X-Plane 10.03 beta 4 is out – just a few unrelated notes:
- Legacy scenery packs should work – I’ll write that up in detail in another blog post.
- If you have Paris or Denver installed, you need to update using the newest updater (version 3.02). If you update from the About Box, you get this version automatically. But if you have a version of the updater already on your hard drive, get a new one here.
- If your third party add-on worked in v9 and is still not in working in v10, please file a bug if you have not done so already. If you did file a bug, please bear with us – we’re killing off compatibility bugs with each patch, but there are still some major ones out there. (For example, I have on my plate to fix some bugs with OBJ materials that affect a lot of airplanes.)
And I meant to link to this: everything you ever wanted to know about global scenery but were afraid to ask.
I have a number of technical issues to cover relating to v10 scenery, so I’ll try to increase the blog post frequency to get through it all over the next week or two.
The short answer is: I think it will be fixed for everyone in 24 hours, but less if you want to get it by hand. Here’s the whole story:
The Paris DSF rendered incorrectly when we cut the global scenery. We discovered this after we cut the global scenery DVDs, but before they shipped out to users. I found the bug in the DSF generator (it was an error in airport processing) and fixed Paris and 5 other tiles. This was a top priority fix – it’s been fixed for probably two weeks now.
The Paris DSF is included in the X-Plane 10.02 beta series – that is, it has been available for over a week!
But here’s where things go sideways: since we’ve never updated global scenery before, you need a new updater to actually get the file. And what I am just realizing now is: while you need the X-Plane 3.02 updater to get the file, everyone is using the 3.01 updater, which doesn’t know to grab the Paris fix if you have Paris installed from DVD.
Hang on one second while I bash my head on my desk.
Okay. So there are two ways you can get your Paris fixed.
The Fast Way
If you want Paris fixed now, do this:
- Get the X-Plane Updater from here.
- Run the updater on your copy of X-Plane.
Paris should be fixed, at least I think.
The Easy Way
If you have already installed global secnery for Paris and you do nothing now, but get beta 4 when it comes out, X-Plane will use the latest updater to get beta 4 and you’ll get Paris anyway. I expect beta 4 tomorrow…maybe Monday at the latest.
A number of users have reported “ghosting” with NVidia Windows hardware and X-Plane 10. The artifact typically looks like this:
What you’re seeing there is the scene from last frame being left around where the sky was supposed to be drawn, but was not. As the camera moves, we get a trail of artifacts.
For a few days I couldn’t see this bug on my own system, and this afternoon I tried to reproduce it based a report from a user with the same hardware as my development machine. So after a bunch of failed tries and scratching my head at the German version of the NVidia control panel, I was overjoyed to see this:
I mean, how cool is that! That could be our new startup screen! It’s like a giant 737 is going to pop up out of the screen and eat us all. (Hint: if you are in the pit of a 747 and an airplane appears over the horizon that looks bigger than you from 20 miles away: run!)
It appears that this artifact is caused by turning on full screen anti-aliasing in the Nvidia control panel (with “override application settings”) but not in X-Plane. My work-around: use “application controls” for the control panel and set FSAA in X-Plane itself.
Here’s another fun one:
This shows up with moderate global shadowing. This shows up on the 285.62 NVidia drivers; the 280.62 and (for the very brave) 290.36 drivers don’t have this problem.
I don’t think there’s a moral of the story here; we’re still working through bugs, but I did find the bottom of my in-box, which I hope is an indication that the patches are helping at least some users. There are a lot of different card/driver/OS combos, so working through all the combinations (as Windows X1000-users are finding) will take some time.
A new beta is out – 10.03 beta 1 – release notes here.
I guess people don’t really have .plan files anymore, but here’s what would be on my short list if I had one, now that 10.03 beta 1 is out:
- Crash bugs and artifacts. We’re still seeing some of these, particularly on old hardware; I am still working my way through these.
- Third party compatibility. 10.03 beta 1 starts to fix some problems with older planes, but it’ll take a few more betas to work through these – I still have a long list! Thanks to the aircraft authors that have sent bugs in.
- Performance. I haven’t had a chance to dig in hard on this yet, but I have been logging bugs with some of the complaints that have come in. I hope to be on performance in a big way in the next week.
A number of third party authors (bravely) promised X-Plane 10 updates to their airplanes. And I believe that a tune-up to be X-Plane 10 compatible isn’t going to represent a lot of man hours.
That is, unless you try to do this job now.
I have a number of open bugs where version 9 airplanes don’t load quite right in X-Plane 10. If you have an X-Plane 9 airplane and you try to work around these bugs, a few things will happen:
- You will only be able to work around some of the bugs, as others are pretty hard-baked into the sim.
- When I actually fix the bugs (in the next weeks) your airplane will be “broken” yet again, since “fixing” the bugs now means trying to make a right with two wrongs.
So third party authors: please do file bugs if you haven’t already, and give us a little time to work through them. Please do not try to work around these bugs, only to have your airplane become “re-broken” when we get the sim corrected.
And users: please be patient with your third party airplane authors. They can’t make their plane v10 compatible until we fix some bugs, and if they try they’re just going to get thrashed.
There are some things that do need to be reworked for version 10, particularly for HDR mode. But a lot of the reports I get are just things that are funky in the sim.
How to File an Airplane Bug
Since I am getting deluged with bug reports, support requests, questions, etc. I want to describe the best way to get an airplane compatibility bug to us. By following these guidelines, you’ll make it easier for us to kill off compatibility bugs fast.
- Please file the bug only once. If you have filed the bug and haven’t heard that it’s fixed, you do not need to tell us in every new beta that it is still broken.
- File bugs via http://dev.x-plane.com/support/bugreport.html. We can route this form to whomever we think is best suited to handle the bugs. Please do not just email the last person you conversed with directly.
- Please only file bugs if an airplane looks different in the latest X-Plane 10 build and X-Plane version 9.70. X-Plane 9.70 is the version 9 release that we are targeting – no older version!
- Please get us reproduction materials – preferably a complete ACF pack, and preferably a cut down one if it can be simplified.
- Send us the v9 .acf file, before any modifications. We want to see what your customers would have seen if they just tried to use the plane. If you send us a version resaved in X-Plane 10, we don’t know what happened.
- Please provide illustrations of how the plane should look in version 9 vs how it does look in version 10. We need a reference point.
- Please try to keep reproduction steps as short as possible. If we have to make a 2 hours flight with 400 waypoints to see a bug, that’s a time sink for us.
A number of you have already sent us good bug reports – we will get to them as quick as I can. If all goes well tonight my fires will be out and I’ll be able to jump into this shortly.
Hint: not the comments section of this blog. If you have not filed a bug but did write a comment, please do not assume that we know about it.
You can email tech support here: info@x-plane.com.
You can file bugs here: http://dev.x-plane.com/support/bugreport.html
If you file a bug an do not hear back from us immediately, please be patient; I am back-logged with reports right now, so if it is going to my part of the code, it’ll be a bit of a wait.
I will post more on reporting airplane compatibility bugs later today.
***EDIT*** Chris says: Please do not email Austin, Ben or Me directly unless we ask you to…Even if we’ve asked you to do so for a bug in the past, please do not email us directly for a new bug. Bugs need to go through our support channel. Ben wakes up to over 100 emails each morning…I can only imagine what kinds of emails Austin gets. This takes away precious development time.
You can update via the about box or the updater application. If you update from the about box, the updater app may already be in your X-Plane folder, ready to use.
This build should hopefully fix any crashes and colored-triangle artifacts introduced by 10.02 beta 1; the smoke puff performance optimization wasn’t my best work.
Also your airplanes may have engines again, which is nice for flying, I’m told.
If you are getting a crash in 10.02 beta 2 but did not get a crash in 10.0, please file a bug ASAP! (If you always get a crash, file a bug if you haven’t; we’re working through them. But I definitely don’t want to go backward in terms of hardware support with the betas.)
Note: the torrent is still 10.02 beta 1, so you’ll want to run a quick update on it. I’ll recut the torrent periodically, but I think it probably works better for everyone if the torrent can build up a bunch of seeders.
Austin just posted an announcement. The short version: we have the first patch to X-Plane 10. You can read more about how to get the patch here. A few key points:
- You don’t have to re-download the whole sim! You can simply run an update, which will get only the changed files. Less than 150 MB, I think.
- If you can’t run X-Plane 10 because the app isn’t getting along with your graphics card, you can still update – just run the updater directly.
- We have posted a new torrent – zipped, so it should be smaller, have correct permissions, and not drive µTorrent nutty with too many files.
Compatibility With Graphic Cards
I’ll try to post on-going status updates with regards to graphics card support; I’ve posted a chart on the wiki. If you have gotten one of the cards for which the status is “unknown” to work, please post a comment.
The two cases that I believe we have fixed for the 10.02 patch are Intel HD integrated graphics and Radeon X1000 series GPUs – both were not functioning due to bugs in X-Plane (which were revealed by the particular capabilities of these cards).
I was surprised by how many reports of Intel HD graphics crashes we got but in hind sight it makes sense: everyone with a Core i3/i5/i7 chip has one of these GPUs, since it is built into the chip. In some cases, users were running on the Intel GPU despite also having a real GPU, so even with the crash fix, those users will need to figure out how to change their default GPU. (For a desktop this is usual a BIOS operation – for a laptop it’s usually black magic.)
I still have at least six different GPU crash cases that I am investigating, so there’s a lot of compatibility work to do.
The other major compatibility problem I am hearing about is just a slew of reports of weird stuff with NVidia GeForce cards. Graphic artifacts, hangs, screen corruption, two copies of the app – you name it. It’s going to take a while to figure out what’s going on.
Framerate and Performance
We put out X-Plane 10.02 to fix a few crash problems and cases of graphic corruption; there are only a few performance tweaks along for the ride. The majority of performance work is still to come. You may get a few fps back with AI planes, or if you have a Mac NVidia GPU.
“Well little Johnny, when a KC-10 and a 747 love each other very much…”
On a more serious (kinda) note, this is a shot of what happens when ATC fails at spacing its aircraft properly. These two planes flew all the way down the ILS like this which is obviously a bug…but fun to have a chuckle about as well. If you look off into the distance, you can see some other aircraft, also on the ILS lined up against the golden sky…very dramatic!
(Notes: This is v9 scenery, v9 planes, a slow debug build…nothing special here)
I haven’t had much time to post, and it’s going to very quiet for another two to three weeks. This is the calm before the storm. Everyone on the team is somewhere past redline trying to get as much as we possibly can into the initial release. We won’t get everything we want into 10.0 – we already knew that – we have too many ideas and there is way too much potential unlocked by some of the major changes to X-Plane. But we’re still going to try to stuff the release as much as we absolutely can right up until the clock runs out.
So: please bear with us for a few weeks. There is a ton to discuss, and once we get that DVD master burned, I’ll be in a position to answer more questions, describe some of the new features (which we are really excited about) and generally come out of hiding.
Back to code…BBIAB.
