A few quick notes on the various betas floating around:
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X-Plane: with the 9.4x series we are trying to fix small one-off bugs and improve stability. The BK-117’s throttles will be fixed in the next beta, and we fixed a crash with a third party orthophoto scenery pack.
This goes for any beta, but: if you have an add-on that used to work on an older build (especially 940) and it does not work, please report this immediately! There are no intentional add-on compatibility breaks in this patch.
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WorldEditor: apparently developer preview 2 doesn’t contain the latest texture coordinate editor (TCE) code, so I will try to cut a preview 3 soon. The texture coordinate editor is a new small editor that lets you specify the texture placement on draped polygons. This facility lets you create custom markings. (The current TCE in preview 2 apparently doesn’t have snap to grid and a few other useful features.)
What’s holding us back from a real beta? The problem is that the DSF export of draped polygons cannot split bezier curved polygons (especially with texture coordinates) across the boundaries of DSF tiles. Since I don’t have an algorithm implementation for this yet, I’m not sure how soon I will be able to fix it. For now, don’t try to export a DSF polygon that spans DSF tiles.
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MeshTool 2: beta 4 seems to be a keeper. I hope to cut an RC some time in the next week. (You can see the results of MeshTool 2.0 in these FranceVFR preview pics.)
This is my 500th post. I put off posting it all week because I wanted to post something lofty and clever. But in the end, the great is the enemy of the good – if I wait until I have a really good post, it could be weeks before I have time to write a 6000 word treatise on the relationship between quantum physics, shaders, and the price of crude oil.
The decision to publish less now or more later always comes up in software release planning – once the resource budget for a project is fixed* the only choice is ship sooner with less features or later with more features.
With both X-Plane and WorldEditor we often choose “ship now with less” for a simple reason: we are going to ship with more later, but if we ship now with less as well, people get some benefit in the meantime. WED is a perfect example: the first version could only edit airports, and shipped almost 18 months ago. Had we waited until we had overlay editing and airports, we would have had a more impressive release, but authors would have had no editing at all for 18 months. Why force the people who want to edit airports to wait 18 months for overlay features?
(An assumption in this is that the cost of actually doing a release is fairly low. Obviously we don’t want to do a new release every single week!)
There is a contrary force that might argue against frequent releases: once we change a feature to make it better, users are surprised if we don’t make it perfect. Users assume that if we fix some bugs in a feature but not all bugs, that it’s because we didn’t know about the bugs we didn’t fix. (The truth is usually that we had limited resources.) This produces a very strange situation where users are sometimes happier with a product that is less featureful/more deficient/more buggy because a small improvement in real functionality introduces an expectation of a large improvement.
A second behavioral phenomenon amplifies this: in my experience users consider new bugs to be significantly “buggier” (for lack of a term) than bugs that have been around for a while. This is perfectly understandable: humans are very adaptable and we get used to a bug over time to the point where we may not consider it as “bad” as when we first saw it. Trade the old bug for a new one, and we have to become re-acclimated.
These two behaviors argue (particularly when bugs and limited functionality are involved) to make a small number of large changes that move an aspect of the program from one ‘stable’ configuration to the next.
* If you think that more resources can break this trade-off between features and a quick release date, I strongly recommend “The Mythical Man Month“. The short version: 9 women can’t have a baby in 1 month – if you want a quicker release you have to do less.
I’ve been very busy with X-Plane feature development…when the blog is quiet, usually something interesting is getting coded. (Actually this weekend, I’ve just been sick in bed, so…hrm…when the blog gets quiet, perhaps I am infected.)
Just a quick note: if you see any kind of spam or vandalism on the wikis, please let me know immediately. The wiki engine we use (mediaWiki) has some fairly advanced anti-attack capabilities, but they need to be brought in when a problem occurs. Over the last two weeks I’ve cleaned out repeated attacks on the SDK site and one attack on the main site, and it appears that the software installed now is working.
But if more attacks come in, the next step is filting, e.g. programming the wiki to automatically reject posts based on typical off-topic keywords like certain ED drugs, etc. So if you see a post like this, please let me know – I’ll kill the post and set up the anti-spam filter.
So…just how awesome is my main development machine? Not that awesome.
Periodically users ask me what my setup is. Usually the user wants to set up a really nice machine to run X-Plane at its best and figures “let’s find out what the guys who write X-Plane have.”
But … my main development machine is definitely not selected to be the best possible X-Plane machine. I put together a system to:
- Debug X-Plane productively.
- Test all aspects of X-Plane.
- Create the global scenery as fast as possible.
In practice this means a Mac Pro with 8 cores, 12 GB of RAM, a lot of hard drive, and not particularly fast CPUs. It’s a machine that can churn out 8 DSFs at once. There’s no need for me to keep upgrading the CPU type itself – it’s the 8 way parallelism that makes DSF creation fast. (To Apple’s credit, the IO in the machine is fast enough to keep all 8 cores busy!)
Being an Intel Mac, the machine is triple-bootable into Vista (someone in the company has to have it) and Ubuntu Linux.
Right now I have a Radeon 4870 in the machine and an 8800 on my shelf. I do recommend the 4870 to Mac users – it’s a very nice card. But for my purposes it has one annoying problem: it takes up the space for the second graphics card slot and both power connectors…I may go back to a lower powered card so I can have one NV and one ATI card in the machine at the same time – a great configuration for debugging. (I do not recommend that any user ever mix graphics card brands…”don’t try this at home”, etc.)
Maxing out X-Plane isn’t on the priority list. In particular, past these goals, the faster the machine, the less likely I am to notice a problem.
An example: during 930 development, for some period of time, we had accidentally set the code to allocate an extra 1 GB of RAM at startup. Oops! The embarrassing part: neither Austin and I noticed for weeks. Both of our machines have plenty of RAM, and OS X has a decent VM system, so we just ran, using a lot of memory.
Then one day I try to start X-Plane on my laptop and the whole machine nearly catches on fire. Sure enough…an extra 1 GB of RAM is being grabbed.
The moral of the story: I’d rather not have a machine that hides things from me, if it doesn’t affect productivity.
Palm announced 3-d gaming for the Palm Pre! Some big names there…Need for Speed, Monopoly, the Sims 3, X-Plane — hey!! Laminar Research?!?! Who let those hacks in!??
I have the original Palm Pre (not the newly announced Palm Pre Plus) and flight is quite smooth! Thanks to the Palm team for letting us in on the roll-out.
With a new year and CES upon us, it’s go time for pundits to predict the future of the technology industry. Lori considered the question of how technology might affect X-Plane and pronounced:
Pixel shaders will get shadier.
I think she is right. It is only a question of how long until they are so shady that they are basically pitch black. (At that point, I expect a significant boost in framerates!)
There is no need to use the 3-d panel if you only want 3-d cockpit.
That might be the most counter-intuitive statement in the entire universe. Let’s break it down and see what’s going on. Originally we had the 2-D panel. The 2-D panel was where you put your instruments for interior views. When 3-d cockpit support was added, the 2-D panel was used to create the panel texture – that is, the instruments texture for the 3-D cockpit.
Thiat worked for a while, but as handles became more complex, screens became larger, and as 3-D cockpits became a more complex, authors started to run into the system’s limitations. If the author wanted to create a huge panel, then the panel texture for the 3-D cockpit was huge. Furthermore, texture space for the instruments in the 3-D cockpit was wasted because the 2-D panel had to have windows on it.
With X-Plane and 9 we added the 3-D panel to fix these problems. The 3-D panel is a second panel whose sole purpose is to provide instruments as a texture for the 3-D cockpit. When you have a 2-D panel and a 3-D panel, the 2-D panel is used to draw the panel in 2-D viewing modes and 3-D panel is used only to create the panel texture for the 3-D cockpit. With this setup the 2-D panel can be huge, and the 3-D panel can be small and compact with no windows.
The 3-D panel solves a second problem as well. Often the overhead panel is drawn in perspective on the 2-D panel this perspective view is useless for texturing a true 3-D cockpit. With a 2-D panel and a 3-D panel, the author can draw the overhead in perspective for the 2-D panel, and orthographically for the 3-D panel.
Now here’s where things get complicated: if an airplane has no 3-D panel the 2-D panel is used for both the 2-D view and the 3-D cockpit. But some airplanes have only a 3-D cockpit. In this case, there is no reason to use the 3-D panel at all. You can simply use the 2-D panel for texturing the 3-D cockpit and not worry about the user seeing it; in a 3-D only plane the user will only see the panel as a texture for the 3-D cockpit.
This setup is confusing in name: how can you have a 2-D panel used for a 3-D cockpits? But it is an allowed configuration. In fact, it was the only configuration allowed in X-Plane 8.
In summary: a 3-D cockpit can use the 2-D panel or 3-D panel as its panel texture. If an airplane has no 2-D panel, then the 2-D panel can be used for the 3-D cockpits without problems. In this situation and there is no need for a 3-D panel.
(It might be better to think of the 2-D panel and three panels simply add his two panels so that you can have two different versions of the panel. The names to the panel and 3-D panel are really just labels.)
Happy New Year! This entire post is going to be off topic, but hopefully worth it; I will resume the usual ranting about how video cards are slowly turning our brain into string cheese later.
I think my favorite part of working for Laminar Research and being part of the X-Plane community is the friends I have made in the X-Plane community – X-Plane really does bring a great group of people together. While I lived in California, I met Jay Oliver, and actually lived not too far from him while I was in ATC school.
Here’s the thing about Jay: he is a fabulous musician. In an age where music is “produced” and so much of what we hear is digitally manipulated, there’s a lot to be said for listening to a human being who is simply astoundingly good with his or her instrument. It’s an experience that can’t be synthesized. It was always enjoyable to get a few drinks into Jay and put him down in front of the Piano and then just listen.
I’ve been listening to Jay’s new album for a few days now, but Austin beat me to the punch, putting it on the X-Plane announce list. Jay set up his new website here, and his album is available for sale in CD or DRM-free mp3 format. You can also listen online right on the site.
Austin’s usual diet is highly electronic, usually runs at about 180 beats per minute, and is the musical equivalent of shooting Jolt cola directly into your brain. What Jay does is completely different, and it’s really something special.
It’s been a tough year for X-Plane authors. Key framing, manipulators, global lighting, baked lighting control, generic instruments, normal maps…version 9 has extended the possibilities for airplanes in a huge way. This is great for X-Plane users, and great for any author who wants to push the envelope, but there is a flip side: the time investment to make a “cutting edge” X-Plane aircraft has gone way, way up.
Here’s the problem: as hardware has been getting faster, the amount of data (in the form of detailed airplane models) needed to keep the hardware running at max has gone up. But the process of modeling an airplane hasn’t gotten any more efficient; all of that 3-d detail simply needs to be drawn, UV mapped and textured. Simply put, NVidia and ATI are making faster GPUs but not faster humans.
That’s why I was so excited about order independent transparency. This is a case where new graphics hardware and nicer looking hardware means less authoring work, not more. (The misery of trying to carefully manage ordered one sided geometry will simply be replaced by enabling the effect.)
My Daddy Can Beat Up Your Daddy
Cameron was on FSBreak last week last week discussing the new CRJ…the discussion touched on a question that gets kicked around the forums a lot these days: which allows authors to more realistically simulate a particular airplane…X-Plane 9 or FSX.
This debate is, to be blunt, completely moot. Both FS X and X-Plane contain powerful enough add-on systems that an author can do pretty much anything desired, including replacing the entire host simulation engine. At that point, the question is not “which can do more” because both can do more than any group of humans will ever produce. As Cameron observed, we’ve reached a point where the simulator doesn’t hold the author back, at least when it comes to systems modeling.
(It might be reasonable to ask: which simulator makes it easier to simulate a given aircraft, but given the tendency to replace the simulator’s built-in systems on both platforms, it appears the state of the art has gone significantly past built-in sim capabilities.)
Graphic Leverage
When it comes to systems modeling, the ability to put custom code into X-Plane or FS X allows authors to go significantly beyond the scope of the original sim. When it comes to graphics, however, authors on both platforms are constrained to what the sim’s native rendering engine can actually draw.
So if there’s a challenge to flight simulation next year, I think it is this: for next-generation flight simulators to act as amplifiers for the art content that humans build, rather than as engines that consume it as fuel. The simulator features that get our attention next year can’t just be the ability for an author to create something very nice (we’re already there), rather it needs to be the ability to make what authors make look even better.
(This doesn’t mean that I think that the platforms for building third party “stuff” are complete. Rather, I think it means that we have to carefully consider the amount of input labor it takes to get an output effect.)
I find it very difficult to write good documentation for the X-Plane scenery system and tools. Not only am I not a technical writer by training and not particularly good at explaining what I am thinking in non-technical terms, but since I have been working on the scenery system for over five years, I don’t really have good perspective as to what is complex and what is straightforward.
For this reason, I try to keep my ears open any time an author cannot understand the documentation, cannot find the documentation, or in another way has a problem with the scenery website. These “first experiences” give an idea of the real utility of the docs. Writing a reference for people who know things is not very hard – writing an explanation for new authors is much harder.
One author who was converting from MSFS to X-Plane pointed out a problem with the documentation that I hadn’t realized before – but I think he’s on to something. He pointed out that the information you need to complete a single project is often spread out all over the place. You probably need to look at an overview document, a file format, and a tool manual, each of which describes about 1/3 of the problem. To make it worse, each document assumes you know what the other ones say!
Who would write such poor documentation? A programmer, that’s who. (In other words, em.) In computer programming, the following techniques are all considered good design and essential:
- Breaking a problem into smaller, sections.
- Limited cross-references between these sections as much as possible.
- Keeping the sections independent.
- Not duplicating information (code).
In other words, the docs I have written for the scenery tools are a mess because they are “well factored”, a good thing for a C++ and a really useless thing for humans.
This is definitely not the only problem with the documentation, which also suffers from a lack of clarity, is often incomplete, and could use a lot more pictures. I am a programmer, and I am paid to make X-Plane faster, better, etc. It can be very hard to find the time to work on documentation when the next feature needs to be done. And yet…without documentation, who can use these features?
Now that I’ve at least figured out that factorization is bad, for the short term I am going to try to write “non-factored” documentation. The first test of this will be MeshTool. I am doing a complete rewrite of the MeshTool readme. Like the ac3d readme, MeshTool needs a full large-scale manual of perhaps 10-20 pages, and the task needs to be approached recognizing that the manual is going to contain a huge amount of information.
When I work on the MeshTool manual I will try to approach it from a task perspective, with explanations of the underlying scenery system, rather than a reference perspective that assumes authors might know why the given techniques work. We’ll see if this creates a more usable manual.
