It looks like the next cut of 10.30 will be a release candidate. I am not sure when we’ll release it, but I am hoping for this weekend.
If you installed 10.30b8 on a full beta, and thus downloaded 500 MB of DSF recuts, I’m afraid to say you’ll end up re-downloading them again for the RC. A user reported bad edge matching between the recuts and the original tiles for one airport. The underlying bug is one that could affect any seam between a recut and an original tile, so to be safe I’m recutting the entire recut set with the fixed code. So…I apologize for the bandwidth hit, but I think better safe and sorry here.
If you do find a last minute bug that you have not reported, please be sure to:
Report it on the bug reporter. If you haven’t used that page, we don’t know about it. Blog comments do not count, forum posts do not count, and random emails to people with x-plane.com email addresses do not count! Don’t send a bug to a place where it will be lost this late in the game!*
Please make sure the bug is complete, with detailed instructions to reproduce it step by step and a way to get the reproduction materials necessary. This close to RC, we no longer have time to spend a few days going up and back to understand the bug and then realize we don’t even have the payware ACF we need!
There are two features that will ship whenever they ship, e.g. in 1030 if they’re ready, or we’ll cut a 10.31 in a week or two if we have to:
Oculus Rift support. There is a new SDK for the Rift, and it’s not backward compatible with the old one, so Philipp has some coding to do there. I think we’re going to enable the Rift as soon as it’s done, but given how few sets are already sold (since they’re just low-res developer previews right now) we’re not going to halt 1030; we’ll cut a quick bug fix release if we need to.
Cylindrical Projection. Austin reworked cylindrical projection for pro users for 1030; if we find we need to get a few more refinements into the warping code, that may go into a bug fix release too.
My goal is an RC by the weekend, but that’s more of an aspiration than a promise.
* If you like a bug and don’t want it fixed, perhaps emailing me directly or posting it on the forum is the best thing you can do!
X-Plane 10.30 beta 8 is now (after 27 hours of syncing!) live – more bug fixes listed here.
Aircraft, scenery and plugin authors: this may be the last beta; if things go well we’ll cut an RC next week. If you have been ignoring 1030, go get beta 8 immediately! If you have been ignoring your users reports of problems with 1030, please start investigating.
If there is something in your add-on that doesn’t work with 1030, we don’t know about it and we can’t fix what we don’t know about. Please get this beta and make sure your add-ons work as expected!
X-Plane 10.30 beta 8 is mirroring to our servers now; this beta contains a pile of recut DSFs, fixing some of the worst DSF bugs. I will post a complete list of recut DSFs in the release notes; what follows are just a few hilights from really prominent DSFs.
Terrain recut to match the complete airport.
The truckee River is back, connecting Pyramid Lake and Lake Tahoe
The Tennessee River is back.
The lakes near Edwards AFB are now Salt Flats. One is still wet – it wasn’t fixed in OSM when we pulled data.
Terrain recut to support new runway in Tokyo.
The Ottowa River is back, eh?
Botany Bay is now…a bay.
Terrain recut around new runway development.
Beaches underneath the Manhattan bridges fixed.
Lake Hood restored.
The mountains are fixed – the originals were affected by a bad DEM.
Terrain recut to reflect new airport area as they expand KORD.
Terrain recut with airport included. This airport is still a bit wild, but have you seen the real airfield?!?!
I’m not sure how long the mirror will take to finish; I’m hoping we’ll go live with the beta tonight or tomorrow.
The X-Plane updater will download scenery updates if (and only if) you have the base scenery installed. So if you have the entire world installed, you’ll get the entire set of updates (the DSFs themselves are about 500 MB); if you only have the US, for example, you’ll get some tiles but not others, and if you just have a demo, you’ll just a core file update.
If you install scenery later, simply run the updater again (the install-scenery function gives you a chance to run an update at the end of DVD scenery install) to get any fixed DSFs you might not have gotten at the time.
(Alpilotx had a good suggestion for the installer that I’d like to do in the future: an option to skip scenery updates. This would let users get a sim update immediately, and then fetch the scenery later if bandwidth is tight.)
X-Plane 10.30 beta 7 (finally) went live this morning.* More bug fixes made it in, and the bug in the airport library that was stopping so many scenery packs from loading is now fixed.
* The master server was busy doing a backup and thus took forever to push out the beta to the download sites – I actually cut the beta Sunday night. I ended up pausing the backup temporarily but not until we’d lost a day.
X-Plane 10.30 beta 6 is out; as with the entire 10.30 beta 6 run, complete release notes are here. The release notes are meant to be a complete reference; what follows is a few of the major things you might notice in beta 6 (if you’ve managed to update).
Frame Rate
Beta 6 fixes a major performance problem from the X-Plane 10 betas. Beta 6 also sets the cloud graphic settings to match 10.25, so at this point 10.30 should be as fast or faster than 10.25 in all cases.
Airports
We used the X-Plane Airport Gateway to consolidate over 750 airports that users sent to Robin since X-Plane 10.25. These updates include over 300 new airports and hundreds of updates. You’ll get these lego-brick airports automatically with the update.
I’ll post more about the gateway in a future post, but I believe that at this point WED 1.3 and the gateway are ready to go into beta shortly.
Please do not send any more airport updates to Robin; the gateway will go into beta soon, and we’d like to use it to collect all future changes. (You can only imagine how much work it was for Robin to gather up 750 airports by hand! We imported them into the gateway ourselves to test the gateway and get control of the process.)
GPS In the Default Aircraft
With beta 6 we now have the new GPS in the C172, the Kingair, and the Baron; all have the full res GPS in the 3-d cockpit, and the Kingair even gives you dual GPSs.
Still More On the Todo List
There’s still more bugs to fix. On the top of my list is fixing bugs with the cloud visuals, and with their base height (which sometimes doesn’t match what you set in the weather settings). I am also working on getting a few majorly borked DSFs fixed in the next beta (Sydney, Rio, etc.). I’m hoping for another beta by Tuesday, which will also fix the auto update bug.
Where to File Bugs
I say something about filing bugs using the bug report form in every post, and yet readers try to post bugs on the blog. Since writing “don’t do that” in each post clearly doesn’t work, I’m going to try it using the Swedish Chef translator.
Fur zee lufe-a ooff ell thet is mooppet, pleese-a du nut pust boog repurts tu thees blug. Pleese-a use-a zee boog repurt furm – a furm dedeeceted tu nutheeng boot…boog repurts. Iff yuoo pust a boog repurt tu zee blug, I veell delete-a it. Bork Bork Bork!
So…you have been warned – keep posting bug reports to the blog comments and things will only get sillier.
I just discovered that apparently automatic update is broken in X-Plane 10.30 beta 5.* If you are participating in the X-Plane 1030 beta program, then when you receive an automatic notification of a newer beta, then installing the beta will fail with an error number 2 or 3 (depending on what OS you are on).
Update: many users are not affected by this problem. The reason: older auto-updates leave the installer in the right place, so this bug only hits you if you haven’t done a recent, functional auto-update, e.g. from beta 1 to beta 2. Since my X-System folder was relatively clean (due to my recent C drive face-plant) this bug did hit me.
If you see this bug, here is how you can work around this.
Launch X-Plane. When X-Plane tells you there is a new beta, click “Get Beta”.
When the installer downloads, click “Update”.
When you hit the error message, click “ok”.
When X-Plane finishes launching, quit.
Go to your Output/preferences folder and locate the installer. It will have a name “X-Plane 10 Installer.app” on Mac, “X-Plane 10 Installer Windows.exe” on Windows, and “X-Plane 10 Installer Linux” on Linux.
Move the installer out of Output/preferences directly into your X-Plane folder, so that it is next to the X-Plane application.
Re-launch X-Plane. When X-Plane tells you there is a new beta, click “Get Beta”.
At this point, auto-update will work normally.
A few notes on beta 6 coming shortly…
* There are two things that are particularly annoying about this kind of bug: first, you can’t just get an auto-update to get the bug fix, because auto-update itself is broken, and second, because we didn’t find out that auto-update was broken until shipping beta 6, the bug is still in beta 6, so it’ll take another update to fix it. However, you will only need to use this ‘fix-it’ procedure once.
This week I received my new PC, set it up, and was able to actually look at 10.30 performance problems with AMD hardware on the Catalyst 13-9 drivers. With the actual “problematic” configuration (and a hard drive that wasn’t barfing up sectors like an infant with reflux) it only took about 15 minutes to find the actual problem.
Which was…face palm…a GL drawing code path that I had disabled during private testing (due to low performance) was actually not disabled at all due to a lack of parenthesis. So I’m an idiot.
What’s interesting is the relative effects of this code path on multiple platforms.
On OS X, this code path runs at pretty much full speed, so having it in the beta didn’t reveal any actual problems. Hence while my PC was dead, my few attempts to reproduce the reported behavior on my Mac totally failed.
The code path is slower on both Nvidia 331.88 drivers and AMD 14-4 drivers. But…1030’s basic performance is faster than 10.25, so the two canceled out, yielding somewhat reasonable looking fps tests. That’s why when I asked Philipp to try to reproduce things on an NVidia windows box, he told me things didn’t look broken.
On the AMD 13-9 drivers, the code path is absolute death. I believe that this is where the majority of bug reports were coming from.
The actual total performance win from 10.25 to 10.30 appears to be quite a bit bigger on NVidia hardware than AMD hardware. For some reason, one of the modernization changes in 1030 is more important for NV than AMD. I don’t know what the specific changes that are helping are – the goal of 1030 is to simply use the best code paths we can find.
Here’s an excerpt from my performance testing numbers – this is with fps test 3 with the 747 replay. The hardware for the test is a GeForce 680 GTX and a Radeon HD 7970. Expect better fps with the NV card – it’s a generation newer than the AMD card. Numbers are framerate, probably good +/- 1 fps.
So you can see here that on better functioning drivers (331.88, 14-4) even with the performance problems of 10.30b5 the net change in framerate from 10.25 was positive. But once I remove the stupid code path, things get a lot better.
That 11 fps in 10.30b5 with 13-9 is the bad code path behaving badly. That will be fixed in the next beta.
I am hoping that this code path is also responsible for the remaining “low fps in local map” reports, but I haven’t confirmed that yet.
Your Mileage Will Vary
One of the problems with performance testing is that X-Plane’s content varies by add-ons, so how much the problems with 10.30b5 affect you will have a lot to do with which aircraft you fly. This is why some users already thought 10.30 was a win over 10.25 performance wise, and others thought the build was totally unusable. How much speedup you get will depend on the kind of content you use.
AMD: What Drivers Should I Use
The 14-4 drivers are slightly slower than the 13-9 drivers for either shipping X-Plane 10.25 or 10.30b6 (not yet released). I believe this represents a fundamental (small) loss of performance with the newer drivers. The loss is actually smaller than it looks if you view the raw fps numbers with fractions, and the precision for the tests isn’t better than 1 fps.
If you can run the 14-4 drivers you should – they fix a bug in sRGB blending with HDR that makes the 13-9 drivers look rather weird with HDR mode.
If you are stuck on the 13-9 drivers because you have old hardware (the oldest GPU the new drivers support is the HD 6000 series – so if you have the HD 5870 or older you need the older drivers) at least 10.30b6 will improve performance.
Clouds Are Their Own Performance Problem
The other big performance problem that I am aware of besides this one is that clouds use a lot more fill rate than they used to. This is my next bug to try to fix – it is totally separate from this one, and affects all platforms. My goal is to get the clouds to use the same fill rate as they did in 10.25. That work isn’t done yet, but at least now I have hardware to work on.
Austin fixed a bunch of METAR parsing bugs. As before, please include the METAR and airport any time there is a METAR parsing issue. There were a few common cases that were broken in beta 3 that caused most of the bug reports, so we should be in better shape now.
Philipp fixed a pile of bugs.
I did not. My C drive died again, and I am ordering a new PC now. So unfortunately I can’t look at AMD or Windows performance bugs until I get new hardware.
This build contains a rework of our cylindrical projection code – this is a feature that our Pro key enables; we’ve been working with customers for a while now to design the new system. We’ll be working out the kinks over the rest of beta.
One last note on METARs: when X-Plane finds a METAR with “unlimited” visibility (e.g. 9999, CAVOK, etc.) it will look at the temperature-dewpoint spread to determine the humidity, and then pick a visibility distance that is lower when humid and higher when dry. So under truly dry conditions you should get a less hazy view, while visibility will continue to be constrained on humid days.
Update: the 32-bit Mac version of beta 4 won’t run due to a build configuration problem. We’re working on it now, but I’m guessing it will be 36 hours before we get beta 5 posted. 🙁
Beta 3 just went live. Release notes are still here – the document grows! When the beta is done I’m going to have it printed and use it as a weapon to squash house flies. Bug reporter is still here. Bug reporter is still not the comments section in this post.*
The short summary is: Philipp crushed a huge pile of GPS bugs, and I crushed none of the cloud-related bugs. So please read the bug fix list carefully before you report. We try to make sure there’s a bug list bullet for every single fix in the beta, so that you don’t have to waste your time (or ours!) re-reporting a bug that isn’t fixed. If you reported (hypothetically 🙂 that cloud performance makes you weep (and not in a good way), there’s no need to re-report, I haven’t gotten to it yet.
If you have not tested your payware add-on with X-Plane 1030, please do so ASAP! We do not have a pile of known issues with third party drawing, so if you see something, say something. (We have a number of possible bugs that aren’t reproducible yet – so your bug report might be what lets us get to the bottom of things efficiently. Only you can prevent forest fires!)
* This post comes with an extra helping of snarkiness…Chris and I made the really poor decision to try to debug part of the X-Plane airport gateway deployment from 11:30 PM to 3:30 AM land night. Since we both have small children who didn’t get the memo and woke up at their normal time, I am, at this point, pretty much unaware of what I am typing.
