It’s out the door! (Steam should go “final” tomorrow morning, but you can get the final now – it’s still marked as a “beta”.) Here’s everything that happened.
I expect we’ll do an 11.31 bug fix patch in the next week or two – 11.30 release candidate three was just critical fixes, e.g. fixing crashes on startup for Nvidia users with Windows 10 and the moon and stars aligned just right. Some less super-critical bugs are fixed and waiting for the bug fix patch.
As a developer, you’ll (hopefully) want your products to be VR compatible. To do so, you can of course use a real headset. If the need for debugging arises, that may not be very practical.
So, here’s how to fake VR in X-Plane:
--fake_vr command line argument (see “Using the Command Line Options” if unsure how to do that).There are a couple of noteworthy things to keep in mind when using this. Let me start with the good news: this also works on Mac! On to the bad news… this is very much in the category of “nasty hacks”, which means:
X-Plane 11.30 Release Candidate 1 is out – we fixed a lot of bugs!
As you can tell by the release name, we’re getting ready to kick this thing out the door. Most of the team is no longer working on 11.30, and those of us who are are trying to make very small, tactical changes to not further screw things up. I wouldn’t bet against an RC2 (we’ve needed more than one try for all of the “really big” patches we’ve done in the last decade) but at this point if you haven’t tested your add-on against 11.30, you’re really late to the party.
Flight simulators sometimes have to deal with unrealistic problems specific to being simulators and not real airplanes. One category of these “unrealistic problems” is dealing with user input hardware that is less complex than the real control inputs of the airplane. You might have a single throttle lever on your joystick, and not the 4 throttles with reversers of the 747. You might not have a twist axis or rudder pedals. You might be flying with a mouse!
Automatic toe brakes are a feature where X-Plane automatically applies differential toe brakes at times that we think might be useful if you don’t have toe brake hardware and no plugin is controlling the toe brakes. For example, an aircraft with a free-castering nose-wheel might be impossible to steer at low speeds without toe brakes. (You can’t turn the nose wheel directly, and the rudder will lack authority at low speed.) X-Plane can apply the left toe brake for you when you apply a lot of left rudder to help you turn.
In previous versions of X-Plane, this automatic toe-brake behavior was automatically applied based on some rules that Austin coded into X-Plane. When they worked, they really helped (and we know they sometimes worked because when we removed some of them in 11.30 we got bug reports), but at other times they weren’t tuned properly for a particular aircraft.
Starting in X-Plane 11.30 release candidate 1, aircraft authors can now explicitly control whether toe brakes are auto-applied for users without hardware, and if so, how aggressively. This control is auto-populated for older aircraft with the choices X-Plane 11.26 and earlier would have made, so you shouldn’t see a change in older aircraft behavior. The aircraft updating guide has the full details.
I believe that changes to these automatic rules may have been responsible for changes in third party aircraft ground handling in late 11.30 betas; hopefully with the new code, we should see complete compatibility.
X-Plane 11.30 beta 7 is out – full notes here. Hopefully the next beta will be a release candidate; we’re down to a small number of bugs, almost all of which are in the particle system, or are regressions (meaning the behavior was fine in 11.26 and is borked in 11.30).
If you have a bug that dates back to 11.26 or earlier and it hasn’t been fixed yet, it probably is not getting fixed in 11.30 – we’re out of time with this release.
Here are a few details on bugs we’re still working on and bugs we recently fixed.
Beta 6 fixed a bug where plugins would receive extra window-phase drawing callbacks if a modern plugin had a new-style XPLMDisplay window on screen. This should fix a wide variety of plugins-interfering-with-each-others-drawing bugs, particularly where the “culprit” was a new plugin and the victim was SASL-based.
As a general guideline, please use XPLMDisplay windows with the modern SDK and new APIs whenever you can – it will give you the most compatible results going forward. The only drawing phase we recommend at this point is the panel/gauge drawing phases for custom panels.
X-Plane’s free turboprop model uses the “N1” engine dataref to represent the gas turbine speed, and ties “N2” to the compressor tied to the prop. When you turn on the starter but don’t bring in fuel, N1 will rise up to 16%, but N2 will stay much lower.
11.30 introduces the “new” free turboprop model – a second engine model that’s designed to more closely emulate the PT-6. For most of the beta, Austin was using an opposite convention: N2 represented the compressor turbine and N1 represented the prop turbine. Austin’s logic was that this was analogous to a high-bypass jet engine: N2 makes the high pressure and N1 spins the big fan-like thing.
In beta 7, Austin changed this; the new free turboprop model now follows the same convention as the old free turboprop model. This should make it a lot easier in the long term for authors whose aircraft have real PT-6’s to use the new model and take advantage of the improved accuracy.
In beta 6, we fixed the bug where the new partilcle effects could not be seen from within the cockpit. This had the unfortunate effect of making them visible when the particles were inside the aircraft. This problem can be hard to avoid – depending on the wind and location of the exhaust on your aircraft, it’s possible the smoke just blows through the cockpit, making an artifact.
This is my plan for how we will ship particles in 11.30:
This is one of the scariest “not done yet” parts of 11.30, because the logic to control interior vs exterior drawing is very complicated – it has to take into account different hardware capabilities, different rendering settings, etc.
I am still working with Alex on particle light levels. A recent beta included logic in the particle lighting code to match the clouds (e.g. direct sun makes them brighter) – without this, contrails don’t match the clouds.
But with this logic, particles look too dark on the ground. So we are tweaking things. The take-away here is: don’t ship your add-on with particles until we go final, as these things are subject to change during beta.
Automatic Toe Brakes is a feature where X-Plane automatically applies toe brakes when a user who does not have toe-brake hardware deflects the rudder pedals to near their maximum position. The idea is that on some aircraft, you can’t steer tightly or hold a heading in a cross-wind without the toe brakes. (This feature does not run if a plugin is controlling toe brakes or hardware is available.)
Early X-Plane 11.30 betas caused us to apply automatic toe brakes to aircraft where it was not appropriate, e.g. airliners. X-Plane 11.30 beta 6 removed this behavior from the airliners but also removed it from some third party GA aircraft where it was accidentally (but usefully) being applied.
We’re looking at this now, but at a minimum, I expect we’ll restore legacy aircraft to acting as they did before, and probably widen the steering range of our 172 a bit. I’ll write more in a separate post once we make a decision.
As some of you may be aware, Blender 2.49 is old unsupported software that is becoming increasingly less usable on modern computers. To make matters worse, authors have large projects that are currently stuck on this platform, jeopardizing their work!
We are creating a 2.49 XPlane2Blender converter inside of XPlane2Blender 2.7x, so that opening a 2.49 Blend file in 2.7x will automatically convert meshes, animations, materials, lights, textures, and XPlane2Blender properties into a modern format. This isn’t just an idea, we currently have a strong proof of concept that animations can be converted from old to new!
The goal is
That if it exports in 2.49, it exports in 2.7x as similarly as possible.
That the conversion process is hassle free and also transparent.
That your work is safe and won’t be lost if there is a problem.
To accomplish this we’re going to need a lot of test .blend files and projects – to make it work for artists in the wild we need projects in the wild! We’ll take anything working and not working.
Again, just as with any other time someone sends me a sample to debug, it is kept secure and private, kept only for as long as needed, you can ask me to delete it at any time, and is only used for the development of that specific bug or feature of XPlane2Blender. They would never be used to develop any Laminar Research asset.
If you’re willing to submit a project to me, please get in contact via e-mail, DM, comment, or especially Github bug #397.
Please ask any questions!
First, X-Plane 11.30 Beta 5 is live. If we find it’s not a screamapiller we’ll get the Steam version going tomorrow.
Update: it is a screamapiller. The lighting is missing for chunks of the runway, city, etc. When b6 fixes this, we’ll cut a Steam build.
There were some questions in the comments section about whether aircraft would lose the built-in default effects as part of the particle system upgrade in 11.03. The short answer is “no” and the slightly less short answer is “no, unless you do some stuff in Plane-Maker.” Here’s the details:
Note that the question of how we did the default effect (new or old code) is totally unrelated to whether you (the author) want to replace it; if you turn off our effects, that check box will turn off our effects both now and when we re-implement that category of effects with new emitters (e.g. for rotor down-wash).
I still have a pile of effects bugs open, so please don’t ship aircraft based on the beta using the new particle system. (You shouldn’t ship an aircraft based on a beta anyway, but in the particle system, as of beta 5, I definitely have bugs that, when fixed, will require re-tuning of art files, e.g. lighting levels aren’t final).
Here’s a few particle bloopers.
X-Plane 11.30 Beta 4 is out, both for Laminar Customers and for Steam! The fix list for beta 4 is pretty short because we intentionally cut back on what we added to it. Beta 4 had one job, and that job was to not be as broken as beta 1, beta 2, or beta 3.
X-Plane 11.30 Beta 4 does not have the performance improvements we have been working on for the last week and a half; Sidney and I found a bunch of things that are slowing 11.30 down, but we didn’t want to risk yet another broken beta. This stuff should be ready for beta 5 in a few days.
The public beta for 11.30 has been unusual in that it took us quite a few betas to get a stable non-crashing, usable beta, and during the waiting period we heard a lot of complaints from Steam users about being left out, and a lot of questions about when the beta would make it to Steam.
Here’s the problem: we don’t know the date when a beta will make it to Steam. Here’s the rough algorithm:
10 BETA = BETA + 1 20 RELEASE BETA 30 WAIT ABOUT 24 HOURS 40 IF BETA CRASHES GOTO 10 50 RELEASE STEAM BETA
So in the case of X-Plane 11.30, we had to go back and recut betas due to a crash in the joystick code (beta 1), a crash when the radios were on (beta 2) and airplanes falling through airports into the abyss (beta 3).
One thing to note: if there’s a beta and it’s a few days old and it’s not on Steam, it’s because the beta has a known bug that makes it so unusable that you wouldn’t want to set your Steam install to use it. I see no reason to have a beta that crashes when you start it.
(Since we collect automatic crash reports from users, we have frequency information about how often crashes are happening, and we can identify crashes that are significantly more frequent than what we’d expect in a stable beta.)
Over the weekend, I published a Python package called xplane_airports. This serves two major use cases:
apt.dat) files used by X-Plane, and asking questions like “does <some airport> support <some feature>?”apt.dat on disk.If you’re doing any sort of automated analysis or manipulation of X-Plane airports, this should be a huge help.
It’s available via pip now:
$ pip install xplane_airportsAnd there’s a ton of documentation in the project’s README on GitHub.
Bug reports, feature requests, & pull requests are all welcome. 🙂
We’re pushing to get a stable X-Plane 11.30 beta 3 right now, and I think we’re making progress: Chris has fixed the crash when using the radio stack audio (this Windows-only crash was very frequent) and I have found at least one case of collapsing landing gear.
The bug report was the landing gear collapsing when taxiing on orthophoto-based scenery. It turns out that the custom DSF meshes have triangles that are duplicated and then flipped. In other words, a few of the triangles have twins that are upside down.
Here’s a pair of pictures to illustrate.
The image on the left is the “tops” of the orthophoto mesh triangles – this is what you expect to see. The image on the right is the bottoms!
Now normally the “bottom” view should show nothing – we should see only the light blue background, because the camera is above the mesh, so all of the triangle backs are facing away from us. Those extra triangles you see are copies of parts of the orthophoto mesh that have been duplicated and flipped over, so that their fronts face down and their backs face up.
This DSF violates the DSF specification, which requires all triangles to be wound counter-clockwise when viewed from above. But as of X-Plane 11.26, this wasn’t a huge problem; X-Plane blissfully ignored the flipped triangles. X-Plane 11.30 is intermittently detecting the upside-down triangles and the resulting upside-down normal vectors are making the collision physics go crazy. We should have a fix for this in X-Plane 11.30 where we filter out these flipped triangles.
One last bit of the mystery: the creation agent on both bad DSFs I have looked at is “X-Plane Scenery Creator 0.9a”. Does anyone have a link to this tool or know who the author might be?
Post script: there is a separate bug where the new physics code is reacting to DSF boundary cracks more severely than X-Plane 11.26. I had hoped this would all be one big bug but it’s not, so mesh cracks will be next on my todo list.
X-Plane 11.30 beta 2 went up yesterday – it fixes a few of our really big bugs, e.g. crashing and completely whacked out graphics. In terms of what’s next for the beta:
If you make a third party aircraft, you should be carefully evaluating your aircraft for compatibility bugs ASAP. The window for reporting compatibility bugs is going to close next week, and if you tell us late in the beta (after the app has been available for six weeks) that there’s a compatibility problem, you may have to wait for a patch to get a fix.
Do not wait for the release candidate to check compatibility!