X-Plane 11.30 Release Candidate 1 is out – we fixed a lot of bugs!
As you can tell by the release name, we’re getting ready to kick this thing out the door. Most of the team is no longer working on 11.30, and those of us who are are trying to make very small, tactical changes to not further screw things up. I wouldn’t bet against an RC2 (we’ve needed more than one try for all of the “really big” patches we’ve done in the last decade) but at this point if you haven’t tested your add-on against 11.30, you’re really late to the party.
Auto Toe Brakes
Flight simulators sometimes have to deal with unrealistic problems specific to being simulators and not real airplanes. One category of these “unrealistic problems” is dealing with user input hardware that is less complex than the real control inputs of the airplane. You might have a single throttle lever on your joystick, and not the 4 throttles with reversers of the 747. You might not have a twist axis or rudder pedals. You might be flying with a mouse!
Automatic toe brakes are a feature where X-Plane automatically applies differential toe brakes at times that we think might be useful if you don’t have toe brake hardware and no plugin is controlling the toe brakes. For example, an aircraft with a free-castering nose-wheel might be impossible to steer at low speeds without toe brakes. (You can’t turn the nose wheel directly, and the rudder will lack authority at low speed.) X-Plane can apply the left toe brake for you when you apply a lot of left rudder to help you turn.
In previous versions of X-Plane, this automatic toe-brake behavior was automatically applied based on some rules that Austin coded into X-Plane. When they worked, they really helped (and we know they sometimes worked because when we removed some of them in 11.30 we got bug reports), but at other times they weren’t tuned properly for a particular aircraft.
Starting in X-Plane 11.30 release candidate 1, aircraft authors can now explicitly control whether toe brakes are auto-applied for users without hardware, and if so, how aggressively. This control is auto-populated for older aircraft with the choices X-Plane 11.26 and earlier would have made, so you shouldn’t see a change in older aircraft behavior. The aircraft updating guide has the full details.
I believe that changes to these automatic rules may have been responsible for changes in third party aircraft ground handling in late 11.30 betas; hopefully with the new code, we should see complete compatibility.
X-Plane 11.30 beta 7 is out – full notes here. Hopefully the next beta will be a release candidate; we’re down to a small number of bugs, almost all of which are in the particle system, or are regressions (meaning the behavior was fine in 11.26 and is borked in 11.30).
If you have a bug that dates back to 11.26 or earlier and it hasn’t been fixed yet, it probably is not getting fixed in 11.30 – we’re out of time with this release.
Here are a few details on bugs we’re still working on and bugs we recently fixed.
Drawing Callbacks and Plugins
Beta 6 fixed a bug where plugins would receive extra window-phase drawing callbacks if a modern plugin had a new-style XPLMDisplay window on screen. This should fix a wide variety of plugins-interfering-with-each-others-drawing bugs, particularly where the “culprit” was a new plugin and the victim was SASL-based.
As a general guideline, please use XPLMDisplay windows with the modern SDK and new APIs whenever you can – it will give you the most compatible results going forward. The only drawing phase we recommend at this point is the panel/gauge drawing phases for custom panels.
N1/N2 for Turboprops
X-Plane’s free turboprop model uses the “N1” engine dataref to represent the gas turbine speed, and ties “N2” to the compressor tied to the prop. When you turn on the starter but don’t bring in fuel, N1 will rise up to 16%, but N2 will stay much lower.
11.30 introduces the “new” free turboprop model – a second engine model that’s designed to more closely emulate the PT-6. For most of the beta, Austin was using an opposite convention: N2 represented the compressor turbine and N1 represented the prop turbine. Austin’s logic was that this was analogous to a high-bypass jet engine: N2 makes the high pressure and N1 spins the big fan-like thing.
In beta 7, Austin changed this; the new free turboprop model now follows the same convention as the old free turboprop model. This should make it a lot easier in the long term for authors whose aircraft have real PT-6’s to use the new model and take advantage of the improved accuracy.
Particles In the Cockpit
In beta 6, we fixed the bug where the new partilcle effects could not be seen from within the cockpit. This had the unfortunate effect of making them visible when the particles were inside the aircraft. This problem can be hard to avoid – depending on the wind and location of the exhaust on your aircraft, it’s possible the smoke just blows through the cockpit, making an artifact.
This is my plan for how we will ship particles in 11.30:
- Particle emitters attached to objects with “outside” lighting objects will create particles that appear outside the aircraft; they will be masked out so that they don’t appear in the cabin.
- Particle emitters attached to objects with “inside” lighting will be ignored and produce a log warning. We are reserving this capability for a future update when we can have interior-pass particles; for now, don’t use this capability, as you can’t know how it will look in future versions of X-Plane.
This is one of the scariest “not done yet” parts of 11.30, because the logic to control interior vs exterior drawing is very complicated – it has to take into account different hardware capabilities, different rendering settings, etc.
Particle Light Levels
I am still working with Alex on particle light levels. A recent beta included logic in the particle lighting code to match the clouds (e.g. direct sun makes them brighter) – without this, contrails don’t match the clouds.
But with this logic, particles look too dark on the ground. So we are tweaking things. The take-away here is: don’t ship your add-on with particles until we go final, as these things are subject to change during beta.
Automatic Toe Brakes and the C172
Automatic Toe Brakes is a feature where X-Plane automatically applies toe brakes when a user who does not have toe-brake hardware deflects the rudder pedals to near their maximum position. The idea is that on some aircraft, you can’t steer tightly or hold a heading in a cross-wind without the toe brakes. (This feature does not run if a plugin is controlling toe brakes or hardware is available.)
Early X-Plane 11.30 betas caused us to apply automatic toe brakes to aircraft where it was not appropriate, e.g. airliners. X-Plane 11.30 beta 6 removed this behavior from the airliners but also removed it from some third party GA aircraft where it was accidentally (but usefully) being applied.
We’re looking at this now, but at a minimum, I expect we’ll restore legacy aircraft to acting as they did before, and probably widen the steering range of our 172 a bit. I’ll write more in a separate post once we make a decision.
X-Plane 11.30 Beta 4 is out, both for Laminar Customers and for Steam! The fix list for beta 4 is pretty short because we intentionally cut back on what we added to it. Beta 4 had one job, and that job was to not be as broken as beta 1, beta 2, or beta 3.
X-Plane 11.30 Beta 4 does not have the performance improvements we have been working on for the last week and a half; Sidney and I found a bunch of things that are slowing 11.30 down, but we didn’t want to risk yet another broken beta. This stuff should be ready for beta 5 in a few days.
The public beta for 11.30 has been unusual in that it took us quite a few betas to get a stable non-crashing, usable beta, and during the waiting period we heard a lot of complaints from Steam users about being left out, and a lot of questions about when the beta would make it to Steam.
Here’s the problem: we don’t know the date when a beta will make it to Steam. Here’s the rough algorithm:
10 BETA = BETA + 1
20 RELEASE BETA
30 WAIT ABOUT 24 HOURS
40 IF BETA CRASHES GOTO 10
50 RELEASE STEAM BETA
So in the case of X-Plane 11.30, we had to go back and recut betas due to a crash in the joystick code (beta 1), a crash when the radios were on (beta 2) and airplanes falling through airports into the abyss (beta 3).
One thing to note: if there’s a beta and it’s a few days old and it’s not on Steam, it’s because the beta has a known bug that makes it so unusable that you wouldn’t want to set your Steam install to use it. I see no reason to have a beta that crashes when you start it.
(Since we collect automatic crash reports from users, we have frequency information about how often crashes are happening, and we can identify crashes that are significantly more frequent than what we’d expect in a stable beta.)
Posted in News
by
Ben Supnik |
X-Plane 11.30 beta 2 went up yesterday – it fixes a few of our really big bugs, e.g. crashing and completely whacked out graphics. In terms of what’s next for the beta:
- We should have a Steam version of beta 2 early next week. As always, Steam betas will wait until we’ve proven a beta doesn’t crash; given how easy it is to get Steam betas, we can’t risk the reputation of the product by posting broken betas. The delay for Steam betas should be days, unless the beta is broken, in which case you shouldn’t want it anyway.
- We have a number of performance problems that we’re looking into now. The good news is that these are perf problems that may be fixable; the new tech in 11.30 that was suppose to be fast actually is fast, so I’m optimistic that things will run decently once we get these lumps out.
- We should have beta 3 mid next week; we don’t have much out-standing in terms of flight model compatibility bugs.
If you make a third party aircraft, you should be carefully evaluating your aircraft for compatibility bugs ASAP. The window for reporting compatibility bugs is going to close next week, and if you tell us late in the beta (after the app has been available for six weeks) that there’s a compatibility problem, you may have to wait for a patch to get a fix.
Do not wait for the release candidate to check compatibility!
Posted in News
by
Ben Supnik |
Almost! we’ve been running a small scale private beta for the last few weeks while we finish new features and fix major bugs. I don’t want to curse the beta, but it looks like we may be able to get the public beta posted this weekend.
In the last two days we’ve had two major show-stopping bugs, but both are fixed, so we’re going to keep trying to nail this thing down and get it posted.
The public beta features not only the new particle system, available to third parties, but it is now in use for most (but not all) of the built-in effects in the sim. New Plane-Maker options let authors specify which effect categories (e.g. engine effects, wheel effects, etc.) they want to replace.
At this point it looks like we won’t have anything public for Vulkan this year, although I do think we will hit some internal milestones.
X-Plane 11.26 release candidate 2 is available for users who check “get betas” in our installer or who select public betas on Steam. It’s just like RC1, but without the giant 60 nm jump when the DSFs load.
Posted in News
by
Ben Supnik |
Two notes on stuff we released today:
X-Plane 11.26r1 is now in public beta – click “get betas” to get it. It’s just a translation update except one bug fix: we think the weird errors about missing taxiways mid-flight should be fixed. This bug was specific to users who loaded additional nav data into the sim, but if you are one of those users this will hopefully help.
WorldEditor 1.7.1r2 is now officially final. WED 1.7.1 supports all of the new airport line types from X-Plane, and also has a slew of new editing options for working with vectors.
Posted in News
by
Ben Supnik |
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).
As Tyler previously posted, we’re doing another X-Plane Live video stream this Wednesday – this one a bit earlier for Europe.
A number of commenters pointed out that the Q&A has been a bit of a free-for-all in the past live-streams. It’s hard for us to pick up all of the questions, things get missed, etc.
So this time, we’re going to do a mix of live questions and questions submitted ahead of time. If you have something you want to bring up, please post in the comments section for this post. You can also ask questions via Facebook or Twitter – Thompson will post start a feedback thread on FB tomorrow.
Please only use this blog post for questions for the live session next week.
We are almost certainly not going to be able to answer everything that gets asked, and there will probably be questions where the answer is more or less “we’re working on stuff but it’s rully rully secret right now”. But we will read everything that gets asked here and do our best to make sure big things don’t get lost.
Posted in News
by
Ben Supnik |
Edit: the X-Plane live session is actually on the 14th – today, Tuesday.
At the request of our European friends, the next round of X-Plane live Q&A will take place on August 15th—excuse me, 15 August! August 14—at 20:00 UTC (translate that to your time zone). Previous Q&A sessions have been scheduled at times that were convenient primarily for Americans, but why should they get to have all the fun?!
In case you missed the first and second rounds of this, this is a streaming broadcast (via YouTube) featuring:
- Austin Meyer, owner & creator of X-Plane
- Ben Supnik, desktop product manager
- Chris Serio, mobile product manager
- Alex Unruh, art director
- …and anyone else we happen to drum up. 🙂
Dear Europeans, the fate of the livestream is in your hands! 😀
Posted in News
by
Tyler Young |
