We’re looking to add a junior UI developer to the team in the near future.
About the position
We need a junior developer to come do user interface work for us. As you may know, the Plane Maker and Airfoil Maker user interfaces did not get the same overhaul that X-Plane itself did for version 11, and we’d like to change that. That’s a major undertaking, and you, dear applicant, could be responsible for it in its entirety.
Beyond that, X-Plane itself has a “long tail” of UI improvements that we’d like to see. You could be the one to move these improvements from “The Glorious Future™” schedule into reality.
Our UI is built on a custom widget-based framework that is only now starting to reach maturity. So, while a lot of your work will involve putting together existing pieces, there will definitely be problems you can only solve by writing completely new UI components. Read More
Sidney posted a detailed write-up a few days ago as to why developing an add-on by modifying our shaders is not a good idea. The short version is that, like art controls, the shaders are an internal part of X-Plane that we don’t lock up so you can see them and muck around with them. But there is no stability, documentation, or any attempt to make them useful the way the plugin system is.
This confused a number of commenters. Do we want you to use them or not?
To resolve the mixed messages, Sidney created this fantastic flow-chart.
Hopefully that clarifies where the line in the sand is between “I was poking around” and “I made a serious add-on”. Pretty much everything here goes for the shaders as well as the art controls, only more so.
X-Plane has always shipped with the shaders visible to everyone as plain text in the Resources/shader directory. Partly this was due to making it convenient to load the shaders into OpenGL itself, but we also don’t have anything to hide there either so it doesn’t make much sense to try to hide them. You are more than welcome to look and poke at our shaders and if you learn something about X-Plane in the process, that’s awesome!
However, the one big caveat to that is that we never considered the shaders to be part of the publicly accessible interface and they are in no way stable across versions. X-Plane is an actively developed product and we are making a lot of changes to the codebase, including the shaders, so you should never ever distribute a plugin or tool that modifies the shaders. Since we give no guarantee that our shaders will remain stable across versions, you’ll always be left worrying that we might break your add-on.
Additionally, there is a big change to the shader system coming in 11.30 that will definitely break all existing plugins that are modifying shaders. This blog post will cover the upcoming changes and hopefully convince everyone that the shader system is in flux and not to be relied upon as a basis for add-ons. Read More
This beta brings in many new bug fixes and heavily requested new features! As with any beta, be aware that this could break your project SO MAKE BACKUPS! We don’t think there are any drastic changes to the data model, but, better safe than sorry.
Bug Fixes
- #355 – A small UI fix relating to too many manipulator fields being shown
- #360 – A bug fix for Drag Rotate manipulators giving false negatives
- #353, #363, and #260 – All relate to warning people and correct what was allowed with NORMAL_METALNESS and BLEND_GLASS. Previously
Blend Glass was in the same drop down menu as Alpha Blend, Alpha Cutoff, and Alpha Shadow. Now it is a checkbox allowing you to correctly specify a Blend Mode and apply Blend Glass to it. Existing materials with Blend Glass will see this new checkbox automatically checked. Blend Mode will be set to Alpha Blend or, if your plane is old enough to have been worked on during X-Plane 10, it will be set to whatever it was back then.
See the internal text block “Updater Log” for a list of what got updated, including this. You may see, for example:
INFO: Set material "Material_SHADOW_BLEND_GLASS"'s Blend Glass property to true and its Blend Mode to Shadow
- #366 – An Optimization! Useless transitions in the OBJ were being written, now they’re not. Custom Properties still work, there won’t be any visual changes to your OBJ. We haven’t done any profiling but it might have decreased OBJ loading time by a small amount too.
Features
Command Search Window
Thanks to #361, just like the Datarefs.txt Search Window, we now have the same capabilities for searching Commands.txt (for manipulators). We are shipping with X-Plane’s latest Commands.txt file, but of course you can replace it with your own (as long as you keep the name the same). One day we hope to make it much more flexible.
Particle Emitters (not very useful to most yet, I know)
Thanks to #358, some people who have access to X-Plane’s cutting edge particle code can use XPlane2Blender to specify particle emitters. Don’t worry, we’re all working as hard as we can to get these into the hands of others. Fortunately, XPlane2Blender users can hit the ground running the minute it drops!
Build Scripts And Test Runners
- #302 and #307 – Are you a professional XPlane2Blender maintainer and developer (if so we should probably talk!) Then you need a better build script, and a test script to match! Introducing
mkbuild.py, the build script for the modern developer! It creates, it tests, it renames without messy mistake prone human intervention! To top that off, how about a testing script that doesn’t give false positives!
Two notes on stuff we released today:
X-Plane 11.26r1 is now in public beta – click “get betas” to get it. It’s just a translation update except one bug fix: we think the weird errors about missing taxiways mid-flight should be fixed. This bug was specific to users who loaded additional nav data into the sim, but if you are one of those users this will hopefully help.
WorldEditor 1.7.1r2 is now officially final. WED 1.7.1 supports all of the new airport line types from X-Plane, and also has a slew of new editing options for working with vectors.
Posted in News
by
Ben Supnik |
I’ve gotten a handful of emails from third-party devs recently asking the question:
I have a bunch of XPWidget-based windows. When will I be able to use them with fancy new features like UI scaling, pop-out support, VR support, etc.?
Happily, the answer is: now!
I really buried the lede on this one, but back in X-Plane 11.20, as part of adding plugin support for VR windows, we added a new “mode” for XPWidget-based plugins. It all starts with a call to opt-in to the “modern” window APIs like this:
XPLMEnableFeature("XPLM_USE_NATIVE_WIDGET_WINDOWS", 1);
From this point forward, all widget windows you create will be backed by a modern XPLM window, and can therefore be used with all the new XPLMDisplay APIs. All you have to do from there is call XPGetWidgetUnderlyingWindow() get the XPLMWindowID of your window to pass to those APIs.
A quick correction – the X-Plane Live session will actually be today, Tuesday at 4 pm (20:00 UTC) – I apologize for the total confusion and chaos on this one. We have your questions from the developer blog and social media, and we’ll try to take live questions as best we can.
EDIT: T-minus 30 minutes to live stream! We’ll be live here on YouTube.
EDIT 2: If you missed the live stream, you can watch the recording: Part 1 and Part 2 (split due to technical difficulties).
As Tyler previously posted, we’re doing another X-Plane Live video stream this Wednesday – this one a bit earlier for Europe.
A number of commenters pointed out that the Q&A has been a bit of a free-for-all in the past live-streams. It’s hard for us to pick up all of the questions, things get missed, etc.
So this time, we’re going to do a mix of live questions and questions submitted ahead of time. If you have something you want to bring up, please post in the comments section for this post. You can also ask questions via Facebook or Twitter – Thompson will post start a feedback thread on FB tomorrow.
Please only use this blog post for questions for the live session next week.
We are almost certainly not going to be able to answer everything that gets asked, and there will probably be questions where the answer is more or less “we’re working on stuff but it’s rully rully secret right now”. But we will read everything that gets asked here and do our best to make sure big things don’t get lost.
Posted in News
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Ben Supnik |
I meant to post this weeks ago, and basically just lost track of it, so thanks for the reminders in the comment sections. Here is a PDF export of our slide deck from FSExpo.
Flight Sim Expo 2018 Slide Deck
There is professionally shot video of the event, but it wasn’t shot by us, and I’m afraid I have no idea when it will be posted. We’re looking into using our own cameras next year so that we can ensure a video post on a more timely basis.
Edit: the X-Plane live session is actually on the 14th – today, Tuesday.
At the request of our European friends, the next round of X-Plane live Q&A will take place on August 15th—excuse me, 15 August! August 14—at 20:00 UTC (translate that to your time zone). Previous Q&A sessions have been scheduled at times that were convenient primarily for Americans, but why should they get to have all the fun?!
In case you missed the first and second rounds of this, this is a streaming broadcast (via YouTube) featuring:
- Austin Meyer, owner & creator of X-Plane
- Ben Supnik, desktop product manager
- Chris Serio, mobile product manager
- Alex Unruh, art director
- …and anyone else we happen to drum up. 🙂
Dear Europeans, the fate of the livestream is in your hands! 😀
Posted in News
by
Tyler Young |
