X-Plane 10.31 release candidate one is now live. To get it, you need to run the X-Plane installer and check “Check for new betas as well as updates” – 10.31 isn’t final so it won’t auto-notify you.
Please do get 10.31 Release Candidate 1 and try it. We’d like to go final with it shortly.
The release notes are here – that’s basically a list of the bugs fixed. Go read them if you want to know what is fixed! (If the release notes don’t say it is fixed, then there is no change from 10.30.)
Please do not report bugs in the comment section – a little bit of me dies inside every time you do.
It looks like we have some bug fixes that will go into a 10.32, but for 10.31 I wanted to get out smaller fixes that we could ship quickly. So hopefully 10.31r1 will be the only 10.31 patch and then we can get fixes in for 10.32 in another week or two.
Just a quick note: last night I fixed the bug in 1030 where the sky is corrupt when you use the instructor’s station and HDR together. This is the last of the ‘quick’ fixes for 1031, so I’m hoping to have 1031 cut over the weekend.
When I first saw pics of this bug I thought it might have been an old driver, but the number of users seeing it made it clear that it was a real thing; as it turns out, it was a subtle OpenGL screw-up by me. Frankly the amazing thing is that we’re not seeing it on every Windows driver. (From what I can tell, the AMD drivers “helpfully” work around my error, hiding the bug.)
We’ll post release notes with the beta with a complete bug fix list.
For about a year there has been a subtle bug in how X-Plane draws taxiways: if you build an S-curve shape out of a single bezier and it is almost perfectly symmetrical, X-Plane would go “nah, why bother” and replace it with a single straight line segment.*
So in 10.30 I fixed it, and the result was a bunch of broken airports with missing pavement. (YMML is high on this list!)
It turns out that these airports have authoring errors – typically a segment of pavement that should be straight instead being formed by two overlapping beziers. This is definitely wrong, but due to the bug, X-Plane would simplify the overlapping S curve into a single straight segment and the layout would work. Only now that X-Plane correctly renders the S curve does the taxiway fail (because taxiways may not have overlaps). So two wrongs may not make a right, but they do make a “hey, that looks okay, let’s ship it”.
Note that the overlaps depend on the rendering setting of X-Plane – a different S curve is formed at different rendering settings; the overlap that causes the taxiway to disappear may only appear at a particular rendering setting.
For 10.31 I am going to undo my bug fix. This doesn’t make me happy, but I think it is necessary:
We have no idea how many airports have their taxiways broken by this bug.
Authors have no easy way to detect this problem, other than re-testing every airport at every rendering setting.
Even if an airport looks okay at all rendering settings, future rendering settings may cause the problem.
This is too much uncertainty to solve ‘by hand’. So my plan is:
Undo the code change for 1031. YMML and friends comes back.
Develop validation code in WED to detect this kind of authoring error.
Ship that version of WED so new authoring work will be checked.
Run the WED code on all airports and make a list of ones that need repair.
Fix all of the known problems in the airport gateway.
Redo the code change so X-Plane is correct.
This isn’t going to be a quick process, but then it can’t be, because third parties have apt.dats shipping now that only work when X-Plane has the buggy taxiway code in place. So we need to ship WED and then give third parties enough time to go back and check their layouts and fix them if necessary.
I expect to get a 10.31 beta with the taxiway code changed back this week.
For WED validation, I have some test code to detect errors but it isn’t ready yet. The problem is that it’s not good enough to detect errors with overlapping beziers**; we have to consider two bezier curves near enough to each other that with the error in rendering introduced by WED’s rendering settings, we get an overlap. (So authors, better be safe than sorry in creating your pavement.)
If there’s a moral to this story, I think it’s this: when we (LR) don’t provide good tools for authors to validate that their work is correct, the resulting body of work will end up with subtle errors.
* X-Plane renders beziers by measuring how far the mid-point of the curve is from the average of the ends. As long as this distance is ‘too far’ and the iteration count isn’t too high, X-Plane divides the bezier in half and repeats the process. In this way beziers are broken into enough line segments to approximate the bezier within a minimum error limit. The rendering settings control the error limit.
The bug: if the curve was a ‘balanced’ S curve the mid point of the curve was the average of the end points and X-Plane went “great, no error” and stopped dividing.
** Which is already not an easy problem – the analytical solution for bezier intersection is a 9th order polynomial!
Laminar Research, creators of the X-Plane flight simulator franchise, has released the latest update to X-Plane, version 10.30.
This latest release represents the largest and most significant X-Plane update to date. It not only contains numerous fixes and performance improvements, but also some substantial additions to the product itself. Foremost is the inclusion of the new GPS. The previous versions of X-Plane also included a GPS instrument but it could only do direct-to navigation and could not implement a GPS approach. With the recent introduction of GPS enabled approach systems at many airports, the new GPS in X-Plane will allow customers to practice actual GPS approaches using an instrument familiar to most general aviation pilots. The new GPS is a drop-in replacement for the old X-Plane GPS, so that with one click in Laminar’s PlaneMaker, old aircraft can be upgraded to the more IFR capable version. The X-Plane 10.30 default aircraft come with the new GPS already installed. The new GPS is based on the Garmin 430 and Garmin 530 and both variants are included.
The 10.30 update also includes major improvements to both the weather and scenery systems. The system for the placement of autogen scenery has been refined so buildings, trees, and other objects more accurately reflect their real-world counterparts.
With the recent release of World Editor 1.3 and the Airport Scenery Gateway, hundreds of new highly detailed airports have also been included in this latest and major update to X-Plane 10.
We’ll have a 10.31 bug fix patch, probably in about a week, with a few straggler bugs that didn’t make the cut. In the meantime, aircraft designers can start using the new GPS.
Once X-Plane 10.30 goes final*, we will also update X-Plane on Steam to version 10.30. The update for Steam users will be applied using Steam’s normal updating system, not the X-Pane updater. (Basically if you installed via Steam, you update via Steam; if you installed via Laminar Research’s installer, you update via our installer.)
How soon will it be available? I don’t know; this is the first patch we’ve done via Steam. We’ve done literally one hundred patches (including betas) for X-Plane 10, so we know how long it takes to cut a patch, upload it to the servers, etc. For Steam, we’re just learning this now. I am hoping it will only lag our installer by a few days at most, but Steam is new to us and partly out of our hands (in that it’s Steam’s servers doing the downloads).
* So far it looks like 10.30r2 will be final, but I will look at the submitted bugs tomorrow.
X-Plane 10.30r2 is out now. You should go get this RC and try it. I believe it is very likely to go final in the next week.
There are known bugs* in 1030r2 – the plan is to put 1030r2 out as final, then issue 10.31 in perhaps a week or two to mop up about a dozen bug fixes that didn’t make in.
By getting 10.30 out now, third parties can stop holding their breath and ship aircraft that use the new GPS.
By giving 10.31 another week or two we lower the risk profile on some of those extra bugs.
There’s always one big bug that gets reported as soon as we go final, so a 10.31 is inevitable; we might as well plan for it.
X-Plane 10.30 has had an incredibly long beta period, so our goal is to get it out now and unblock third parties.
August 28, 2014, Columbia, South Carolina. Laminar Research is pleased to announce the release of its Airport Scenery Gateway, as well as an updated and improved version of its airport scenery tool, World Editor 1.3. The Airport Scenery Gateway can be accessed on the internet at http://gateway.x-plane.com and the new and improved version of World Editor is available for download at http://developer.x-plane.com under Scenery Tools.
The Airport Scenery Gateway was created to facilitate the populating of X-Plane with 3D airport sceneries that are consistent in quality and appearance, error-checked, and will work with a standard installation of X-Plane 10. During the past several months Laminar Research has received hundreds of airports designed by World Editor users. World Editor is an airport scenery creation and editing tool for Laminar’s X-Plane 10 that allows the typical X-Plane user to create airport scenery.
By establishing an internet gateway for scenery submission, it is now possible with World Editor 1.3 for users to automatically submit airport scenery contributions directly to the Airport Scenery Gateway. X-Plane users can visit the Airport Scenery Gateway to search for airport scenery submissions. The scenery can then be immediately downloaded into X-Plane 10 before it appears in a scheduled X-Plane update.
If your airport is not already in X-Plane 10.30, please use the Gateway to share it via WED 1.3; do not send it directly to Robin. At this point Robin should only be getting navaid patches. You must use WED 1.3 to upload to the Gateway!
The airports that are already in 10.30 are uploaded by ‘WEDBot’, which is an account we used to transfer our existing collection into the Gateway. As users share data, we will start to get good attribution; I think this is important because we will know who to contact to sort out issues with airports.
If you could not upload an airport due to a missing ICAO, we are working on this now.
We are working on a Linux build of WED 1.3 and will post it as soon as we resolve the chaos of shipping a working app on multiple distributions. mroe has done great work to make Linux happen.
We will periodically ‘roll’ shared airports into X-Plane via point releases to the sim. I do not recommend collecting a huge pile of Gateway custom scenery packs; they will simply conflict with newer data from X-Plane when it comes out. The ability to download a pack directly from the Gateway is meant for authors who want to view the state of a pack and possibly modify it. The gateway is not meant to be a scenery file sharing site.
Finally, I think this has been discussed before, but…custom scenery authors:
Always put exclusion zones around your custom airports! Even if there are no 3-d buildings at an airport today, they may appear in the next update.
With the Gateway open, 3-d is going to appear quickly!
Technically I’m kind of out on paternity leave right now, but a quick update on some, um, stuff!
X-Plane 10.30r1 is out. Honestly, if you don’t know where the bug base and release notes are now, it’s too late. We’re in RC already! (I cut this RC about a week later than expected due to said paternity leave above – I’m sorry for the chaos this has caused third party developers who want to ship add-ons requiring the new GPS.)
WED 1.3 and the X-Plane Airport Gateway should debut in the next week I think – I’m cutting an RC now.
Philipp is working on updating our Oculus Rift support for the new SDK and DK2 dev kits. The SDK for the Rift changed a lot recently, and the docs/sample code are actually out of sync with the SDK, so I’m not sure how soon he’ll be able to tie this up. We’ll cut a 10.31 with this code as soon as we have it.
X-Plane 10.30 beta 8 is now (after 27 hours of syncing!) live – more bug fixes listed here.
Aircraft, scenery and plugin authors: this may be the last beta; if things go well we’ll cut an RC next week. If you have been ignoring 1030, go get beta 8 immediately! If you have been ignoring your users reports of problems with 1030, please start investigating.
If there is something in your add-on that doesn’t work with 1030, we don’t know about it and we can’t fix what we don’t know about. Please get this beta and make sure your add-ons work as expected!
X-Plane 10.30 beta 8 is mirroring to our servers now; this beta contains a pile of recut DSFs, fixing some of the worst DSF bugs. I will post a complete list of recut DSFs in the release notes; what follows are just a few hilights from really prominent DSFs.
Terrain recut to match the complete airport.
The truckee River is back, connecting Pyramid Lake and Lake Tahoe
The Tennessee River is back.
The lakes near Edwards AFB are now Salt Flats. One is still wet – it wasn’t fixed in OSM when we pulled data.
Terrain recut to support new runway in Tokyo.
The Ottowa River is back, eh?
Botany Bay is now…a bay.
Terrain recut around new runway development.
Beaches underneath the Manhattan bridges fixed.
Lake Hood restored.
The mountains are fixed – the originals were affected by a bad DEM.
Terrain recut to reflect new airport area as they expand KORD.
Terrain recut with airport included. This airport is still a bit wild, but have you seen the real airfield?!?!
I’m not sure how long the mirror will take to finish; I’m hoping we’ll go live with the beta tonight or tomorrow.
The X-Plane updater will download scenery updates if (and only if) you have the base scenery installed. So if you have the entire world installed, you’ll get the entire set of updates (the DSFs themselves are about 500 MB); if you only have the US, for example, you’ll get some tiles but not others, and if you just have a demo, you’ll just a core file update.
If you install scenery later, simply run the updater again (the install-scenery function gives you a chance to run an update at the end of DVD scenery install) to get any fixed DSFs you might not have gotten at the time.
(Alpilotx had a good suggestion for the installer that I’d like to do in the future: an option to skip scenery updates. This would let users get a sim update immediately, and then fetch the scenery later if bandwidth is tight.)
