X-Plane 10.20 rc2 is out – just a few crash fixes and the final code to support Lua-based add-ons.
If you make a third party add-on, please: go try your add-on with 10.20 rc2 now!
If we don’t find any new bug reports, 10.20 will go final next weekend.
Edit: the Kingair is, weirdly, missing a small panel of its fuselage in the right rear corner. Tom has already edited the file and I’ll post it shortly. I’m going to let the RC sit for a day or two to see if anything else washes up.
Here’s a rough road-map for getting X-Plane 10.20 and friends out the door:
- X-Plane 10.20: if all goes well, release candidate 2 will be posted overnight and you’ll get a crack at it this weekend. RC2 fixes a few crash bugs and sets up Lua memory allocation the way we want it to be for 64-bits going forward. (I also plan to post the rest of development materials for Lua plugins tonight.)
- X-Plane 10.21: we are planning a 10.21 bug fix release. It will include bug fixes that we have already coded but didn’t want to put into 10.20 late in the game. It will also include new apt and nav data from Robin once he gets the next release done, and possibly more autogen. (If 10.21 goes out before the next autogen drop, we’ll do a 10.22 for autogen.) We’re not looking to do anything major or disruptive in 10.21.
- WorldEditor 1.2: WorldEditor finally has some (desperately needed) time on the road map; this should allow me to close out the major bugs in 1.2 and get it posted. This is a high priority for us; we’ve done most of the work for the new airport system, but it doesn’t do anyone any good until WED 1.2 goes final. (Yes, you are reading correctly, WED 1.2 is earlier in the road map than an X-Plane release.)
- X-Plane 10.30: we don’t know when this will be or what will be in it with any kind of certainty, but there are some areas we’re looking at, like fog and visibility (where we have a mix of bugs and feature requests that might go well together). I think that even for 10.30 we’ll be in “fix what we already have” mode, not “add more stuff” mode; we want to make X-Plane 10 as stable, solid and fast as possible.
One of the goals of this roadmap is to make sure that 10.20 itself is a stable 64-bit release that authors can target and users can run. One reason why late bug fixes are going into 10.21 is to avoid delay in getting a solid, ‘final’ 64-bit release to everyone. (We also expect that at least one major bug that was not reported during the long 10.20 beta will pop up as soon as we hit “final”, hence the expectation of 10.21.)
Please do not turn the comments section into a guessing game about 10.30; we don’t have a precise list of what goes into it, and if we did I wouldn’t post it anyway, because it’s likely to change over time as we get new data.
I have some specific comments on airports and ATC, but that’ll be another post.
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Ben Supnik |
A quick follow-up on yesterday’s post regarding LuaJIT memory failures on Windows:
We will be making a change to how plugins interact with LuaJIT and X-Plane for 10.20 rc2. If you have an add-on that uses a LuaJIT-based plugin (SASL, Gizmo, or FlyLua) you must get new 64-bit binaries for your add-on! If you do not get new binaries, it will only be a matter of time before your 64-bit add-on stops working.
This change is unavoidable – it either has to happen now (in RC, when only beta testers have X-Plane 10.20) or later (when we’ve shipped the product and everyone is happily flying). I think now is better — I would rather not have to do this at all, but the memory problems are not going away.
I am already in direct contact with the plugin developers who use LuaJIT to work with them on the needed changes.
With this in mind, I am hoping to cut RC2 later this week.
A quick status update on X-Plane 10.20:
- The Portuguese language bug in the installer is fixed – thanks to all of the users who helped test the new installer.
- X-Plane 10.20 rc1 has two bugs that we have fixes for: a crash when opening radio controlled planes and a crash on 64-bit Mac under heavy load with Lua-based plugins. We have fixes for both of those; the second has been privately tested for about a week.
- We have one more new bug report that I am investigating: memory failures with Lua-based plugins and Windows. This last bug (if it needs fixing) is serious and will kill our release schedule. If we don’t need to fix it, we’ll get an RC2 out shortly. I hope to have a verdict on the bug by tomorrow.
There’s a bug in the latest installer/updater: if your machine’s default language is Portugese, it will crash. I will post new installers that fix this as soon as I get back home on Monday (maybe Tuesday if the snow storm is bad enough).
For now, the sim will run, even though the updater will not.
Posted in News
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Ben Supnik |
10.20 release candidate is out now; see the release notes for a list of changes. There are two sets of bugs that we didn’t get to:
- Some users on Windows are having sound problems; I will write more about this shortly in another post; we’ll fix this as soon as we can.
- I have a set of bug reports relating to the airplane exterior lighting; I hope to get those fixed in a 10.21 build (as well as whatever one bug gets reported the day after 10.20 goes final).
Plugin authors: if your plugin has a problem with 10.20, you should have reported it weeks ago. The 2.1.2 SDK is done, 10.20 is a release candidate, so the 64-bit SDK is ready for you and has been for a while now.
We will continue to slip additional airplane improvements and autogen into updates as we get them from our art team.
ppjoy users on Windows have been experiencing a crash on startup; this was a bug in X-Plane 10.10/10.11, induced by particular virtual HID devices that only ppjoy could make. I found the problem and it will be fixed in 10.20.
In the meantime, if you need to use ppjoy and want to work around the problem, set your hat switches to discrete directions, not analog. (X-Plane can’t use an analog hatswitch anyway; most people have this because it is a ppjoy default.)
As a side rant to ppjoy users: I was a bit horrified with the process of installing ppjoy. ppjoy is an unsigned driver so I had to turn off driver signing in Windows. ppjoy is also, as far as I can tell, not hosted anywhere official. So I had to install an unsigned driver off of a file locker onto my Windows machine with the safeties off.
To be clear, I do not think that this is the author’s fault. He is making freeware, and the only thing that would remedy these problems is money. I do not and cannot expect him to give up not only his time (to code) but also pay to solve the distribution problems of official hosting and buying a signing certificate.
Still, the process of taking off all of the safeties to put random third party binary software on my Windows box was unnerving and not something I would ever do as an end-user.
As far as I know, the ppjoy crash and the PS3 controller crash are the only two known regression bugs* with joystick hardware, and they’ll both be fixed in 10.20. (Linux users, needing to edit udev rules to use hardware is not something that we consider to be a bug – see this post.)
When will 10.20 go final? Real soon now. Plugin authors, if you aren’t already running on 10.20 betas, you should have been doing that weeks ago.
* Regression bug means: it used to work in 10.05 and stopped working in 10.10 when we rewrote the joystick code.
It’s been a slow week – I’m sick, Alex was sick, Chris is sick, Chris’s wife is sick, my wife is sick, Chris’s daughter is sick, my son is sick…basically all of New England has bubonic plague. Skype meetings sound like a 19th century sanitarium for TB patients. But we are making progress on 10.20 betas. What’s still left?
- There are a handful of new 10.20 bugs that I still hope to resolve before we go final: sound problems, Intel GPU compatibility, etc.
- The installer needs to be made 64-bit aware.
- There are a handful of authoring bugs that were present in 10.11. I may push these off to a 10.21 bug fix patch, so that we can get 10.20 out the door sooner.
Users: please stop asking your favorite third party developers when they will release a 64-bit version of their add-ons. The devs are really stuck until we finalize 10.20. If they release an add-on before 10.20 goes final and then something comes up during beta, the dev is stuck fire-drilling a quick fix of the add-on.
Thanks to everyone who offered help WRT Intel GPUs. I have been in contact with the Intel driver team and we have a potential work-around for the HD4000 GPUs crashing. We do not yet have a fix or work-around for Gen-4 (GS45 chipset) GPUs crashing.
We also do not have a work-around for black sky with Intel HD GPUs and HDR mode, but honestly if you have an Intel GPU, I recommend keeping HDR off for frame-rate reasons. (I only have the HD3000 though – it’s possible that the GPUs on the new Ivy Bridge chipsets are faster. We’ll know once the shader-compiler issue is fixed.)
EDIT: Let me be more clear: we do not need any more volunteers! Thank you to everyone who helped. If you have this configuration, please just check the release notes in the next beta and test when the bugs are reported fixed.
If you are a Windows 7 X-Plane user with:
- An Ivy Bridge Intel CPU (in other words, one of those really nice shiny new ones)
- In a desktop machine (so that you can remove your GPU) and
You have an appetite for misery- You can spend an hour or two running test builds over the next day or so
Please email me (ben at x-plane dot com). I need to gather diagnostics on problems with the Intel HD4000 motherboard graphics, but I only have the previous-gen chipset.
This series of exchanges happens to me way too often:
User: X-Plane crashes when I change the flap setting.
Me: Which airplane does this happen on.
User: Any airplane.
Me: (Tries one of the default airplanes. Crash does not happen.) I could not reproduce this!
This has happened to me over and over again. Invariably, when told that a bug is reproducible with “any” materials, it turns out that the bug requires something specific, like a particular airplane or scenery pack.
Bugs that occur with any materials are far less common than bugs that happen to particular airplanes or scenery because bugs that happen all of the time are more frequent and easier to spot and fix.
If we ask you which airplane or scenery pack a bug happened on, or ask you for reproduction materials, it means that either:
- We already tried the bug on our own airplane or scenery pack and it didn’t happen or:
- We think it’s very likely that the bug is specific to something in the airplane, based on how the code works or
- We haven’t gotten any other reports of the bug, making it unlikely that it happens for all airplanes.
Now here’s the thing: if you have seen a bug, you saw it with a particular airplane or scenery pack. When you report the bug, just tell us which materials you used!
(One exception: if you’re using a custom airplane, try one of the defaults first – that’ll be the first thing we ask you anyway.)
I’ll end this rant with a philosophical thought: you shouldn’t report a bug as happening with any airplane unless you have tried it with all airplanes.
