Category: News

The What And When of X-Plane 10.30

(Spoiler alert: the answer to the “when” question is going to be deeply unsatisfying and annoy you.  Sorry – there isn’t a date.  But at least you’ll know what’s going on.)

It’s been over four weeks since Philipp publicly demonstrated an early X-Plane 10.30 build with the new GPS.  What’s going on now?  What about 10.30?

What’s In X-Plane 10.30

Here’s a rough overview of what’s going into 10.30.  We’ll have a complete change log when we release a public beta; right now the change log is not compiled, and it’s going to be long enough that I can’t go through everything now for a blog post.  (To give you an idea, Austin has 158 commits on his branch going in.)

The one truly big new features is the new GPS Navigator that will ship in X-Plane 10.30.  Please note that an aircraft must be modified to take advantage of it.  It looks like a basic modification (e.g. if the aircraft already has the old G430) should be a few clicks in Plane-Maker.  Similarly, you can add the GPS to your aircraft with drag-and-drop in the panel editor.

Philipp has Oculus Rift support working but we’re still trying to figure out whether to ship it in 10.30 or wait; the actual Rift support is usable but the user interface is still quirky.  Since they’re not actually selling devices to consumers yet we may wait.

We’re working on a number of visual improvements:

• Tuning and improvements to the look of the clouds, including their behavior as you fly into and out of them.
• Optionally increasing the distance the DSF scenery is drawn for better long-range rendering.
• Better fog in lower visibility situations.  (I’ll try to post some experimental pictures over the next few days.)

This stuff is not finished – in particular, my fog work is not done yet, but if we can get it all working together it should make the visual experience in X-Plane 10 a lot better, and a lot closer to what we imagined.

Under the hood 10.30 contains major changes to Plane-Maker’s panel editor and the entire OpenGL stack; these changes don’t provide any immediate features – this is just us putting in new infrastructure for future updates.  I mention this only for completeness; infrastructure changes can cause bugs that we’ll fix before and during beta, but they’re necessary to keep the product evolving.  The OpenGL changes in particular can affect plugins if they haven’t followed plugin SDK guidelines.

10.30 has some small extensions for third party developers, including a number of new dataref-based interfaces to customize sim behavior; we held off on this kind of thing during 10.20 to ship 64-bits faster so now we’re catching up on adding flexibility for third parties.  I’ll post a complete list with the release notes; some of this work is already done and some is still in-progress.

Finally there’s just a huge number of bug fixes, including a number of high profile and stubborn bugs.  Please do not ask about your favorite bug in the comments (I will nuke your comment!).  We will post complete release notes when we reach public beta.

The Release Process

We’re trying two changes to our release process for X-Plane 10.30:

• We are doing extensive private pre-beta testing before the public beta.  Normally we release a public beta and get 300 reports that all tell us the same one big bug.  This time we are starting with a much smaller group of testers and slowly growing it; this gives us much more efficient feedback and should speed the whole process up.
• We are doing private testing on parts of the sim individually before we jam them all together.  I’ve had users test my “lots of DSFs” code separately from Philipp having people test the GPS.  Traditionally we’d test everything at once, and the chaos of having so much new code in one single build made life hard for both testers and developers.  So this time we’re  starting small and slowly bringing the pieces together.

(Please do not email or post requesting private beta access – we are not looking for additional testers at this time.)

This process is an experiment; when 10.30 is done we’ll have to step back and see if the added complexity saved us real development time.

When Will 10.30 Be Released

We are currently privately testing some parts of 10.30.  My expectation is that we will reach a public beta of 10.30 with the GPS, but without all fog-related features in weeks. (I don’t know how many weeks – it depends on how fast the current bugs get fixed and what new bugs are found.)  Austin and I have differing views on this; I always push toward “don’t public beta until all of the bugs are gone” and Austin pushes toward “let’s get people the new GPS ASAP.”  I think the actual public beta will be somewhere in the middle.

The current plan is to get the GPS public before we integrate some of the newer fog features so that users can use the GPS (and third parties can start to add it to their airplanes) without everyone being held back on my incomplete fog code.  We’ll roll the fog code in when it becomes stable enough.

What Else Is Going On That’s Not In 10.30

A few things that are not part of 10.30:

• Alex is still working on autogen; we’ll release art assets when they are complete and shippable, but 10.30 won’t wait for them.  (10.30 does have the autogen engine enhancements he needs.)
• I still have a bug left to fix for DSF recuts; those also aren’t tied directly to 10.30.
• The Airport Gateway and WED 1.3 (to send airports to the gateway) are in late development and early test; they’ll ship as soon as they are ready, but don’t require an X-Plane update.
• Once the Airport Gateway is live, we’ll gather up all of the airports users have shared with us since X-Plane 10.25.  We’ll include those airports in an X-Plane patch whenever they’re ready – if that’s after 10.30 we can do a small update to push out airports very easily.

Put another way, X-Plane 10.30 is mainly about code changes; if the various art asset and data updates become available early enough, they’ll go into 10.30 but if they don’t, we’ll do a 10.35 or some other small patch to get them to you as soon as we can.

A Dispatch From Fearless Leader

From the big boss, earlier today:

OK you folks have not heard from me in forever, but trust me when I say it is because I am busier coding than you can imagine!

We are getting very close to X-Plane 10.30 Beta 1, and the feature-list is simply extraordinarily huge.

These will all be “making it work just perfectly” type features to really dial X-Plane in to the point that it is doing the job it needs to do, free of bugs or other quirkiness that make complex programs difficult to use. I will be announcing the beta when it is ready for public testing (we have been in private beta for some weeks now).

Next: Here is a cool new helo that was just introduced for X-Plane:

http://xplanereviews.com/index.php?/topic/175-aircraft-review-bell-407-by-dreamfoil-creations/

I usually do not announce each new craft for X-Plane since there are so many of them, but in this case I just had to make an exception since this bird looks just so darn good.

So, look for the public 10.30 Beta soon, and give the Dreamfoil 407 a try if you like!

austin

I’ve been meaning to post something about 10.30 too, but every day is exactly the same: I wake up, think I should post a status update and go “oh, I’ll do that later when I’m too tired to code.”  Follow that with: code all day, survive dinner and bed-time with a two-year-old, and inevitably I end up being too tired to even post a status update.

I’ll get a few details up in the next 24 hours.  Having put it in writing, now I can’t put it off anymore.

New approach-capable GPS navigator in X-Plane 10.30

X-Plane has been lacking a decent navigation solution for general aviation aircraft for a long time. The built-in GNS430 instrument could only do direct-to navigation and not use X-Plane’s FMS plans, making long IFR flights inconvenient.

In X-Plane 10.30 we are introducing a new generation of the X-Plane 430 GPS navigator, modeled more closely after the Garmin 430W that is very popular in general aviation aircraft. The 430W is a popular aftermarket GPS replacement in many older general aviation aircraft, because it is approved for WAAS approaches and thus an easy upgrade to allow flying instrument approaches at lots of smaller airports without ILS.

The new X-Plane unit can create and fly multi-leg flightplans in addition to the direct-to function:

You can create directs or flight plans using a worldwide database of airports, fixes and navaids:

Loading or saving the route works using the X-Plane FMS format. Many online services for virtual flight planning are compatible with that:

You can then navigate along your flight plan using one of different map views that provide situational awareness:

While flying under VFR, stay alert to any Bravo, Charlie, Delta or special use airspace in the United states (open database, user-expandable):

You will be warned when you are about to violate an airspace:

using the nearest airport function you always know your nearest alternatives for landing (though we all know X-Avion does a much better job at that!)

With a little help from your friend, knowing when to start your descend becomes easy:

Before landing, always know who to call:

For IFR approaches, load precision and non-precision approaches from a world-wide, updatable database:

Review approach transitions and initial approach fixes:

and then load any approach and transition into your flight plan:

Under ATC (read: when flying online) the vector-to-final function will often be used instead of a transition:

The X-Plane 430 is there to help you stay alert to common errors in approach navigation:

The GPS is capable of flying non-precision GPS-approaches with a localizer-like guidance and varying CDI sensitivity:

If you don’t see the runway at the minimum descend altitude, continue to the missed approach point and the flight plan sequencing will go into suspend. At the missed approach point, if you still don’t see the runway, begin your missed approach:

and then get help choosing the right entry to the missed approach holding:

The new GNS430 is a drop-in replacement for the old one, so every X-Plane aircraft equipped with the GNS430 automagically becomes more IFR-capable with the 10.30 update. We also provide an additional instrument in style of the bigger GNS530, that designers can use in their aircraft starting with Plane-Maker 10.30. It also allows for dual installations that can either use separate flight plans or cross-fill.

The interaction of the GPS with the rest of the panel, especially the CDI and the autopilot, has been improved, offering a few more options for aircraft designers. Two additional posts explaining the new options in Plane-Maker will follow shortly.

The database from which approaches are loaded is provided by Aerosoft. A current database will be provided once with X-Plane 10.30, and further updates will be available on a subscription basis.

You might have noticed stupid COM frequencies in some screenshots. This is not a bug, but a feature: X-Plane 10.30 supports 8.33kHz channel spacing, that is now mandatory in the European upper airspace and will become more important over the next few years.

For the inevitable question “will it have X and does it simulate Y?” I do have one answer:
I chose the feature-set for the 10.30 release carefully to fulfill two requirements:

1. It must simulate the functions I use every day. After spending about 40 hours flying a C172P with this equipment, I have developed some pattern in day-to-day use. The simulated equipment must have the functions I use every day.
2. It must simulate what I need for my IFR checkride preparation. I’m currently studying for the instrument rating. All IFR GPS functions that are needed during the lessons must be simulated so I can use X-Plane to practice at home.

This does not cover all functions of the real unit, but it covers what the pilot absolutely needs every day.

Irons in the Fire

Here is a quick update on some of what we are working on.  This post won’t contain everything, as some development efforts are still under the radar, and it’s not a comprehensive list of 10.30 features.

(I am not ready to post a 10.30 feature list yet; please do not comment with “will XXX be in 10.30”.)

The Airport Gateway.  That’s what we are calling the website we are developing for sharing lego brick airports.  The X-Plane Airport Gateway is under construction and has already reached an internal milestone; when finished it will be the portal through which you can share lego-brick airports with the community for inclusion in X-Plane.

We have decided to provide direct upload to the gateway from WED in the initial roll-out of the gateway; it’s a simpler work-flow and it is what we always planned to do eventually.  So there will be a WED release (probably 1.2.2) to match the gateway.

I believe the gateway may go live before 10.30 goes final. (I believe this mostly because I think 10.30 will need a loooooong beta) so at this point we’re looking at how to transfer all shared airports into the gateway, rather than looking at how to release airports without the gateway the way we did in 10.25.  We do want to upload all of the data we already have into 10.25.

Autogen.  Alex is working on a set of autogen that will greatly improve the coverage, variety, and correctness of US autogen.  I do not know when he will complete this task; we will release the work whenever it is ready, possibly in a point release of X-Plane just for autogen.  Basically if 10.30 is in beta when he is done, the work will be rolled into 10.30 betas; if it isn’t, we’ll do a 10.35 or something for the autogen.  The autogen is basically an art-asset update, so it isn’t strongly tied to X-Plane code.

Bug Fixes.  A big part of 10.30 is bug fixes and quality improvements, and a lot of the bugs that we are working on are hard to fix.  (If they were cheap to fix, we would have fixed them in 10.22 or 10.25.)  Our view of X-Plane 10 is that there are a lot of new features that need tuning to meet their full potential, so we are trying to focus on high quality for what X-Plane 10 does, not on expanding X-Plane 10 into (even more) new territory.

As get some of those bugs fixed, I may post a few “call to test” posts – we are looking to do significantly more private beta testing in 10.30 to get specific features tested before the flying circus of public beta starts.  (Please do not request private beta access unless we’re calling for testers.  Our goal is to have new features and bugs fixed by people who are specialists in that part of the sim.)

Third Party Interfaces.  We’ve built up a number of requests for datarefs, third party interfaces, etc. that we haven’t been able to implement in ‘small’ releases like 10.22 or 10.25.  I’m hoping we’ll get through most or all of these in 10.30.  I’ll write up more details when we get closer to a public beta.

DSFs.  We still need to figure out how we will release DSF recuts, but they should be ready when 10.30 is; pretty much all of the work for the recut is already done.

I’ll post more on the 10.30 beta process in a few weeks when we get closer to it.  As of now, the basic coding work for 10.30 is not yet done, so while we have some code to test, 10.30 is not “in the can”.

AMD Drivers Are Still Dead

Update: this driver bug has since been fixed – see here.

If your X-Plane screen looks like this with HDR on, you may be running the new Catalyst 13-12 drivers.  If you can, back up to the Catalyst 13-9 drivers to get back HDR mode.

(If you have a really new AMD card, you might not be able to run 13-9 – in that case please turn off HDR until AMD has a fix.)

This is a continuation of this problem – what’s new is that the 13-12 drivers are WHQL drivers and not just beta drivers.

Thanks to the users who reported this to me.  I try to keep an eye on all driver combinations, but the help is appreciated!

Catalyst Driver Advisory: 13.11 Breaks HDR, 13.9 Is Okay

Update: this bug has been fixed – see here for details.

For X-Plane users with an AMD graphics* card on Windows or Linux: there appears to be a bug in the 13.11 drivers** that cause corruption in HDR mode; the symptoms are square artifacts of missing clouds and missing windshield in aircraft.

If you can run the 13.9 drivers, stick with those; if you have one of the new Rx 290 cards and you must use newer drivers, turn HDR off for now.

These bugs are Win/Lin only – the Mac AMD drivers don’t have this problem.

* AMD seems to have fully rebranded ATI’s GPUs at this point, so I guess I should get used to writing ‘AMD Radeon’.

** The bug could very well be in our code, but since the code worked on old ATI drivers and a number of other driver stacks, it may very well be a regression in the driver itself. We won’t know until it’s fixed.  And even then, maybe we won’t know.

Add New HD Base Meshes to 10.25

If you’ve survived downloading the rather large 10.25 patch and you want to download even more data, good news!  Alpilotx has just released version 2 of his X-Plane HD Mesh Scenery.

His scenery pack is a donation-ware recut of North America and Europe.  Alpilotx’s HD scenery use the latest OSM and other global data sources, and are cut with the latest DSF generator; thus they contain better DSF generation with newer data.  Alpilotx then cranks the mesh settings well beyond what we can ship with the global scenery (which must fit on a DVD set and not fill an entire SSD), bringing out wonderful terrain definition and other detail that we have to cut down for the global scenery that ships as a default with the sim.

One of the cool effects of cranking up the base mesh detail: it brings new detail to the terrain shading.  In X-Plane 10 we moved the process of altering terrain with slope (from forest to grass to rock, or whatever the artist defines) from a CPU process calculated ahead of time to a shader process run on the GPU. The result is that more detailed meshes actually produce better shading, as the shading responds to the 3-d detail.

If you have a computer that can run them, these meshes look great, and they get you a source of recut DSFs now.

The recut DSFs that Laminar ships will be based on the same DSF generation code improvements and the same new data, but the resolution will be reduced to produce files of similar size to the default scenery we already ship.  We have not decided exactly how we will ship recuts; I think that really important fixes (e.g. Sydney with the harbor fixed) will be automatic updates; I don’t know about a wider scale yet.

A Big Update (For Our Servers)

X-Plane 10.25, out now, is a big update by size – 1 GB compressed, if you were current to 10.22.  The result on our servers is, well, higher than normal load.  (That nearly flat top-out at 100 mbits is 10.25 kicking.)  We’ll keep an eye on things; I expect that server load will settle down in the next few days, once the initial rush of auto-updates goes through.

X-Plane 10.25 and What Comes Next

X-Plane 10.25 went final today; if you’ve launched X-Plane you already know that from the auto-update notice.  With this update we shipped the first set of lego-brick airports, and new urban and natural terrain.  We also updated WorldEditor to version 1.2.1 during this beta run.

The Necessity of Saying Too Little

This post, like all “road map” posts, will almost certainly be too vague for your liking. What you’d really like to see is a list of features and a list of dates, e.g. “we will ship X on this day, then Y on this day” for future X-Plane patches.  Unfortunately I cannot provide that.  I also can’t expect you to be happy with only vague release notes.  But I have to hope that you can at least see what things look like from the other side of the table; if you were in my position, you might not post too much either.

There are a few problems with announcing new features way in advance:

• The penalty for being wrong is a lot higher than the benefit of being right.  If I can predict our future features directly, at best everyone gets excited and impatient for the new release.  But if my prediction is wrong, it will make everyone very angry.  So if there is any risk that a feature might not come out when we think it will, I think everyone is better off without pre-announcements.  (We are not the only tech company or even flight simulation to maintain this policy.)
• It is really hard to predict when new features will come out for technical reasons.  Or put another way, if what we are trying to do is new and novel, there aren’t good things to compare to in order to estimate schedules. We thought we’d ship real-time shadows in X-Plane 9.0, but when 9.0’s release date came around, they just looked awful; the technology we had picked was not good enough.  So we put them on ice, re-coded them and released them for X-Plane 10.0.  That kind of thing is hard to predict; we had working shadows for v9, they were just horrible.  In hindsight I’m really glad I didn’t pre-announce “X-Plane 9 will have real-time shadows” – everyone would have been disappointed by the lack of shadows, and it would have drawn away from the real-time water reflections we shipped.
• It’s also hard to predict when new features will come out for business reasons; if a feature isn’t being worked on “right now”, there’s the risk that some kind of high priority emergency will come up.  For example, during the X-Plane 10.25 beta run, we realized we had to recut our installer, because it had a crash bug on certain OSX versions.  That time wasn’t in the estimate, but the installer crash was an emergency.  Had I said “X-Plane 10.25 will go final on November 15th”, I’d have been wrong, and you’d be mad that we had mislead you.

So my first point is that software is unpredictable, and I think it’s better to keep quiet until we’re sure we know what will happen.  Thus, no statements about what we will release six months from now.

Guidance Is Important

If you develop third party aircraft, you’re probably jumping up and down at this point, going “are you freaking kidding me?  I can’t plan my business this way!!!”  And you’re right.  What I can try to do is provide guidance about technical challenges that you might face as an author.

Our overall goal is to maintain add-on compatibility within a major version run.  If your add-on follows the rules, we’ll try to avoid changing the rules.  But sometimes add-ons bend the rules, and updates can affect those add-ons.  I try to provide hints as to what is going to matter, far ahead of time.

For example, X-Plane 9 introduced the concept of ‘glass’ objects in an aircraft.  Glass objects solves the problem of getting your cockpit windscreen and 3-d interior to render in the right order, which is nice.  But it also is necessary to get high quality translucency in HDR mode in X-Plane 10.  So we tried to get the ‘glass’ option into v9 and then encourage developers to adopt the new scheme, as it provides both better results and future proofing.

Big and Small Patches

Our patches to X-Plane come in two sizes these days:

• Big patches have long betas (4 weeks or longer) and make significant change to the sim; we need the beta time to find and fix bugs introduced by the new changes.
• Small patches change a very small amount of code; we test them for only 1 or 2 weeks. Because the amount of code change is very small, we don’t have to worry as much about strange bugs we didn’t expect.

X-Plane 10.10 was a (very) big patch, and 10.20 was a big (albeit not very chaotic) one. The bug fix releases (10.11, 10.21, 10.22) were all, of course, tiny – they just fixed 1 or 2 bugs that made it past beta.

X-Plane 10.25 is actually a small patch by our standards – while it provides a lot of great stuff for users (airports, cities, etc.) and it’s a big download data-size, the code changes are incredibly small; it’s mostly art files.

Future Releases

At this point our next “big” release planned is 10.30.  We have a ton of stuff planned for it; it’ll be a big release, offer significant new features, and probably take quite a while in beta.

If you are a third party aircraft or scenery author, you will want to re-check your add-ons on 10.30.  I know that this takes time away from working; we try to not have a “retest everything” patch that often; the last one was 18 months ago.  Remember that if you find something broken, you will need to report a bug, not change your add-on!

(As a side note, I hear this from third party developers all the time for bugs that have been in the sim a while: “You mean no one else reported this bug?”  Everyone thinks someone else will report a bug; some bugs that are visible only on third party content thus never get reported.  Assume that no one has reported a bug – you’ll often be right!)

We may do at least one more small release before 10.30, either for DSF recuts, more lego brick airports, or to fix any crash bugs that we find.  But at this point no code features are going into the sim before another “big” patch – small patches will be for art.

In terms of timing: I can say with some certainty that 10.30 will be next year, not this year – there are less than six weeks left in 2013, and we won’t be ready to public beta a big patch that soon.  I think it is possible that we’ll have one more small patch in 2013, but we don’t have a firm plan yet.

The DSF recut work is mostly done, but I am going to wait for AlpilotX to release his latest HD scenery; his scenery is developed using the same tech as the global scenery, so it should give us a good idea as to whether the recuts are ready or need bug fixing.