Now that X-Plane 9.00RC3 is final, we’ve released a complete set of “next-gen” updaters and installers, identifiable because they run at 800×600. With these new installers and updaters, we’ve changed the way updating the sim works.
In the past, we had one application (the “net installer”) that would:
- Update any existing files it found and
- Get any files that were missing.
This was useful in that you could get a fresh copy of X-Plane or update your existing one.
But it also made life a living hell for our tech support folks; the single biggest tech support item we would get is users who would:
- Go to update X-Plane using this tool.
- Pick a new location, not their existing install.
- Download 700 MB of demo instead of 30 MB of updates.
- Run the demo and discover they now have no scenery.
- Become confused and call or email us.
To try to combat this confusion, we’ve separated the concept of installing a demo from the concept of updating the sim.
The new “web demo installer” always makes a new copy of X-Plane. It will not install into an existing location; if you ask it to install to an existing folder, it will demand you pick a new name. It will always fetch the full 700-MB demo.
The new “updater” always picks from an existing copy of X-Plane (presented as a list of known X-Plane 9 installs, rather than a file picker – one of the big problems was people picking a folder inside the X-Plane folder). It always updates this existing folder, and will thus never fetch a new install or create a new install.
My hope is that users can identify the task they wish to execute (install a demo, or update what they have) and thus use an application that will guide them through a path without pitfalls. Top concern is that the updaters not install second copies.
Advanced users: you can still do anything with these tools that you could before – but the functionality is now split into two apps. The updater will never rename an existing folder name (as this breaks people’s shortcuts), and the installer will let you customize both the install name and the install location. You don’t have to install “X-Plane 900r3 Demo” to the desktop.
Finally, a note on beta: previously we had a separate set of tools for beta; searching for betas is now a check-box preference that puts nasty red writing up. This is mostly to keep me sane and the number of installer builds down to what I can count on my fingers. So when the next beta comes out, just take your updater and enable “search for betas”.
I had to do some research into compression algorithms recently, because we had to squeeze the global scenery onto fewer DVDs for retail distribution. We did this mostly by completely filling the DVDs, but we also had to use 7-zip compression to get about a 10% improvement in compression ratios.
DSFs are not the best test of compression efficiency because the format has been organized to help algorithms like zip compress them – the improvement with 7-zip and RAR was a lot less than you’d get with, say, a text file.
Anyway, my point here is: let’s not use RAR – it’s the new GIF. Every now and then a file format comes along with some kind of restriction that keeps everyone from doing everything with it. In GIF’s case, you had to buy the right to create GIFs, and in the case of RAR you have to buy the right to compress RARs.
I think that having these kinds of entanglements in fundamental low level file formats (like how do we compress our data or save our images) is really bad for the software community as a whole; it balkanizes raw materials. And file formats stick around for a long time – even though GIF is made obsolete by PNG you’ll still find them all over the web.
The lure of RAR is of course higher compression ratios than zip. But 7-zip can do the same thing, and unlike RAR, has the potential to be completely free, which means it can be completely ubiquitous.
Macintosh users understand the problem here: for the longest time “StuffIt” archives were the standard way to compress data on the Macintosh. The file format was proprietary, so you couldn’t even make your own program work directly with StuffIt archives. Now that zip has taken over on the Mac, getting data between Mac and Win is easy – you can just zip something using the operating system and send it to all your friends.
Let’s not go back into the “bad old days” of proprietary utilities and a lack of integration with regular apps. I say: if you can stand to use zip or bzip instead of RAR, vote for what’s open and has a future, not what is slightly better now but will just be a pain in the ass in three years.
I’ll post more about scenery soon; this will be short and not terribly topical.
The X-Plane Plugin Wiki used to have no login requirements – anyone could just click and edit. All was good for a while, and then I logged in one day to find some of the most highly used pages stuffed to the gills with the phrase “Nigritude Ultramarine” over, and over, with links to other sites.
You can read about this phrase, why it was invented and what was going on here.
Our response was to put a user login requirement on the site, and we haven’t had a spam problem since (knock on wood) although we do seem to get what appear to be bogus signup requests. (They don’t really hurt anything, they just clog the user database. I’m not sure why anyone would sign up if they don’t intend to actually do anything.) But a few thoughts on Nigritude Ultramarine and people’s attempts to get junk spam sites into the top of Google’s search listing:
- I was pleased to see a real site (this FAQ) as the number two search hit for the term…this real link from a real blog to them can be sort of a contribution to their page rank.
- I have faith that Google will continue to fight the technology arms race against seach engine optimizers…Google has gobs of money and an immense motivation to do so.
- Apparently link farmers, in an attempt to raise their page rank, have been using bots to automatically steal blog content. I haven’t seen this myself yet and I’ve never had an X-Plane query go to a junk site. But some blogs I read have complained of this happening.
Only mildly related, there is an X-Plane Wiki, and I’ll try to point people toward it next week; I’ve been posting things there rather randomly in an attempt to get underdocumented stuff written down somewhere.
I just finished about 15 pages of emails, mostly to Andrew McGregor (who is the very first MeshTool user) and also Benedikt Stratmann (whose x737 is on the bleeding edge of plugin-based aircraft) and AlpilotX (we all know about his forests). Probably all three are wondering how the hell I have time to write so much on weekends. (The answer is of course that my frisbee game got rained out. Foo!)
In the meantime, probably about 300 other people who have emailed me in the last few
months are wondering why the hell they have heard nothing from me. My in-box looks like a mail server exploded. It’s not pretty.
So let me blog for a moment about the “relationship problem”. Simply put, there are two of us (Austin and myself) and about a thousand of you (third party developers doing cool and interesting things with X-Plane) plus significantly more users, some of whom have some very weird tech support problems.
In this environment, our algorithm for who gets “developer attention” is pretty broken and subject to total thrash…there is a huge element of random luck (who emails me when I am recompiling the sim vs. debugging a nasty bug).
I’m aware of both how hard the task Austin and I face and how frustrating it is for a third party developer because I’ve been on both sides. Before I worked for LR, I was a third party and I was always astounded that Austin couldn’t remember what we talked about last week.
Then I started working for the company and saw what it’s like. Imagine sitting at a train station watching the trains go by* (at full speed, not stopping) and someone says “last week I waved to you out the window and you waved back, remember me?”
So I would advise three things to the neglected third party:
- Be firm – you may need to ping us again because at busy times we can’t always keep track of who has asked for what.
- Be patient – if you need something the week we’re burning DVD masters for a second time (because the first set failed at the factory) then you’re going to have to wait.
- Don’t take it personally…a lack of a response usually indicates overload inside the company, not a poor opinion of your work!
This blog post has rambled enough, but it may feed well into the next one.
* This analogy is totally stolen from “How Doctors Think” by Jerome Groopman – he uses it to describe the task of primary care physicians trying to spot the early signs of a very rare illness among a fast-moving train of patients who are almost entirely healthy. I strongly recommend this book particularly for Americans – we need to understand the forces at work in shaping the quality of our medical care!
Just to clarify, these things are not April Fools Day jokes.
- RC3 coming out.
- The installer installing to the desktop.
And as always, relax, you will be able to put the install anywhere you want via the “destination” button.
I am intentionally announcing a decision that might make experience X-Plane users unhappy – my goal here is to solicit arguments against it (if there are any) since it’s a sort of a strange change.
The proposal is to make the default installation location for a new copy of X-Plane be…the desktop.
EDIT: to clarify some of the blog comments, this is a default installation location; the user will be able to customize both the folder name that is created to contain X-Plane (default will be “X-Plane 9”) and the folder into which this new X-Plane 9 folder will be placed.
The desktop? What are you hacks thinking? Well, here’s what we’re thinking:
- Our goal is to minimize tech support calls during installation. This means making an installer where the last computer-savvy users will not get stuck in the installation process. If you know what you’re doing, you’re not who we’re aiming at. (I reiterate, we get a lot of calls about installation problems from users who have never used a computer before.)
- We need a location that the user installing X-Plane has access to, guaranteed. That rules out places like the Applications folder on OS X – we expect the least sophisticated users to not customize the install location, so we need one that will work.
- We need a location that the user can find. This rules out their home folder (the user may not use their home folder or know it exists) as well as the C drive and the Program Files folder on Windows (both can have their files hidden by default on Windows XP to keep users from breaking tings).
The desktop solves all of these problems. Every user has write-access to his or her own desktop, and every user knows where it is.
If, like me, you don’t want X-Plane on your desktop, you can simply click the “destination” button in the installer to put it somewhere else.
As a final note, the strongest alternative to this on Windows was to put the app in program files and build a start menu short-cut. But this starts the sweater unraveling…if we have a shortcut, we need an uninstaller rather than trashing the folder…if we have an uninstaller, how do we cope with multiple installs…by the time you solve these problems you have a huge amount of new untested code.
I’d like to get a more Windows and Mac interface compliant installer, and we’ll get there eventually, but the work I’m doing now is aimed at the biggest real problems we face:
- Users not knowing where X-Plane is.
- Errors during the install in its default configuration.
- Problems installing and configuring scenery.
Okay, there it is, fire away!
Nine women cannot have a baby in one month – that’s the classic example that gets thrown around computer science for the difficulty of parallelization – that is, just because we have ten times as many resources doesn’t mean we’re going to go ten times as fast.
Problems of scalability via parallelization have become very important for graphics engines as everybody and their mother now has at least two cores, and users with more serious hardware are going to have four.
I get asked a lot: “will X-Plane utilize X cores…” where X is a number larger than two. My general answer is: sometimes, maybe, and probably more in the future. I can’t make strong predictions for what we’ll ship in the future, but the general trend for the last 18 months has been us using more cores every time we go into a piece of code to do major architectural changes.
I’ve been doing a lot of work on the installer this week – the first major overhaul of the installer since we originally coded it all the way back at X-Plane 8.15. And the new installers and updaters will try to take advantage of multiple CPUs where possible. A few cases:
- The X-Plane updater runs an MD5 checksum over the entire X-Plane folder to determine which version of the various file components you have and whether they need to be updated. This s not a fast process. I am working on threading this so that more CPUs can work on the problem at once. It looks like there will be only modest benefits from this because the process is also highly bottlenecked on the disk drive.
- The installation engine from the DVD will use more than one CPU to decompress files. For zip compression this wasn’t very important, but the scenery will be compressed via 7-zip compression to get us down to disk DVDs. 7-Zip compresses DSFs about 10% smaller per file than zip, but it’s horribly slow to decompress, so being able to throw twice the CPU at it is a big win.
Now on one hand, our top performance goals are for the sim, not the installer. On the other hand, faster installations are good. But my main point here is: when we wrote new code four years ago, we assumed one CPU and a nice graphics card. We now assume at least two cores and possibly more, and that informs the design of every new feature, not just the rendering engine. If we don’t create a multi-core-friendly design, we’re effectively leaving at least 50% of the CPU on the table.
If you look at the about box for X-Plane 9 RC1, it still lists itself as a beta.
Here’s the thing: that label is dynamic. Right now when X-Plane calls up the server to see if there is a new patch, it notices that its current version (900Rc1) is newer than the latest “final version”. (This is because we haven’t declared any version of 9.xx final yet.)
So it thinks for a second and goes “oh – I’m newer than the latest final version, I must be a beta.” And that yellow beta label appears.
When we finally declare a version final (which involves tweaking the versions listed on the servers) the existing code will then look at the server and go “oh, I’m the latest version” and that beta label will disappear.
If you have a third party add-on and you haven’t tested it against X-Plane 9, well…honestly it’s probably a little bit too late to fix compatibility bugs now. We’re in RC, and only changes to fix critical bugs are going into the sim; everything else will have to wait for 9.1.
So if you have an add-on and you haven’t tested it against 9.0, for crying out loud, do it now! Submit the bug anyway – if we can’t fix it for 9, we can fix it for 9.1. But…after almost 14 weeks in beta, we’ve got to close this build up.
BTW a minor side note on fuel pumps…
In X-Plane 864, an airplane will run even if the electric fuel pump is off. (However, if the fuel pump failure is triggered and the electric fuel pump is off, either by switch or electrical-system failure, then you’re out of fuel.)
X-Plane 900RC1 restores this behavior; in beta 25, an electrical failure would turn off all sources of fuel. This is wrong for a plane like the C172 where gravity can feed the engine.
In the long term X-Plane does need a more complex abstraction (e.g. does this plane have gravity feed or engine drawn fuel, or engine driven pumps, etc. etc.) but for now the 864 model, while inaccurate and incomplete, causes less problems than beta 25, which was simply wrong for a number of planes.
Let me go into the installers in a little more detail before I start a mini-riot. Basically there are three “installation” operations that we (Laminar Research) support:
- Installing a new full sim from a DVD.
- Installing a new demo from the internet.
- Updating any installation from the internet.
The problem with the current installer model is that tasks two and three (get a new demo, update an existing installation) are handled by a single application. This means that the web-demo-installer/updater cannot know which choice (2) or (3) the user is trying to do (since both are legitimate) and therefore user error can result in the wrong operation.
The most common problem we have is users installing new demos when they meant to update a DVD install. The result is an old copy of X-Plane with scenery, a new copy without scenery, and a very confused user who has to contact us for help.
The solution I am working on is simple: provide separate applications for all three tasks.
- Like before, the DVD installer comes on your DVD. It installs the DVD, nothing else.
- A demo installer does nothing but install the demo. You get the installer from the web, probably from the “demo” page (which would have to no longer be an “update” page too). The demo installer always does a full install, and will stop you from trying to install on top of existing installations.
- The updater is always fetched by the app and updates the app. Thus the paradigm is that the app is “self-updating” (even though most of the work is done by a helper application). That updater (fetched by the sim) can only update the copy of the sim that fetched it.
Dealing With Problems
The above work-flow is meant to address most users doing the usual thing without technical problems. We must also consider how we will deal with tech support problems, and finally what the impact is on advanced users. There are two cases where we sometimes have to help users out:
- If the DVD installer for some reason will not work for a user’s computer, we usually provide a downloadable DVD installer. You would insert the DVD, run this “DVD installer” and thus install the DVD. This is not the normal case, but we will probably continue to provide DVD installers specifically for users with tech support problems (based on the tech support incident), just like we have been in the past.
- We will provide the updater directly for users who need to update the sim but cannot launch the sim. This is the exception case, so a direct link to the updater would not be globally advertised on the main page of the sim. Rather it would be a support link, again only provided to users who really need it. 98% of the user base will be able to update from the sim.
When you run the updater from the web (the support case) it will prompt you to locate your X-Plane folder if needed.
Advanced Users
Will you be able to keep multiple copies of X-Plane around? Absolutely. But you’ll have to manage your operations in terms of the “three operations” (make a new install from the DVD, make a new demo install from the web, update any one version you have laying around).
If you want to get a new web demo, you’ll have to use a separate application than you would for an update. I don’t think this is a huge problem; generally your best bet for keeping an old copy of X-Plane (when running a new beta) is to simply copy the entire X-Plane folder, rather than downloading the contents from the net.
