.
Posted in News
by
Ben Supnik |
I made the mistake of nuking this poor user’s comment and I can’t figure out how to get it back; it’s a question that I think a number of people might have, so:
Ben, I am thinking of buying the dvds. I have heard the new (final)
version fills the whole dvd (6gb) whereas the beta took about 1,5 gb.
What is the difference? If I buy the final version, will I get better
geographic detail (more vectorpoints) or what is the real reason?
First, you will not get more scenery detail (geographic, vector points, or otherwise) in the final than beta. The scenery is the same in beta and final.
Generally speaking, every difference between beta and final is available via web download. In fact, the final DVDs are made by:
- Installing beta 1.
- Running the updater to get the final version.
- Cutting a new DVD off that finished result.
So I am quite sure that the final disks are the same as a beta DVD plus update.
Now the question is then, why did we do eight DVDs before and six now? The answer is two-part:
- Walmart.
- Best Buy.
The retailers prefer a six-DVD pack that is commonly used for software; our distributor therefore wanted us to cut from eight to six DVDs. We did this both by using a more powerful compression algorithm on the DSF (7-zip instead of regular zip for DSFs) and by packing the DVDs much tighter. The old DVDs are one continent-per-DVD, plus the sim; the new set is simply a ton of files packed onto 6 DVDs until they’re almost full. Since the new installer lets you pick areas to install, the fact that the files are packed is not a huge problem.
So why did Austin have a sim DVD with only 1.5 GB of stuff? Convenience during beta. Austin updated the beta DVDs at beta 11; by having the sim by itself he could make a new sim DVD and not recut all of the scenery DVDs. (Cutting DVDs takes forever; an hour to burn each one, a lot of testing, a few copies, start all over if you find a problem. It can take me a whole long day and into the night to create a master.)
As a final note, there is a difference between the early US retail six-DVD set and the Laminar one; the installers are different. But they are both six DVD packed sets with scenery on the sim disk (disk one). The retail disks had to be finished first; the new installer was not ready. We will be using the new installer from now on.
The operative point here is: it really doesn’t matter what you buy; everything we’ve released can be web-updated to the current version!
I think Austin has made this clear, but…
IF you got x-plane 9.00 BETA, then you do NOT need buy version 9.00 final… if you just run the updater, then it will UPDATE your beta TO the final version.. there is no need to make another purchase.
BUT, if you WANT to have the FINAL version on DVD for backup purposes, or to get the latest DVD INSTALLER, then you should re- purchase x-plane 9.00 now… though i do not recommend or suggest that at all… you just CAN, if you want the FINAL, NOT BETA, on DVD
The key equation here is:
Beta DVD + Web Updates = Final Sim
Everything that has changed from the beta DVD to the final DVD is available for free using the updater. If you want to buy more DVDs, Austin’s not going to stop you, it’s a free country. But we made sure that everything that was big and couldn’t be downloaded would be there on the beta 1 DVD so that users could buy the beta DVD and have a complete sim.
So if you have a beta DVD, just use the updater to get the latest version (and RC3 is final, so if you have RC3, you’re already done) and you’re all set.
(Am I beating this to death? Yes…but…people get very angry at the idea that their DVDs are “not the latest” – so we put a lot of effort into making sure that you can buy the DVD early on and still have the latest!)
Now that X-Plane 9.00RC3 is final, we’ve released a complete set of “next-gen” updaters and installers, identifiable because they run at 800×600. With these new installers and updaters, we’ve changed the way updating the sim works.
In the past, we had one application (the “net installer”) that would:
- Update any existing files it found and
- Get any files that were missing.
This was useful in that you could get a fresh copy of X-Plane or update your existing one.
But it also made life a living hell for our tech support folks; the single biggest tech support item we would get is users who would:
- Go to update X-Plane using this tool.
- Pick a new location, not their existing install.
- Download 700 MB of demo instead of 30 MB of updates.
- Run the demo and discover they now have no scenery.
- Become confused and call or email us.
To try to combat this confusion, we’ve separated the concept of installing a demo from the concept of updating the sim.
The new “web demo installer” always makes a new copy of X-Plane. It will not install into an existing location; if you ask it to install to an existing folder, it will demand you pick a new name. It will always fetch the full 700-MB demo.
The new “updater” always picks from an existing copy of X-Plane (presented as a list of known X-Plane 9 installs, rather than a file picker – one of the big problems was people picking a folder inside the X-Plane folder). It always updates this existing folder, and will thus never fetch a new install or create a new install.
My hope is that users can identify the task they wish to execute (install a demo, or update what they have) and thus use an application that will guide them through a path without pitfalls. Top concern is that the updaters not install second copies.
Advanced users: you can still do anything with these tools that you could before – but the functionality is now split into two apps. The updater will never rename an existing folder name (as this breaks people’s shortcuts), and the installer will let you customize both the install name and the install location. You don’t have to install “X-Plane 900r3 Demo” to the desktop.
Finally, a note on beta: previously we had a separate set of tools for beta; searching for betas is now a check-box preference that puts nasty red writing up. This is mostly to keep me sane and the number of installer builds down to what I can count on my fingers. So when the next beta comes out, just take your updater and enable “search for betas”.
I had to do some research into compression algorithms recently, because we had to squeeze the global scenery onto fewer DVDs for retail distribution. We did this mostly by completely filling the DVDs, but we also had to use 7-zip compression to get about a 10% improvement in compression ratios.
DSFs are not the best test of compression efficiency because the format has been organized to help algorithms like zip compress them – the improvement with 7-zip and RAR was a lot less than you’d get with, say, a text file.
Anyway, my point here is: let’s not use RAR – it’s the new GIF. Every now and then a file format comes along with some kind of restriction that keeps everyone from doing everything with it. In GIF’s case, you had to buy the right to create GIFs, and in the case of RAR you have to buy the right to compress RARs.
I think that having these kinds of entanglements in fundamental low level file formats (like how do we compress our data or save our images) is really bad for the software community as a whole; it balkanizes raw materials. And file formats stick around for a long time – even though GIF is made obsolete by PNG you’ll still find them all over the web.
The lure of RAR is of course higher compression ratios than zip. But 7-zip can do the same thing, and unlike RAR, has the potential to be completely free, which means it can be completely ubiquitous.
Macintosh users understand the problem here: for the longest time “StuffIt” archives were the standard way to compress data on the Macintosh. The file format was proprietary, so you couldn’t even make your own program work directly with StuffIt archives. Now that zip has taken over on the Mac, getting data between Mac and Win is easy – you can just zip something using the operating system and send it to all your friends.
Let’s not go back into the “bad old days” of proprietary utilities and a lack of integration with regular apps. I say: if you can stand to use zip or bzip instead of RAR, vote for what’s open and has a future, not what is slightly better now but will just be a pain in the ass in three years.
I don’t know how much of a problem this is yet, or how much of a mess it’s going to make of people’s scenery. Here’s the background:
- ASCII defines 128 character values, mostly letters like A-Z. With ASCII, you can write English and that’s just about it.
- The byte that ASCII is stored in on all modern computers can store 256 values.
- Clever people got the idea to put some more letters in the other 128 values to create characters like é and å.
- People defined different “codepages” that have different sets of charcters in those “upper 128” slots. So one code page might be good for French, another for Russian.
- Modern software uses unicode characters, which have a lot more than 256 values, and can thus hold all sorts of characters in one string.
Code pages were around for a while, but they’re not a good idea. The problem with code pages is that the same numeric values are used for different letters. The result is that a correctly written Russian document, when converted to a different code page, looks like gibberish. And if you want one document with both French and Russian, well, one code page doesn’t do you much good.
Now X-Plane’s handling of non-ASCII characters is pretty poor in version 9.00 (and all previous versions). It will draw ASCII and take keyboard input from ASCII but not much else. If you hit the é key on your foreign keyboard, probably nothing will work.
But it turns out there is one way to use foreign characters in X-Plane – I just discovered it tonight. If you use Windows and your system’s codepage* is set for a foreign language, you can use those foreign language characters in an OBJ file to name a file on disk with the same name. In other words, you can have textures named été.png and it will work.
Sort of. If you then change your system to work in Russian (which changes the code page) your texture will stop working. The reason things stop working is that the file system uses unicode; that is, the OS knows that été requires a Latin character set that’s French friendly, but X-Plane is using Russian since the system’s set that way. The result is that the file system has no way name the file in Russian and we fail to load the texture.
So using the “high 128” characters from your system’s code page to make non-ASCII characters is a bad idea because your scenery won’t work on other people’s computers.
But it’s going to get worse in the future. X-Plane is going to start using UTF8 in a lot of places. UTF8 encodes unicode into one byte characters by using more than one byte for non-ASCII characters, but as a result it uses the “high 128” character codes for very different things. été.png in UTF8 comes out quite different.
I’m not sure how we’ll handle this yet (use UTF8 in the scenery system or have some kind of backward compatibility). But for now I can only advise one things: use ASCII only for your file names. In fact, a good guideline for filenames for the scenery system is to use only numbers, letters, and the underscore.
I’ll post more about scenery soon; this will be short and not terribly topical.
The X-Plane Plugin Wiki used to have no login requirements – anyone could just click and edit. All was good for a while, and then I logged in one day to find some of the most highly used pages stuffed to the gills with the phrase “Nigritude Ultramarine” over, and over, with links to other sites.
You can read about this phrase, why it was invented and what was going on here.
Our response was to put a user login requirement on the site, and we haven’t had a spam problem since (knock on wood) although we do seem to get what appear to be bogus signup requests. (They don’t really hurt anything, they just clog the user database. I’m not sure why anyone would sign up if they don’t intend to actually do anything.) But a few thoughts on Nigritude Ultramarine and people’s attempts to get junk spam sites into the top of Google’s search listing:
- I was pleased to see a real site (this FAQ) as the number two search hit for the term…this real link from a real blog to them can be sort of a contribution to their page rank.
- I have faith that Google will continue to fight the technology arms race against seach engine optimizers…Google has gobs of money and an immense motivation to do so.
- Apparently link farmers, in an attempt to raise their page rank, have been using bots to automatically steal blog content. I haven’t seen this myself yet and I’ve never had an X-Plane query go to a junk site. But some blogs I read have complained of this happening.
Only mildly related, there is an X-Plane Wiki, and I’ll try to point people toward it next week; I’ve been posting things there rather randomly in an attempt to get underdocumented stuff written down somewhere.
I just finished about 15 pages of emails, mostly to Andrew McGregor (who is the very first MeshTool user) and also Benedikt Stratmann (whose x737 is on the bleeding edge of plugin-based aircraft) and AlpilotX (we all know about his forests). Probably all three are wondering how the hell I have time to write so much on weekends. (The answer is of course that my frisbee game got rained out. Foo!)
In the meantime, probably about 300 other people who have emailed me in the last few
months are wondering why the hell they have heard nothing from me. My in-box looks like a mail server exploded. It’s not pretty.
So let me blog for a moment about the “relationship problem”. Simply put, there are two of us (Austin and myself) and about a thousand of you (third party developers doing cool and interesting things with X-Plane) plus significantly more users, some of whom have some very weird tech support problems.
In this environment, our algorithm for who gets “developer attention” is pretty broken and subject to total thrash…there is a huge element of random luck (who emails me when I am recompiling the sim vs. debugging a nasty bug).
I’m aware of both how hard the task Austin and I face and how frustrating it is for a third party developer because I’ve been on both sides. Before I worked for LR, I was a third party and I was always astounded that Austin couldn’t remember what we talked about last week.
Then I started working for the company and saw what it’s like. Imagine sitting at a train station watching the trains go by* (at full speed, not stopping) and someone says “last week I waved to you out the window and you waved back, remember me?”
So I would advise three things to the neglected third party:
- Be firm – you may need to ping us again because at busy times we can’t always keep track of who has asked for what.
- Be patient – if you need something the week we’re burning DVD masters for a second time (because the first set failed at the factory) then you’re going to have to wait.
- Don’t take it personally…a lack of a response usually indicates overload inside the company, not a poor opinion of your work!
This blog post has rambled enough, but it may feed well into the next one.
* This analogy is totally stolen from “How Doctors Think” by Jerome Groopman – he uses it to describe the task of primary care physicians trying to spot the early signs of a very rare illness among a fast-moving train of patients who are almost entirely healthy. I strongly recommend this book particularly for Americans – we need to understand the forces at work in shaping the quality of our medical care!
