Now that we have announced X-Plane 11, I can finally post goofy screenshots and videos from v11 development. Sometimes a bug makes delightfully goofy results, and Austin liked this one so much he wanted me to share it.
I am working on 3-d water for X-Plane 11 – we have a working prototype, but I am not sure if this will make the shipping 11.0 product; it still has a lot of bugs and rough edges.
Traditionally in X-Plane if you don’t have terrain installed, you just get water. This isn’t really an intentional design decision; we just defined “no DSF” as “all water” so that we could avoid shipping DSFs for the huge chunk of the Earth’s surface that is covered with ocean.
But we always have airport data, so in X-Plane you would get an airport floating in the middle of the water! While this was completely goofy and is a huge source of tech support calls (which is why X-Plane 10.50 now offers to install scenery whenever you hit this case) you could, if you really wanted to, land at this water-world airport.
Until now. Now that the water is 3-d, the peaks of the waves actually cover the 3-d buildings and make the entire airport as usable as…well, as it really would be if built in the middle of the ocean.
(This is about the point in the post where I would insert a snarky climate change comment, but I’ll let XKCD do the talking.)
Scenery developers might wonder: why is it that when the water level falls the runway lights and signs are revealed – but where is the pavement? The answer is in the comments.
X-Plane 10.51 has now been officially released; you’ll be prompted to auto-update. 10.51 fixes a few bugs in 10.50 and updates the global airports.
There is one bug we are still tracking: a number of professional customers have reported worse external-visual tracking with 10.51 than with 10.45. If you see this on your setup, please file a bug; we are working with these pro customers individually to test possible fixes.
(We can’t easily reproduce this bug because the performance characteristics of multi-machine setups are very particular to the specific machines, rendering settings, and networking hardware involved.)
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Ben Supnik |
The second release candidate of X-Plane 10.51 is up – I’m hoping this will be our final X-Plane 10.51. build. If you are having problems with 10.50, please use the installer with “gea betas” to get 10.51, then report a bug if you still have problems.
WED 1.5.1 is now out – this is a quick bug fix patch to 1.5. Besides fixing a bug where the downloadable preview packs from the gateway were missing static aircraft info, there’s a nice usability enhancement:
When a polygon fails validation due to a zero length side (two adjacent nodes on top of each other) the validation command selects the second vertex in each pair. Just hit the delete key once and your polygon is fixed! (Thanks to Michael for submitting the patch to this.)
We already have some working WED code to support X-Plane 11’s dynamic ground vehicles; Ted is working on it and we’ll get it moved to the public servers at some point. I am aiming to have WED in public beta condition by the time X-Plane 11 ships.
Austin and I are back from Cosford (thanks to Scott, Richard and the JustFlight team for hosting us!) , and the cat is out of the bag: X-Plane 11 is coming this year. Austin and I gave a presentation on some of what’s coming in v11, and it’s up on Youtube.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPyydyyu3zE
Because of the size of the auditorium, we actually gave this talk twice; I believe this video was taken from the first talk, but there may be video of the second floating around. The content is not quite the same; in particular the Q & A went in separate directions.
Over the next week or two I will post some useful information about v11 for third party developers.
In the meantime: please do not email me asking for early beta access. We will be doing a beta program, and like X-Plane 10, we will try to get third party developers some early access to X-Plane 11 so that we can collect compatibility information and they can get oriented on how to update their aircraft.
But for now, please wait. Please do not post comments asking to be in the beta program. Right now my in-box is flooded and we’re not quite ready to triage these requests.
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Ben Supnik |
WorldEditor 1.5 release candidate three is now the official WED build; you will need to use it to upload to the gateway, and you can now upload WED 1.5 projects to the gateway.
WorldEditor 1.5 supports the new static parking and ATC features of X-Plane 10.50, and adds a visual taxi sign editor. WED can be downloaded here and has full release notes with the app.
You can get X-Plane 10.51r1 by running the installer, picking update, and checking “get betas”. Here’s a full bug fix list.
10.51 brings in a bunch of airports from the gateway that were built with WED 1.4.1 during the 10.50 beta process. It also has a few key fixes:
- If your aircraft’s airfoils have goofy values, it’s an error but you can still fly the plane.
- External visuals should be smoother when rolling the plane.
- Various window positioning and mouse clicking bugs are fixed.
- No more “colocated points” errors for ATC routes ending at ramps.
- Turbulence reduced when using real weather.
WorldEditor 1.5 release candidate three is posted. Hopefully this one is a keeper. The show-stopping bug was: the error margin for near-but-not-connected taxi routes was too large, causing it to incorrectly flag parallel parking spots for aircraft. Two other minor bug fixes went in too.
If you find a bug in the release candidate, please report one ASAP on the X-Plane Scenery Gateway bug reporter.
I just posted WED 1.5 release candidate 2. If you grabbed RC1 and hit the crash on export on Windows, please grab this ASAP and file a bug if your crash is not fixed. Of the four or five crash reports I received, two contained reproduction materials and both were the same bug – a crash when exporting a ramp position with no airliners, Windows only. This is now fixed.
WorldEditor 1.5 release candidate 1 just went up today. Please try it soon; we’re going to make this the official version for uploading to the gateway if no one finds any problems. This build fixes the last known validation bugs and has a bunch of improvements in the validation text messages; Jennifer, Ted and Julian did a complete review of the error messages (there are over 75!).
X-Plane 10.51 release candidate 1 should go up Monday or Tuesday; it has new airports and a few hot fixes for problems we found after shipping.
If you are the author of payware that won’t open due to an airfoil self-check failure, this is just a warning in 10.51, so your users won’t be frozen out.
But you should also fix the problem, as the self check fails only if you enter physically impossible values for the airfoil.
Update: a number of users have reported crashes on export in the release candidate. If you see a WED crash on export or validate:
- Please include a link to the scenery pack causing the crash.
- If you are on Windows and can provide a link to a minidump, that would be really useful. (You’ll have to do a link – even zipped, the minidump files are huge.)
- If you see a crash on a Mac, include the full text of the Apple crash report.
- If your pack requires tons of libraries, please indicate what libraries are needed.
Update 2: WED 1.5 release candidate 2 is out and fixes this crash, which is a crash on validate of a ramp start with no airlines, Windows only.
