He even got on slash-dot! Anyway, if you want to see a short six minute explanation of why we are being sued, here you go.
And to state the obvious, we are not discontinuing any of our products, we are not dropping Android as a platform, and we are in no way backing down because of the lawsuit. As you can tell from the video and Austin’s posts, Austin has some strong feelings about standing up to patent trolls.
X-Plane 10.50 update coming tomorrow.
I’ve been way behind on blog posts over the last few weeks. Basically, the more we are doing, the less I manage to blog about what we are doing. (Instead I put off writing a blog post until it’s really late and then decide at 11 pm that I’m too tired and I’ll do it tomorrow.)
So here’s a partial list of X-Plane 10.50 features. This is not even remotely complete, it’s just some “headline” features that I can think of now; the release notes will be comprehensive.
New Autogen: We have new US tall building art assets that will make cities look better.
apt.dat 1050 with Static Aircraft and New Models: A new revision of the apt.dat file provides information on parking spots so that we can place static aircraft models inside X-Plane, based on the library and rendering settings. X-Plane 10.50 will ship with a bunch of additional static aircraft models, and third parties can add more via the lbirary. WED 1.5 will have new features to edit this information.
For airports created before WED 1.5 (which is nearly all of the approved airports), we are working on tech to auto-upgrade the gateway airports to use the new static aircraft; third party scenery will simply not participate in the new feature until updated by the authors.
Global Winds Aloft: X-Plane 10.50 will use global NOAA data for winds aloft, rather than a US-only data source.
ATC Fixes: X-Plane 10.50 has a number of ATC bug fixes to make ATC a lot more usable. No more “you are off course!”
New Manipulators: We have added a few new manipulator types as part of an effort to make 3-d cockpits more usable. Yes, the scroll-wheel is accessible. (We have not rebuilt every 3-d cockpit in our fleet. The feature here is the capability in the engine, for us and third parties to use.)
Update King-Air and Baron: we have, however, redone the Kingair and Baron, fixing a number of issues and getting them to a whole new level for IFR flight. These planes use the new manipulators for their 3-d cockpits.
More Airports from the Gateway: as with all releases, we’ll include the latest airports from the X-Plane airport gateway.
Those are just the “big” things – there’s some huge number of other changes, some of which may be really important to some of our users. I still have about half a dozen items on my todo list to get to a 10.50 beta, so I haven’t worked up complete release notes yet.
X-Plane 10.45 has been released; if you have run X-Plane you already know that.
This release has another big update to the global airports and updated navigation data. Here’s a complete list of everything changed.
One new feature of 10.45 that may change how you use X-Plane: the global airports no longer conflict with custom scenery – even if you have custom scenery that doesn’t have proper exclusion zones.
So if you have been disabling the global airports due to conflicts, you don’t need to do this anymore. You can use your custom scenery and keep the global airports around.
We are already well into X-Plane 10.50 development – we’ve actually been doing significant 10.50 work for a while now. I’ll have more posts on that soon – right now we are aiming to have 10.50 in public beta in a few weeks.*
* That’s a vague time estimate because it’s not super accurate. Feature work is not complete for 10.50, so it’s hard to know when it will really be done. Our goal isn’t to get 10.50 into beta at a certain date; it is to make X-Plane better as efficiently as possible.
First, X-Plane 10.45 release candidate 2 is out. There was a bug in RC1 where the instructor’s operator station (IOS) couldn’t change aircraft over the network. I’m hoping we don’t have any other last-minute fire-drills; the IOS bug was reported the day I was going to call RC1 final.
I keep on telling myself during the day “I’ll blog some developer news later when I’m too tired to code” and (shockingly) at 10 pm, after the second round of coding after the kids have gone to bed, I find myself too tired and go “meh, I’ll blog tomorrow.”
So in an attempt to post something rather than keep delaying…
The Vulkan API was released today. Vulkan is the third new next generation 3-d graphics API (the other two are Metal for OS X and iOS and DirectX 12 for Windows). Vulkan should be available on Windows, Linux and Android devices. The specification is 651 pages long, so I have some light reading to do.
FlightFactor sent me a test case to look at a while ago – a possible bug in the Blender 2.49 exporter. While exploring the performance of the test case, I discovered that the code that runs ATTR_lit_level in a cockpit OBJ was a lot less performant. (If you don’t create 3-d cockpits, ATTR_lit_level lets you turn the brightness of a 3-d model’s night texture up and down based on a dataref; it is crucial for creating cockpit lighting animations, including annunciators.)
I ripped out a pretty huge pile of code in the process, and I am hoping we’ll see a performance boost. On the mobile product (this code is shared on mobile and desktop) the changes cut the number of driver calls we make down by about 25%. (That doesn’t mean a 25% speed-up – not all calls are equal, but it shows that there was a real win in there.) My measurements of the ATTR_lit_level test case run the OBJ itself 10x faster. (Again, that doesn’t mean 10x the framerate – it means this one very small part of X-Plane runs 10x faster). Once the work is done I’ll post some performance numbers. This code is targeted at X-Plane 10.50.
X-Plane 10.45 release candidate 1 is out (and will be available on Steam for users who have selected to get betas within a few days). If you aren’t running betas and would like to try it, run your X-Plane Installer, pick update and check “Get Betas”.
If you are the developer of an add-on aircraft and you haven’t tried 10.45 yet, please try it as soon as possible! We caught a few surprising systems-related bugs and fixed them for RC1, but overall beta bug reporting has been quite low; we can’t fix what we don’t know about, and some bugs might only be reproducible using your add-on.
X-Plane 10.45 is a “small” patch for us in that it doesn’t contain major changes to the code, but it contains a number of features you might like:
I keep meaning to post about other stuff we’re working on; I’ll post an update soon. But for now, try 10.45 before it goes out the door!
MH1212, developer of the Prefab Airports for X-Plane, requested this feature, and it looks like we are going to be able to sneak it into X-Plane 10.45. (If we hit bugs, it might get pushed out to 10.50, but so far things look okay.) The feature is: the ability to exclude objects by airport ID without using exclusion zones.
Right now when a custom scenery pack replaces an airport (via apt.dat), the old apt.dat is completely ignored. But the DSF-based overlay objects, facades, etc. are included; the custom scenery pack has to use exclusion zones to kill them off.
With this extension, the DSF-based overlay objects in a scenery pack can act as if they are in the apt.dat file, disappearing when the apt.dat airport is replaced. This means that when you replace an airport (via apt.dat file) not only do the runways go away, but so do the overlay elements.
Here’s the win: we can export our global airports from the X-Plane Scenery Gateway this way, and custom scenery will remove the overlay elements automatically just by replacing the apt.dat, even if no exclusion zones are present.
Here are some details:
There are two big advantages of this scheme:
Once X-Plane has this extension and the global airports are re-exported using it, global airports will fully disappear when any custom scenery pack replaces the airport by apt.dat, even if the custom scenery pack doesn’t have good exclusion zones.
This functionality will be available to third parties in WED 1.5 when it goes beta. In WED 1.5, if an overlay element is in the folder for an airport, it will be excluded when that airport is excluded. If an overlay element is ‘loose’ in the outer level hierarchy, it will not be excluded by airport (but will be affected by other pack’s exclusion zones).
Since gateway airports already have the objects “in” the airport folder, they are already authored to make this scheme work.
If you create your own DSFs using a low level tool like DSF2Text, the DSFLib source code, or something else crazy, I have posted the proposed schema here. That’s a technical link for people tinkering with the DSF format itself, but if you’re in that category, please do ping me to get early test materials. (The new code is also on GitHub.)
Two warnings to custom scenery authors: if you are creating a custom airport scenery pack, especially payware, please read these very carefully:
* As a side note I consider it a real problem that airports get uploaded and shared with the community under licenses that don’t allow for abandon-ware to be maintained. It’s clearly the right of the author to use any license you want, but as a community I hope we can encourage freeware authors to use a permissive open license.
X-Plane 10.45 Beta 1 is out – here are the release notes. This is a small update in terms of code change; the new feature is updated global airports and nav data, as well as a bunch of bug fixes; the beta period should be relatively short.
To get the new beta, run the X-Plane installer, update your copy of X-Plane and make sure “get new betas” is checked.
Prop torque is fixed in X-Plane 10.45 beta 1; the calculation was incorrect (causing too much torque from props) in previous versions of X-Plane.
In order to get the new correct physics, you must resave your aircraft in Plane-Maker 10.45 beta 1.
We have heard of authors doing a number of things to lower the effects of prop torque in old versions of X-Plane, including having plugins apply a counter-torque and tweaking the physics parameters of the aircraft itself. Because we cannot know if an aircraft has such work-arounds applied, the prop torque fix is applied only to aircraft resaved in 10.45 beta 1 or newer. This way the fix takes affect when an aircraft author can remove work-arounds.
We’ve seen a few reports (and Philipp has experienced first hand) that X-Plane will crash on startup with the very latest Catalyst drivers that came out last week. The crash appears to only happen if you have a machine with a discrete AMD GPU (e.g. a 7970M) and a built-in GPU on your CPU for low-power use.
We are investigating this with AMD now; in the meantime please use the previous Catalyst driver if you are seeing crashes.
If you have a desktop machine, don’t have an AMD card, or are on Mac or Linux this does not affect you.
X-Plane 10 Mobile is among the first games to be released for NVidia’s Shield set top box.
Part of the work of doing this release was putting game controller support into X-Plane mobile – you’ll be able to use a game controller on your Android or iOS phone or tablet too.
And part of the work was making the entire user interface accessible from a game controller, e.g. only button presses, no touch screen input. That code is going back to X-Plane 10 Global for keyboard navigation in our next generation user interface.
The 747 is out for X-Plane 10 Mobile too (iOS and Android):
The 747 started on X-Plane 10 Global and has been moved over to X-Plane 10 Mobile. We’ve tried to keep the two versions synchronized, so we can move some of the improvements from mobile back to the desktop version of X-Plane.
If you have a computer that can handle more detailed base meshes, AlpilotX’s free HD and (for those with serious hardware, UHD) meshes are a really great looking enhancement to X-Plane. Alpilotx just released a new HD version of South America with more up-to-date land class and OSM data.
Here are comparison screenshots.
