A quick correction – the X-Plane Live session will actually be today, Tuesday at 4 pm (20:00 UTC) – I apologize for the total confusion and chaos on this one. We have your questions from the developer blog and social media, and we’ll try to take live questions as best we can.
EDIT: T-minus 30 minutes to live stream! We’ll be live here on YouTube.
EDIT 2: If you missed the live stream, you can watch the recording: Part 1 and Part 2 (split due to technical difficulties).
I meant to post this weeks ago, and basically just lost track of it, so thanks for the reminders in the comment sections. Here is a PDF export of our slide deck from FSExpo.
Flight Sim Expo 2018 Slide Deck
There is professionally shot video of the event, but it wasn’t shot by us, and I’m afraid I have no idea when it will be posted. We’re looking into using our own cameras next year so that we can ensure a video post on a more timely basis.
X-Plane 11.25 release candidate 1 is live. If you were using an 11.25 beta, you’ll be auto-notified to update. If you’re not using the beta, you can check “get betas” to get the beta. (Steam users: 11.25b1 is available as a Steam public beta – we’ll put the release candidate on Steam early next week if nothing blows up.) Release notes are here.
This update includes the addition of the “High Roller” Ferris wheel/rotating bar to the strip – when we were at FSExpo, the High Roller was very close to the Flamingo, and it was quite clear how visible it was to the skyline.
Austin, Philipp, Alex and I presented a road map for X-Plane at FlightSimExpo this year. The official video of our talk is still not available – it’s apparently in post production. There is an audience video that does have intelligible audio, but this post provides a summary of some of the new things we presented. Read More
X-Plane 11.20 is, of course, final! Like all good Klingon software, it was not so much released – rather it escaped captivity, leaving a trail of blood in the path of all whom opposed it.
I am aware of two plugin-related issues we are tracking:
Philipp and I are still discussing what to do about this second thing, but if your plugin is in this category (so far we’ve seen it with HeadShake and X-Ivap), my suggestion is: compile and link against clang’s libc++ on OS X – it’s the native Mac C++ runtime and the one that’s going to work well in the long term.
We’ll release an 11.21 release candidate either late this week or early next week, once we collect the bug fixes that got away.
EDIT: HeadShake has been fixed by SimCoders!
X-Plane 11.20r2 has only one bug that we are trying to fix: a bug in the plugin SDK that can cause some plugins to crash when creating and destroying windows.
Tyler and I dug into this and found that the fix was a bit more intrusive than we wanted for this late in an RC.
So: if you are a plugin developer and you are working with the new SDK, either for VR compatibility, to use the new 3.x APIs, or just because you are updating the plugins, and you have time this weekend, please email me and I can send you our new fixed XPLM DLLs.
My hope is to get half a dozen plugin developers to bang on them over the weekend, so that when we cut 11.20r3, it really will be the release.
Edit: RC3 is live – thanks to everyone who helped!
We received a last minute bug report that X-Plane 11.20r2 deletes scenery packs from scenery_pack.ini. This is true! It is also by design, not a bug, the same as X-Plane 10, and not particularly brilliant on my part.
scenery_packs.ini persists the order of your packs (putting newly discovered packs “in front” in alphabetical order upon discovery) and maintains enable-disable status. But it does not retain any other information. The file is totally rewritten on every run and the following otherwise useful stuff tends to get destroyed in the process.
Unfortunately this means that if you symlink to an external drive that is unmounted and run X-Plane, your scenery pack order gets lost. This definitely does suck.
In a future version, I can fix this. But we’re not going to mess with it now during RC because it’s totally not changed or broken compared to all past versions of X-Plane since we introduced the scenery_packs.ini file.
For now: you can lock the file as a hack-around to preserve your well-created order while your remote drive is unmounted – when you re-mount and restart, your order isn’t lost. But in this order, new packs aren’t persisted to the file, although they will be used.
If there’s things you want the scenery_packs.ini file to do, commenting on this post would be on-topic. One thing to consider: if we can’t drop missing packs, how do we know a pack was uninstalled? How does the file ever get cleaned?
In the X-Plane 11.20b1, we’re shipping a web browser for the first time. We’re using the Chromium Embedded Framework (CEF)—essentially the same guts as Chrome, wrapped inside X-Plane.
For the time being, it’s being used in one place only*: to support in-app upgrades, so that if you have the demo, you can buy the full version of X-Plane without having to go to the web site. The web view is seamless—you can’t tell by looking at the app that it’s not just part of the native X-Plane user interface.
While its present use is quite limited, if all goes well, we’d like to expand its use elsewhere in the sim—in The Glorious Future™, we could potentially use it to load online charts and the like.
But, there’s a hitch!
There’s not a good way to load two copies of CEF at a time. And, since some plugins (like the ones used in the new Flight Factor A320 Ultimate) depend on a version of CEF provided by a (global) plugin, we have to disable X-Plane’s web browser functionality in the presence of that plugin. This isn’t a big deal right now—after all, if you’ve installed payware, you probably already own the sim anyway—but it will be a shame if, in The Glorious Future™, you have to choose between your payware and core X-Plane functionality.
The situation is even worse than you might expect: CEF absolutely doesn’t support multiple initialization calls in the lifetime of an app—you can’t initialize it, shut it down, then re-initialize it. That means it’s not even possible for plugin authors to be good citizens and “relinquish” CEF to X-Plane, such that you could at least use X-Plane’s browser whenever you’re not using an add-on that depends on it. It’s all or nothing! In fact, you’ll have to uninstall the CEF plugin before X-Plane can use a web view itself.
There are two possible fixes here:
Having us expose CEF via the SDK is not an unequivocal win. CEF is notoriously incompatible between versions—you can more or less guarantee that even minor updates will break compatibility of the API somewhere. That means X-Plane would be stuck at a fixed version of CEF for at least the lifetime of a major version to prevent breaking plugins. X-Plane 11.20 uses CEF release 3202; it would be at least the next major version before we updated CEF to a newer version. There are two major downsides to this:
So, here’s what I’d like to hear from plugin devs:
If you don’t mind telling me a bit about your intended use cases, that’d be very helpful as well!
EDITED TO ADD: There’s a third option here that I didn’t consider: X-Plane could provide a “wrapper” around CEF that offers “just” a browser surface, and simple interfaces like the ability to change the URL programmatically. This has the advantage that we could update CEF regularly without breaking the API (though there’s always the risk that a new version of Chromium would change how it handles your HTML + CSS + JS). The disadvantages are twofold:
a) If a plugin developer really, really needs the full power of the CEF API, they’re out of luck (or we’re back to square one with respect to having to disable core X-Plane functionality in order to support the plugin).
b) New XPLM APIs are a massive tax on our development time. Every time we need to make a change, we have to go test a dozen plugins… then go through an extensive beta… then inevitably hear about a show-stopping bug we introduced three hours after a release goes final. 😀 In contrast, providing a (major-version-stable), transparent copy of CEF costs us very little dev time; time that would otherwise be spent maintaining the XPLM API can be spent on, like, major features.
* Aside: This is actually how we test a lot of new tech in X-Plane: we find a single, relatively out-of-the-way place to make use of it, ship it in a major version update, and wait to see if it blows up. Betas catch a lot of bugs, but not all, so this is a way of hedging our bets when it comes to code that hasn’t been battle-hardened. This is how we worked the bugs out of the user interface framework (Plane Maker’s panel editor was the testbed), the X-Plane 11 particle system (behind the scenes, it was used for some very minor effects in X-Plane 10.51), and more.
X-Plane 11 has had several fantastic updates to the library of lego-brick airport objects that ship with X-Plane. We’ve had new European-style objects, elements for small airports, and the terminal and jetway kits let you build really great looking airports that fit the exact shape of the real-world airport you are modeling.
In that context, I’m pleased to show you a sneak preview of the next set of lego-brick objects for gateway airport authors.
You can download a preview if the new lego bricks here.
A while back, during branch testing for X-Plane 11.20-something, I encountered this little gem:
Happy Friday!