X-Plane 10.42 is a small bug fix release, and it’s out now as a free update for all X-Plane 10 customers, Global Edition, Digital Download and Steam. We also updated the installer on Monday.
With 10.42 out, we’re looking to get onto 10.45 ASAP, which will include the latest set of airports from the X-Plane Scenery Gateway.
I’d like to see us release new airports from the gateway every eight weeks, as long as there are enough new updates (and so far that has definitely been the case). I’m posting that here, publicly so that when Julian and Robin are ready to release new airports and data and I’m going “um, well, maybe next week, I’m really busy and the kids threw up on me this morning” they can point to this post and go “eight weeks!”
Since El Capitan came out, SASL has been crashing on quit when used in aircraft with customized sound. While I work on neither SASL nor El Capitan, both are (at least partly) open source, so I spent a few hours yesterday and located the bugs.
The good news is: this bug is fixed in SASL version 2.4. The bad news is: you’ll need to make sure the aircraft you are flying is using SASL 2.4 – and this applies to every aircraft that you have that uses SASL.
If you develop an aircraft using SASL, you can get the latest free version of SASL here. Note that this new version is apparently 64-bit only.
If you are using a freeware aircraft that is no longer supported, I think you could theoretically drop in the new SASL and see if it fixes things. If the aircraft is payware, the aircraft author might not be thrilled to have to support a “modified” aircraft and might prefer to do the upgrade in-house.
If you are a developer of SASL or you use OpenAL, you can read the gory technical details here.
X-Plane 10.41 release candidate 3 is live – check “get betas” to update to it using our installers, or enable betas on Steam to get it via Steam. Hopefully it will go final within a few days; r3 fixes the stupid version number typo and also fixes a bug in our crash detection analytics and the instructor station.
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Ben Supnik |
I cut X-Plane 10.41 release candidate 1 last night – to get it, run the X-Plane Installer, pick update, and check “get betas”. Here’s a list of bug fixes.
10.41 is just critical bug fixes – fixes to crashes, and fixes to third party aircraft that didn’t make 10.40. No new features, no new airports. The goal here is to get these fixes out rapidly.
If your third party aircraft worked in 10.36 and does not work with 10.41 release candidate 1, please file a bug ASAP. We do not have any remaining open bugs with aircraft compatibility.
Steam users: we’ll cut a Steam version of 10.41 in the next few days if we don’t get any other reports – it’s the same plan as last time.
A number of users have asked me about why a build is sometimes named 10.40r1 or 10.40. Here’s how it works:
- A build of X-Plane is called a “release candidate” if we think at the time we create the build that it could be an official release – e.g. there are no known bugs.
- Release candidates get an “r” in the name, e.g. 1040r1 is our first release attempt for 10.40. The previous builds had a “b”, e.g. 10.40b6 is the sixth beta of X-Plane 10.40.
- If the release candidate doesn’t have show-stopping problems, we make it official – at that point every user gets that version when they update, even if they don’t have “get betas” checked.
- We do not re-cut the build or rename the build. Instead, the “r1” remains in the name of the product forever in the Log.txt file and if you pick “Get Info” or “Properties”. We need this so that tech support can identify someone using the official release versus an older release candidate.
- The version on the startup screen simply reads 10.40 – most users flying the sim don’t care about r1 or r2.
In order to remove the “r3” or “r1” from the long version of the build name, we would have to re-cut the build, which would mean a needless update and download for everyone, but more importantly, there would be a small but non-zero risk that we introduce a bug in the final version that was never tested in the release candidate.
You can see this strategy on OS X too – the OS version is 10.10.5 in the about box, but if you use the System Information App you get 10.10.5 (14F27) – that last cryptic number is the build identifier – it’s sort of like our r1 or r2.
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Ben Supnik |
It’s been a while since I’ve written a blog entry because…I’ve been working in the dungeons, coding for Android, unlike Ben who spends his days at Starbucks sipping lattes and writing blog posts all day. 🙂
Seriously, if you have not yet heard, we’ve finally released X-Plane 10 for Android. It was a long, arduous process. Maybe I’ll write about the experience in a separate blog post if anyone’s interested. Anyway, back to the product…It has the same features and pricing model as X-Plane 10 for iPhone/iPad and will remain that way for the foreseeable future. I don’t expect Android to lag behind like it has in the past. If anything, it will probably be the first to get updates since there’s no painfully slow Apple approval process to sit through.
Where’s the iOS Update?
This initial release on Android is identical to the current release 10.1.0 on iOS except for the additional of liveries! This update will be available for iOS as soon as Apple approves it. It’s currently sitting in their queue.
What’s the Android Plan?
Currently I’m in firefighting mode! As of today, there are 7,654 supported devices so needless to say, there are some device-specific crash bugs…most on devices that I was not able to acquire myself during testing. I’ll admit however, there are fewer than I expected. We’re currently seeing 90.4% crash-free users. This is low compared to our iOS stability of 99.5% however the industry metric for games is supposedly 97%. I can’t remember where I read that, but that’s been my pseudo-goal so I plan on releasing frequent patches until we get there.
Aside from hardware-specific OpenGL issues, the biggest source of instability seems to be with Google’s In-App Billing service. I’ve found and fixed some issues in their sample code which will help, but many users cannot even link up with the service! I have not gotten enough data to fully understand that yet.
An update to 10.1.4 has been pushed this morning. It should go live in a couple of hours. That should fix stability issues for some people but I don’t expect it to move the needle significantly until the In-App Billing issues have been resolved. Until then, I’ll keep at it!
What’s next for Mobile?
Android is a top priority at the moment. Until we reach stability there, almost all of my efforts will be focused on doing so. Once Android has settled down a bit, the work that we do will be for both platforms.
I know the map is a source of annoyance for a lot of people. It appears, unsolicited, when trying to operate the throttle. I can look into that.
We do of course have more aircraft and missions coming. I can’t talk about the specifics of those yet but our artists are very busy at work making more stunning planes.
But where’s the “meat and potatoes” features? Unfortunately, a lot of the feedback that I get is not specific enough for us to use. I see things like “I like Infinite Flight/Aerofly better!” which is fine…that’s a matter of preference. But WHY do you like it better? What features are you missing most?
So here’s your chance to chime in. What’s important to you? What will make the app fit your needs better? Please feel free to comment below. Get your friends to comment too. The more feedback that I get, the more I can make sure our customer’s needs are being met.
Like most major updates to X-Plane, we are working on a quick bug-fix patch, and it will be out soon. (This will be 10.41 and will only aim to fix critical bugs.) At this point it’s looking like I’ll have a 10.41 release candidate up Monday.*
There are unfortunately a few things that are causing a ton of bug reports that we can’t easily fix in X-Plane.
New Gateway airports will not go into 10.41; we’ll get more airports released as soon as possible once we get major bugs fixed.
There is one more bug I am looking into: quite a few users are seeing crash in audio code, only on – all together now – Windows 10. Since we ship a DLL of OpenAL I am hoping we can figure out what’s going on and fix it. I’ll post more when I get more info.
* Last night I finally reproduced a bug that I have suspected for a very long time: if you have a third party scenery library that modifies the cars and the right set of conditions happens, X-Plane will crash.
Nearly every bug report I’ve seen of this is of the form “I was just flying for a long time and X-Plane crashed” – no user had figured out that it was (1) traffic related or (2) due to third party libraries.
I should have a fix for this in 10.41 but in the meantime if you are in the “I was flying and crashed” camp, try turning off cars and see if things stabilize. If things get better, you can turn cars back on in 10.41.
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Ben Supnik |
A ton of new stuff came out yesterday! Everything shipped! Here’s a summary…
X-Plane 10.40 Is Final
X-Plane 10.40 is now the official release of X-Plane, for all users. This includes Steam users! X-Plane 10.40 features hundreds of new 3-d airports, extended visibility with faster DSF loading, and just a ton of new features. Here’s a short summary of what’s new if you haven’t been in the beta. Here’s a really long summary.
Two gotchas:
- Windows 10 users – if you let X-Plane auto-update and it fails with “Permission Denied”, you can work around this by running the X-Plane Installer directly (with X-Plane not running) and update X-Plane directly. Once you have 10.40, the next auto-update should work.
- We have a handful of bug fixes that didn’t make 10.40 final – they’ll be in a 10.41 patch later this week or early next week.
Control Pad – Control X-Plane From Your iPad
Control Pad is a remote instructor’s station app for iPad and iPhone. You can set up and modify your flight without exiting the cockpit; it’s great for training.
Control Pad is free and works with X-Plane 10.40.
X-Plane 10 Mobile for Android
X-Plane 10 Mobile is now available for Android in the Google Play Store. This is the same modern X-Plane 10 Mobile that we shipped for iPhone/iPad last year. The app is free to fly, with in-app purchase of additional aircraft. Like X-Plane 10 Mobile for iOS, every plane features a custom working 3-d cockpit. More details here.
The Android release features new liveries available for free that are not yet available on iOS – those liveries are coming to iPhone shortly; the plan is to have the same features on iOS and Android, just like we have the same features in X-Plane 10 Global on Mac, Windows and Linux.
(The religious wars over smart phone operating systems are even more crazy than Mac vs Windows. It will be interesting to compare sales of the two mobile operating systems – this is the first time we’ve truly had the same product on both operating systems for an Apples to Apples comparison.)
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Ben Supnik |
After a few false starts, X-Plane 10.40 release candidate 3 is now available to Steam users.
Steam users: to try the release candidate, you’ll need to go to the “properties” of X-Plane (in the steam client) and opt in to betas.
(If you can’t figure out how to do this, you should not opt in to betas!)
As with all pre-release software: if you would be annoyed by a crash or bug in X-Plane, do not try the beta or release candidate. The point of betas and release candidates is to find bugs, not to get X-Plane updates early.
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Ben Supnik |
Another post in the category of “things that go wrong due to stuff in your operating system”: some users have had problems automatically updating X-Plane when using Windows 10. The error manifests itself as a “permission denied” error when the installer tries to update X-Plan.exe. No one within the company has ever seen this error but we have seen multiple reports from users.
One user was exceedingly patient and ran half a dozen tests for me and sent me back mini-dump files; via this process I think I have learned what is going wrong.
- When X-Plane goes to auto-update itself, it has to quit itself after launching the installer. If it does not, the X-Plane.exe file cannot be rewritten to a new version because it is in use.
- A DLL (PlayToDevice.dll) gets a chance to run shut-down code as part of the OS process-shut-down procedure. PlayToDevice attempts to de-register notifications of MIB changes and in the process hangs X-Plane.
- When the installer goes to update X-Plane.exe, X-Plane.exe is still running (since it is hung unloading PlayToDevice.dll) and the update fails.
The bad news is: I have no idea why this is happening, what is special about the users who have this problem, or what could be causing it. I couldn’t find any useful info on PlayToDevice.dll (if you know what this is, I’m all ears) – it’s definitely not something we asked the OS for.
The good news is: you can work around this problem quite easily:
- Quit X-Plane yourself.
- Run the installer directly from the desktop and
- Pick “update x-plane” and the update will work normally.
This isn’t as easy as auto-update, but it does still work.
A Possible Fix in RC3
I was able to jiggle the shut-down code to not hang one user’s system – this barely counts as a “bug fix” since it’s just me changing the order of shut-down calls and hoping something works out. But in case it helps all users, this fix is in 10.40 RC 3.
A note of warning: since the fix is in 10.40 RC3, all updates to 10.40 RC3 will have to be done by hand if you are affected. Once you have 10.40 RC3, the next update should work correctly. This delay is due to the bug being in the version of X-Plane being replaced.
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Ben Supnik |
X-Plane 10.40 RC2 is out now. This RC has a few key bug fixes:
- RC1 had a bug in the file scanner that would cause some key frame tables in OBJs to be misread. This could cause add-ons to look wrong.
- There was a shader compile problem on Linux, definitely due to bad GLSL.
- I tracked down an out of bounds memory read in the autogen engine.
At this point I believe there is going to be an RC3 tonight because:
- I have a reported work-around for auto-update failures on Windows 10. That’s pretty high priority – if auto-update doesn’t work, we get tech support emails from now until doomsday.
- There’s a spurious error message in the log. This should really just be considered cosmetic, but for some reason y’all are really, really, really concerned about error messages in the logs* so if we don’t fix it, my in-box will fill up.
Steam users: there will not be an RC2 on Steam – if RC2 is indeed replaced by RC3 within 24 hours, then we’ll wait for RC3 to go to Steam. The reasoning here is the same as it was with RC1.
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Ben Supnik |
