X-Plane 11.11 is now final – you’ll be notified to auto-update. 11.11 is a small bug fix release that fixes a few key issues that we didn’t find out about in time to get into 11.10. Here’s the release notes.
Our VR private beta program is underway – we’ve been cutting VR private betas in parallel to 11.11 testing; I’ll post more on VR over the next few days.
X-Plane 11.11 is available for testing – to get it, run the X-Plane 11 installer, pick “Update X-Plane” and make sure “Get Betas” is checked. Two big fixes:
Release notes are here.
UPDATE: After receiving around 70 requests, we are closing applications for private beta testing at this time.
X-Plane’s native VR is nearly ready for beta. Possibly as soon as next week, we will be moving into private beta testing of VR-capable builds. We are looking for a small number of volunteers to participate in the initial private beta.
X-Plane 11.10 went final Thursday night – you’ll be notified to update. Jennifer has a good write-up of the high level features here, or you can read the release notes.
11.10 was a big patch for us – new airports, new autogen, new lego bricks, the G1000, joystick profiles, London landmarks, and significant engine enhancements to both the physics and rendering engines.
We may do an 11.11 patch next week – we have a few bug fixes that didn’t make the RC. Jennifer gets a lot of bug reports over the weekend, so we’ll evaluate Monday.
The rendering engine work in 11.10 gets the sim “VR-ready”, and Chris has been working on the actual VR features of the app in parallel to the 11.10 release.
The next major patch of X-Plane will be 11.20; it will feature native VR support for the Oculus Rift and Vive on Windows, and the beta is coming very soon.
An author asked me how to make a sound cone in FMOD for X-Plane.
For example, our Cessna features recordings of the engines from four different mic positions (front, left, right, and back) – our engine sound event contains four sub-sound events, with sound cones modulating when the sound can be heard. Think of a 90 degree cone sticking out from the engine to the front, the right, etc. Only if the listener is in the sound cone can you hear it.
Here’s the trick: X-Plane provides two special parameters that give you the bearing of the listener relative to the event. From this you can create your attenuation shapes.
In X-Plane 11.10, annunciator sounds automatically play even if you are using FMOD. This is confusing, particularly compared to 11.05 – here’s what’s going on.
We have two categories of sounds that are not handled by FMOD as of 11.10:
We are planning to make this second set of sounds FMOD-accessible in the future, but to do so we need to create a system for “events” in X-Plane that is accessible to plugins and the authoring interfaces.
My current thinking is that an “event” system would let plugins subscribe to notifications of events, wire up sound events to sim events, and create new events via the plugin system. We may even be able to eventually play particle effects in response to events. The events would have path names (similar to commands and datarefs) for flexibility.
I had hoped to get to this in 11.10 but we just didn’t have time, so this will have to wait for a future patch. When we do have sound events we’ll have a way to indicate in an FMOD .snd file that (1) you want to wire up sound to particular sim events and (2) you don’t want the built-in sounds anymore.
Here’s the current set of sounds that are played even if FMOD is in use. If you don’t want them, include silent waves in your aircraft’s “sounds” folder.
alert/10ft.wav
alert/20ft.wav
alert/30ft.wav
alert/40ft.wav
alert/50ft.wav
alert/100ft.wav
alert/200ft.wav
alert/300ft.wav
alert/400ft.wav
alert/500ft.wav
alert/1000ft.wav
alert/altitude_alert.wav
alert/autopilot_disco.wav
alert/autopilot_fail.wav
alert/dash_OUTER.wav
alert/dot_MIDDLE.wav
alert/dash_MIDDLE.wav
alert/dot_INNER.wav
alert/dash_MORSE.wav
alert/dot_MORSE.wav
alert/gear_warn_1.wav
alert/gear_warn_2.wav
alert/mini.wav
We had a request for information on the popular airports, so here’s a small addendum to the usage data from a couple weeks ago. We don’t currently track whether the airport is a default, Gateway airport or an add on, but we do have it on our radar to track the most popular add ons in the future.
We’ve filtered out demo users again, and this information is for the entire life of X-Plane 11 (1 Nov 2016 to 21 Nov 2017) since we’ve never published airport data before. I’ve only pulled the top 50 airports for this list, but we track 11,281 locations. Read More
I hate finding out about these kinds of bugs late in the beta. But this one was pretty big.
X-Plane uses a “metalness” material model. Metalness is a fairly standard material model that recycles the albedo of your material to implement both dialectrics (non-metals) and metals. It works like this:
In other words, since metals don’t have a diffuse component, we recycle the albedo to save texture space.
The bug in 11.05 is that for a pure metal, the albedo was tinting ambient light but not the sun itself. A third party developer sent me a test model that showed the problem – here’s the before and after.
That weird set of colors on the top of the helicopter body is due to the white sunlight being added to the red body. The red aircraft body is lit by ambient light reflected directly off of the environment. The runway stripes are not visible because the metal is about 30% rough, diffusing the reflection.
(One of the confusing things about PBR models if you are not used to them is that the environment itself can cast both diffuse light and specular reflections off of a material, and if the material is rough, it can be hard to tell them apart. Diffuse light is always widely diffused, no matter how glossy the surface.)
Alex and I took a look at some of our legacy aircraft and found that fixing the lighting didn’t make too much of a difference for metals that are not tinted.
Since our aircraft don’t have any “tinted” metal there isn’t much change. Note that in real life heavily tinted metals aren’t common. The cases you might have are:
As I wrote this up I realized that the spot lights are still wrong in beta 8 – they’ll be fixed for RC1 unless people really need the old model, in which case we’ll have to put some versioning in. My guess though is that anyone doing composite paint realized it was impossible in 11.05 and hasn’t shipped anything like that yet.
In these comparisons we are under an airport light viewing various materials. In the multi-color case the bottom row of materials are various “metals” with light tinting to simulate copper, iron, gold, etc.
In the second set of cases (all red) we have a 2-d grid: metal on the bottom, dialectric on top and rough on the left and glossy on the irght. Note that the reflection of the overhead light is reddish for the metals and white for the plastics in 11.10 (correct) but all white in 11.05 (incorrect).
XPlane2Blender v3.4.0-rc.1
We made it people!
Change log
This release encompasses all of the beta. You can read through the beta notes for more details, but, here are the highlights:
New Features
Important bugs
We could not have gotten this far without the incredible support of our beta testers, new authors, bug reporters, and all the wonderful artists who give us the inspiration and energy to make this product better! It has been an incredible journey diving into this facet of the community and I look forward to even more releases, including VR manipulators, full WYSIWYG lights, and more!
Thank you!