TL;DR: 10.36 works around the latest NVidia driver – let X-Plane auto-update and everything will just work the way it should.
X-Plane 10.36 is out now – it’s a quick patch of X-Plane 10.35 that works around what I believe to be a driver bug* in the new NVidia GeForce 352.86 drivers.
10.36 has been posted using our regular update process and has been pushed to Steam, so if you’re running 10.35, you’ll be prompted to update. The update is very small – about 10-12 MB of download.
With this patch, you can now run the latest NVidia drivers. I have no idea if those drivers are good (I have anecdotal reports that they’re both better and worse than the last drivers, but these kinds of reports often have a large ‘noise’ factor**).
We patched X-Plane because we can cut an X-Plane patch faster than NVidia can re-issue the driver, and the driver issue was causing X-Plane to not start at all for any users, which was turning into a customer support mess. Past NVidia-specific patches have been to fix bugs in X-Plane, but in this case, we’re simply avoiding a pot-hole. I hope that NVidia will get their driver fixed relatively soon so that people installing from DVDs with older versions of the sim won’t be stuck.
Update: NVidia fixed this bug in the new 353.06 drivers!
[OpenGL, Windows 8.1 -x86/x64]: GLSL shader compile error. [1647324]
* The bug is that #defines defined within a function body don’t macro-substitute, but #defines outside a function body too. The work-around is to move some #defines out of function bodies. If anyone can find a reason why #defines can’t be in function bodies, please shout at me, but it’s a pre-processor.
** We’ve had reports of huge fps improvements and losses on beta updates where we’ve made only cosmetic changes to the sim.
Note: this issue has been resolved – please see here!
I’ve received a few bug reports about this today: NVidia’s new 352.86 WHQL drivers for Windows do not work with X-Plane 10. I’m contacting Nvidia now to figure out what has happened.
In the meantime, to fly X-Plane, use the previous 340.52 WHQL driver.
I’ll post more when I learn more; we’ll resolve this with either a driver update or an X-Plane update, based on what has actually gone wrong and which can happen first.
Update: NVidia was able to suggest a work-around in our shaders that avoids what I think is a driver bug. Since we can cut an X-Plane build faster than NVidia can re-release their drivers, I have cut X-Plane 10.36 rc1.
You can get 10.36 rc1 by running the updater and checking “get new betas”; the updater will run even with the newest NVidia drivers.
10.36 rc1 is identical to 10.35 except for version number and a single shader change, but it’s also highly untested; I wanted to get it posted ASAP to accelerate the process. So please give it a try and file a bug if it doesn’t work like 10.35 (but working with the new NVidia drivers.)
Update 2: Sigh…this is what happens when I try to rush out a patch. The 10.36 patch’s free space calculation is totally borked. This will be fixed some time today. (This will be the third time I cut a patch.)
Update 3: the meta-data on the 10.36 rc1 patch is fixed – if you haven’t installed it yet, try again; you’ll need 30-40 MB of disk space, not 30-40 GB. 🙂
Update 4: Steam users – 10.36 will be available for Steam in a day or two; until then, please run older, functioning drivers.
Tyler is migrating the website to new hosting, and so the old server has decided to flip us one last middle finger. Needless to say, if you’re seeing this page, you probably waited for 30 seconds to get it. 🙁
I have WED 1.4b2 ready, as well as a cut of the command line scenery tools pack and MeshTool; I will post all of them once the server is migrated. Not a lot of good posting the files if you can’t download them.
Hopefully the website will be full speed again early next week, if not sooner.
UPDATE: Tyler says the site migration is finished. If you’re still having problems accessing X-Plane.com, demo downloaders, or sim updates, give him a shout at tyler@x-plane.com.
X-Plane 10.40 will have an option to load a larger local region of DSF scenery. For as long as I have been involved in X-Plane (back to X-Plane 6 as a user) the local scenery region was 3×2 tiles (each 1×1 degree in latitude and longitude). With this option, the region is 4×3.
What this gets us is the option for a longer viewing distance before we have to transition from the higher detail DSF scenery tiles to the lower resolution whole-planet render. In X-plane 10 the planet render actually has shape, but the resolution is low; if you see it up close, it does not look good.
Some fine print:
You will only be able to use this option in the 64-bit build of X-Plane. The 32-bit version does not have enough memory.
Combining extended DSFs with heavy third party scenery may be unacceptably slow. For example, Alpilotx was able to run extended DSFs with the HD meshes, but his computer has monstrous amounts of RAM (64 GB I think??). I’m pretty sure extending with the UHD meshes is a non-starter.
Load time shouldn’t be too bad; this change also includes a re-work of the DSF loader that takes better advantage of multi-core hardware. If you have a 4-core machine your DSF load time shouldn’t be worse, even with extended DSFs.
Here are two sets of pictures taken over the demo area at extreme res on my PC; this shows the interaction between atmospheric scattering and loading more DSFs. The camera is at about 30k feet.
Normal DSFs, no scattering
Normal DSFs, with scattering
Extended DSFs, no scattering
Extended DSFs with scattering
The combination of pushing the transition to the planet “out” away from us and using scattering to remove color detail starts to get something that looks more like the real world.
Note that to get the match-up in the lower right, you must have Earth Orbit textures (which come with any full install) and you must be in extreme res or the planet starts to get fuzzier.
Here’s another set.
Normal DSFs, No Scattering
Normal DSFs, Scattering
Extended DSFs, No Scattering
Extended DSFs, Scattering
In the long long term, I expect the planet to improve in render quality (with at least a 2x boost in image quality, and perhaps better than that in mesh shape), and I expect scattering and other lighting to improve in quality.
I do not expect to further extend the DSF box beyond 4×3; I think that the planet can improve to further “bridge the gap.”
Philipp and I will be at the 13th German Flight Simulation Conference in Paderborn this weekend. (Well, I am crossing my fingers that I can still make it despite the lufthansa strike.)
If you ask about the OcRift in person I won’t be able to just delete your comment. 🙂
Report bugs on the gateway – the scenery tools have their own tab.
If you have reported bugs against WED in the past and the bug says “please retry in WED 1.4” or “fixed in WED 1.4”, please go re-check the bug now!
The online user’s manual is up-to-date; pick WED Manual from the help menu to see it and read about the new features.
I’ll try to write some release notes up later but there isn’t a procedure in place for WED for that right now. Some major features:
Download from the X-Plane Scenery Gateway
I think the most important feature of the new build is the ability to directly download an airport from the scenery gateway. This feature is intended for authors and editors who want to modify and re-upload the scenery; in this case direct download has a number of advantages:
It’s a lot quicker and easier.
Better data quality: there’s a lot less data precision loss in the direct download because the format used is not binary DSF; overlay elements spanning DSF tiles will not be split when you get the airport directly.
Version tracking: when you download from the airport, WED knows the scenery ID you downloaded from and sets up a history chain when you re-upload. This sets us up to more easily track changes and understand what are major airport changes vs. minor editing changes.
I think direct download is going to be especially good for bug-swatting. If an airport had one small problem, it used to be that most of the work in fixing it was the import and export; this is now totally automated, so you can just download, edit, re-upload.
Orthophoto Creation
WED 1.4 builds orthophoto draped polygons for you. In this workflow you:
Import source imagery, e.g. a TIFF or PNG. If it’s a GeoTIFF, WED places it for you. (GeoTIFF placement is fixed in WED 1.4.)
WED converts the image format to DDS when you build the scenery pack.
WED makes the draped .pol file for you, and puts a correct LOAD_CENTER directive in place to get paging.
It’s a much quicker and simpler work-flow than the old scheme from WED 1.1 (which was basically a hack I put in for Sergio to get the LOWI demo area built for X-Plane 9).
If you want to make your own .pol files you can still use .pol files directly – WED works either way.
GeoJPEG-2000 Got Kicked Out
I turned off GeoJPEG-2000 support in this beta; our testing indicated that .jp2 was super-unstable and unreliable. I’m not sure whether .jp2 will make it into this release or whether we’ll even keep the feature, but one thing is clear: it’s holding up an otherwise solid beta. There’s no reason why anyone should have to deal with broken GeoTIFF location, crashes on certain library scenery objects, or having to manually download from the Gateway for longer than necessary.
I still need to do more investigation into the crashes we’ve seen but so far the signs don’t look good – there are multiple indicators that point in the direction of .jp2 not being ready for prime-time.
Note: Oops – I wrote this a week ago and forgot to post it. 10.35 will probably “go final” shortly.
If you haven’t tried X-Plane 10.35, please do. Check “get betas” in the updater to get it. Just one bug fix and a license file in the release candidate. A Steam RC should come soon.
Chris took a sledgehammer to the Windows build materials for the scenery tools and pretty much rebuilt everything for Windows; I’ll have betas in a day or two.
UPDATE: The RC is available on Steam also. To get it, right-click on X-Plane in the Steam library, click the “BETA” tab, and then select the beta to opt-in to.
Ben posted a few weeks ago about our quest for “One Bug Base to Rule Them All“—our goal of cleaning up the fact that we had no fewer than five bug bases running, each for different products, with no communication between them.
This situation is understandably confusing—bugs that dealt with the Airport Scenery Gateway wound up in the WED database, bugs filed against WED wound up in the X-Plane database, and so on.
I’m happy to report that we’ve taken the first steps toward unification: today, we have just one place to report issues with:
any of the scenery tools (WED, MeshTool, the AC3D plugin, etc.),
airports and scenery packs in the Gateway or in X-Plane, and
Click the “Report a Problem” link in the navigation at the top of the page.
Use the tabs to select the type of bug you’re reporting: does it deal with an airport/scenery pack, the Gateway site, or the scenery tools?
Fill in the reporting form with as much detail as you can, and hit Report Issue.
In the future, we’ll move to a similar system for the plugin system and X-Plane itself. At that point, we’ll have one page (probably on the main X-Plane site, rather than the Gateway) with a tab for all the things you might need to file a bug for.
EFIS App networking support will remain in X-Plane for the life of v10. We thought that no one was using this option, and interestingly, none of the bug reports were from actual EFIS-App users. (If you are using EFIS app with v10, maybe drop us a line? EFIS app has been discontinued for a very long time.)
It turns out that a third party app is using EFIS App’s network output. This is sort of weird; the output is labeled for EFIS App and isn’t a published “thing. On the other hand, it’s really easy to figure out how the option works and jump on it, and that’s apparently what the developer did.* So we won’t pull it until a major version break.**
WorldEditor Soon
I think we’ll get a WorldEditor 1.4 public beta early next week; I’m just going through the last beta-stopping bugs now.
Linux Nerds: I need help with this bug. Basically we don’t have a way for me to compile a cross-distribution WED release on Ubuntu (Debian) without CURL going somewhat haywire.
If we don’t come up with anything better, my default action is going to be to compile on Ubuntu and if it doesn’t work on your distribution, you can rebuild from the open source. That’s not awesome, so if anyone has a better idea, I’m interested. (But: doing several builds on several VMs for several distros is not on the table. I can’t spend that kind of time on Linux build process.)
MeshTool Anyone?
I have a build of MeshTool that can build X-Plane 10-style DSFs (with the new terrains). If you’d like to try it, please let me know.
Edit: if you want to try an early private beta of MeshTool, please email me. My goal is to have 2 or 3 users try a private build first to make sure it more or less works; then we’ll do a public beta.
* It turns out that the EFIS App output is just the regular data output on another port. More modern options like Xavion and Foreflight really have their own proprietary protocols.
It begs the question of whether we should intentionally have a ‘handshake’ with our own app to guarantee that we don’t have to do third party compatibility on what we consider our own internal interfaces.
** There’s an easy work-around for the authors if they want their product to keep working with the next major version: go back to using X-Plane’s regular UDP data output, which is actually a published thing.
X-Plane 10.35 beta 1 is out – this is mainly a release to get hundreds of new and updated airports out into the world. There are also a number of bug fixes and some features and improvements to the sim.
Release notes – including a list of all of the airports.
Borked airport from the X-Plane Airport Gateway? Report it…here! (You use your gateway account to report bugs with airports on the gateway – or to fix those bugs by updating the airport!)
X-Plane 10.35 beta 1 is meant to be a short, tight release to get out airports; I’d like to have the whole cycle over and done with in a week or two. We’ll do a larger longer release in the future where we put in bigger features and more code change and let it sit for a while, but this one has been kept lean.
If beta 1 turns out to be reasonably stable, I’m going to look at cutting a beta 1 of WED 1.4 next.
