This RC has two simple fixes that are non-breaking and totally awesome.
- #347: Optimization that brings export time down by a third to a half. The file size remains the side and nothing is needed to activate it. Using the “Optimize” checkbox was not optimized this time around.
- #350, #351: Two animation bugs that would cause strange offsets when using bones. You may or may not have experienced this. Again, there is nothing to do to activate this, it is part of every export.
If you run into problems, please file a bug. If you do not notice a decreased export time with large models, also please tell us. We’d love to benchmark this on more data.
X-Plane 11.20 is, of course, final! Like all good Klingon software, it was not so much released – rather it escaped captivity, leaving a trail of blood in the path of all whom opposed it.
I am aware of two plugin-related issues we are tracking:
- Some legacy plugins with widget UIs are missing buttons when the UI is at 150% or 200% scaling. We have a fix for this, but for now you can work around the problem by turning off UI scaling in the graphics settings tab.
- Some Mac plugins compiled against libstdc++ crash with the Steam version (but not the non-Steam version).
Philipp and I are still discussing what to do about this second thing, but if your plugin is in this category (so far we’ve seen it with HeadShake and X-Ivap), my suggestion is: compile and link against clang’s libc++ on OS X – it’s the native Mac C++ runtime and the one that’s going to work well in the long term.
We’ll release an 11.21 release candidate either late this week or early next week, once we collect the bug fixes that got away.
EDIT: HeadShake has been fixed by SimCoders!
Fourth Time’s a charm. RC4 is out and and fixes issues with the 747 autopilot. Hopefully this one is a keeper. Steam build coming Real Soon Now™.
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Ben Supnik |
It turns out that my teachers in college, a ton of engineering textbooks, and the internet in general all seem to understand what wings do. Also my airplane has wings, and those wings are designed to interact with the air as much as possible, so I can flight-test my airplane at any time (and I constantly do) to collect information about what the wings in said airplane do. And then I use the information from the several sources listed above to really dial in the flight dynamics in X-Plane. Without question, on my death-bed I will look back on my many flights flown while frantically scribbling down notes and flying the airplane at the same time fondly. This is a challenge that not enough people get to enjoy, and then turning that knowledge into a simulator that then turns into money for me… well, let’s just say I have very little to complain about. Read More
Third time’s charm? Maybe? RC3 fixes plugin issues we were seeing in RC2. Thanks to the plugin developers who tested our repaired XPLM DLLs yesterday. We’ll update Steam to RC3 soon if this build isn’t on fire.
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Ben Supnik |
X-Plane 11.20r2 has only one bug that we are trying to fix: a bug in the plugin SDK that can cause some plugins to crash when creating and destroying windows.
Tyler and I dug into this and found that the fix was a bit more intrusive than we wanted for this late in an RC.
So: if you are a plugin developer and you are working with the new SDK, either for VR compatibility, to use the new 3.x APIs, or just because you are updating the plugins, and you have time this weekend, please email me and I can send you our new fixed XPLM DLLs.
My hope is to get half a dozen plugin developers to bang on them over the weekend, so that when we cut 11.20r3, it really will be the release.
Edit: RC3 is live – thanks to everyone who helped!
X-Plane will be attending FlightSimExpo 2018 in Las Vegas, NV on June 8-10. Nearly the entire team will be there–they’re even letting me attend this event!
Members from the development team, such as Austin Meyer and Ben Supnik, will be presenting the latest news and behind-the scenes-information on our work on X-Plane on Saturday, June 9 at 10:15 am.
We’ll also have a booth open all weekend so you can stop by to say hello. Add-on developers should come by and pick our development team’s brains while we’re all in one place!
We received a last minute bug report that X-Plane 11.20r2 deletes scenery packs from scenery_pack.ini. This is true! It is also by design, not a bug, the same as X-Plane 10, and not particularly brilliant on my part.
scenery_packs.ini persists the order of your packs (putting newly discovered packs “in front” in alphabetical order upon discovery) and maintains enable-disable status. But it does not retain any other information. The file is totally rewritten on every run and the following otherwise useful stuff tends to get destroyed in the process.
- Comments and notes to yourself
- Whitespace and formatting
- Any scenery packs that can’t be found
Unfortunately this means that if you symlink to an external drive that is unmounted and run X-Plane, your scenery pack order gets lost. This definitely does suck.
In a future version, I can fix this. But we’re not going to mess with it now during RC because it’s totally not changed or broken compared to all past versions of X-Plane since we introduced the scenery_packs.ini file.
For now: you can lock the file as a hack-around to preserve your well-created order while your remote drive is unmounted – when you re-mount and restart, your order isn’t lost. But in this order, new packs aren’t persisted to the file, although they will be used.
If there’s things you want the scenery_packs.ini file to do, commenting on this post would be on-topic. One thing to consider: if we can’t drop missing packs, how do we know a pack was uninstalled? How does the file ever get cleaned?
X-Plane 11.20r2 is up – we’re just killing off the last show-stopping bugs – full notes here. Steam build should be available Real Soon Now™ – it’s already uploaded and just waiting to make we didn’t blow something up.
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Ben Supnik |
Before Ben left on his family trip (and he was very adamant that it was not a “vacation” because the kids were going along) we got an X-Plane 11.20r1 build ready for possible release this week. Tyler and I must feel lucky because we’ve gone ahead and pulled the trigger to make this build public now.
This means that we need you to test your add ons now–seriously we mean it–speak now or forever hold your peace. All our features and changes that are going in 11.20 are in*, and the only changes we will put in from here on out are any regression bugs you bring to our attention. Read More
