Just a few quick notes on the 10.10 beta process…
First, we have received well over 1000 automatic crash reports. For those who have not figured it out from reading forum posts, 10.10b1 crashes on startup with some combinations of joystick hardware and its associated software. Chris has a fix for this which will ship in beta 2, some time this weekend.
Thank you to everyone who has clicked “send to Laminar”. Receiving such comprehensive and complete crash data is really really helpful. We get a very clear picture of what’s happening with complete details. Clicking “send to Laminar” is better for us than filing a bug (because the crash reporter is very thorough in grabbing forensic crash data and the crash submission system pre-processes the crash for us, saving us labor) and hopefully it’s easier for you too.
Also, thank you to everyone who has filed bugs on the bug report form! We really do read every one of them, even though we do not reply to all of them. We try to list fixes in the release notes so you can see what’s going on.
Overall behavior re: posting bug reports on the comments section has been quite good, but I will continue to trash bug reports here. I apologize for the inconvenience, but my fear is that if I start responding to bug reports here, it will encourage other users to “file” bug reports on the blog too and then we’ll have a mess on our hands.
To be clear: my goal is not to snuff out negative feedback. This is not “if you have nothing nice to say”. But…most negative feedback really should be a bug report, e.g. “X used to work and now it is broken” really belongs on the bug report form.
I am fixing my last bug for beta 2, which I hope to have cut over the weekend.
***CHRIS’S EDIT*** We’re aware that having a joystick plugged in destroys frame rate…That’s already fixed and will also be in Beta 2.
After a last-minute morning recut (previous beta candidate was missing 80% of autogen, which is actually a great performance enhancement 😉 10.10 beta 1 is available for download to the brave and foolish. Some notes:
- No bug reports on the blog. Bug reports go here! Please, no back-door bug reports via “is X still broken”? When it’s fixed, we’ll release note it.
- Speaking of which, release notes here!
- As long as those notes are, it still doesn’t do justice to how much changed. For example, we spent a lot of time making things 64 bit safe, but since that’s not done, no release note. I had 215 commits to go through for 10.10 – not sure how many everyone else had.
- I’ll try to get docs up (and updated) on some of the new scenery features; further improvements to the rendering engine have put me even farther behind. But a lot of the rendering engine improvements are either for Alex’s use in autogen or just make the existing stuff work better.
- One thing you can tell from the 10.10 notes is that we’ve put a tremendous amount of emphasis on usability; when we looked at 10.00r1 after shipping, we identified a number of areas where using the sim (especially as a new user) just wasn’t fun, easy or welcoming. The new features in 10.10 include those plans coming to fruition, finally.
To get the beta, run the X-Plane installer/updater or demo installer, pick “update” and check “get new betas”. X-Plane will not prompt you to automatically update your stable 10.05r1 into the unstable 10.10 beta 1.
Finally, X-Plane 10.10 beta 1 is the first beta after a huge amount of code change. If you like to fly X-Plane for fun, do not update your “working” X-Plane install to 10.10; it’s too new and too raw. You can copy your X-System folder (or part of it) and then update the copy.
[Hint: now that we have sym-linked scenery, you can copy your folder minus custom and then sym link custom scenery back into place. Sym-linking is not supported for airplanes and global scenery.]
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Ben Supnik |
X-Plane 10.10 is compiling now; in theory it should be up tomorrow morning. Obviously if the build crashes on us before it is uploaded we’ll recut it.
In my tentative list of features from this blog a while ago I forgot to mention that 10.10 has some of the scenery management features I mentioned a few months back during the dev conference in Columbia: scenery packs can be reprioritized or disabled by a text .ini file and they can be on other hard drives.*
To be blunt, I think beta 1 is a little bit gooey and underdone in the center. I think there will be a big difference in quality between the first beta and what we have 1 week later. The main bugs we are interested in early on are regressions, e.g. things that worked in 10.05r1 but do not work in 10.10b1, especially with third party add-ons.
Two notes on bug reporting:
- You do not need to re-report bugs that are not listed as fixed in the release notes. We try to post long, detailed release notes so that you don’t have to waste your own time repeating bug reports. If it isn’t listed, it means we haven’t gotten to the fix yet. Beta 1 does not fix all bugs we know about!
- Please do not post any bug reports on this blog. Please do not post bug reports on this blog even if you have also filed a bug report. Please only file a bug report on the bug report form.
I am going to be a complete bastard about that second point. If you post a bug report as a comment, I will delete it without reading it. If you do this multiple times, I will ban you. We really need all bug reports to go to a single place. When they go to the bug report form:
- One person initially reads all of the bug reports. That means that duplicate bugs are rapidly recognized as dupes, wasting less triage time and helping us understand what bugs occur frequently (so we can fix them first). When bugs go into multiple places then more than one engineer looks at them and a lot of effort gets wasted.
- With the bug report form, we control who it goes to. We can change who reads them if someone is out of the office or overloaded.
So: no bugs in the comments section – it’s the best way for all of us to get to a stable, final 10.10 faster. I will post links to release notes and the bug report form when the beta goes live.
* Unix nerds: yes, ln -s works on Unix OSes. The feature here is that aliases and shortcuts made using the Finder/Explorer by non-geeks work too!
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Ben Supnik |
So I just realized that it’s been a full month since I’ve posted anything on the dev blog, which is a bit ridiculous since we’re working on a ton of stuff for 10.10 and a number of announcements have also come out in the computer industry. I’ll try to catch up on various topics over the next week.
Where Is 10.10???
I’m pretty sure that that’s the money question: where is 10.10? The answer is: we are working on it, mainly fixing bugs pre-beta. When will the public beta program start? I don’t know – that will be determined by how quickly we can knock out some of the current bugs. My view is that it’s a waste of everyone’s time to go beta on 10.10 with known bugs that we can fix without going beta – going beta too soon means users waste their own time reporting bugs we know about, and we are distracted from fixing those bugs with the task of going through the duplicate reports.
64 Bit – Not Yet!
I think we’ve described this road map before, but in case there is any confusion let me be absolutely clear:
X-Plane 10.10 will not be 64 bit!
We have already made significant progress toward a 64-bit X-Plane and we will continue working on this front. But the plan was never to ship 10.10 with 64 bit support. Rather, X-Plane 10.10 ships with a number of changes to our compilers (as well as a ton of other stuff). The next major patch (10.20) will support 64 bit on all three platforms at once, and we will know that any problems will be due to the 64-bit-ness (and not the changes to compiler, runtime, makefiles etc.) because those will have been vetted in 10.10.
The reason to ship 10.10 in 32-bit is to get out all of the other changes we’ve made so far.
What’s In 10.10
This is not a complete feature list – when we do the first public beta we’ll run through our source control log to scrape out all changes. But here are some fairly big things:
- Austin is putting new UI into the sim for flight setup and airplane selection.
- Roads don’t shoot up in the sky anymore – crazy road grids was always a problem in how X-Plane showed the data, not the data itself. This change may also improve the stability of the sim.
- Chris has integrated “breakpad“, an open source automatic crash reporting system. The vast majority of the bug reports we receive are crash reports, and of them, the vast majority are missing critical files we need to understand what crashed. Automatic crash reporting should both save users time in reporting (you just have to click “ok” when X-Plane asks you if you want to send the bug to LR) and let us dig in with complete file information.
- 10.10 includes faster clouds on ATI hardware on Windows.
- This build moves us to new compiler setup – while this is an internal change, it should mean faster load times on Windows.
- 10.10 fixes some stability problems in 10.05r1. I don’t think the early betas will be great for long flights, but I think 10.10 will in total be better on this front. (But note: a lot of the crash reports we get are due to running out of memory. You can’t run X-Plane at the edge of your memory limits for 10 hours of flight – at some point it will go over. This particularly applies to Mac users.)
- Chris has rewritten the low level joystick code; while this was suppose to be ‘just the hardware’ code (with new UI coming in 10.20) it looks like one aspect will go live in 10.10: you can plug and unplug your joysticks while you fly without restarting the sim.
The artists have been working this entire time and we’ve built up a pretty good pile of art assets to ship too – I’m not going to try to enumerate them right now because I’m not up to date on what they’ve created.
Third Party Airplanes
One goal I have for 10.10 is to close out all of the bugs that are stopping authors from converting their payware add-on planes from X-Plane 9 to 10. Some of these are already fixed and some are still on my todo list. I’ll post more about some of the stickier remaining issues in another post.
Last weekend I was in Columbia, South Carolina for the second X-Plane developer’s conference – that is, the US meeting. I’ll try to write that up later, but first a quick note on WED 1.2. We had Tom Kyler on site, and his demonstration of WED 1.2 with the new lego brick objects turned out to be the surprise hit of the weekend. It’s one thing to say “we’re going to crowd-source airports” – it’s another to show the pieces in action.
WorldEditor 1.1 is released, and WED 1.2 is available as a “developer preview” – it’s that developer preview we showed at the conference. A real “beta 1” will be out shortly.
What’s a developer preview? It’s an incomplete beta. In this case we didn’t have all of the features of 1.2 in place, but I wanted to get it out there for people to poke at. Tom set up Seattle using the developer preview, so clearly it’s “usable” – albeit with a heavy dose of caution.
My plan is to get WED 1.2 beta 1 released some time this week, with every planned feature except for “submit-to-Robin”, which he and I should probably test internally a bit while we make sure that WED’s output is solid.
Note that if you are making custom scenery, there’s no reason why you can’t use WED 1.1 for now – it’s finished and stable. WED 1.2 has usability and v10 updates, but overlay editing has been available in WED 1.1 for a while.
After WED
After WED, the next scenery tools priorities will be:
- Getting ac3d and Blender 2.49 caught up for version 10 technology. For Blender 2.49, I am trying to merge my
hackingchanges with Jonathan’s, so that users of the public scripts can use my v10 mods without having to rework content. I will send these to Jonathan, and also post some of our newer scripts (e.g. autogen-editing).
- MeshTool 2.x will write v9 meshes, but a new 3.0 version will be needed to make “v10”-style DSFs; this is on my todo list.
What About That Program That Simulates Airplanes?
It’ll take a bit to get through the scenery tools because we are also mid-patch for X-Plane. 10.10 will be the next “patch” with new features. It looks like we will post a 10.06 first with some new translation files that have come back to us from a number of sources.
We’re in the middle of the X-Plane developer conference here in South Carolina; I’ve had a chance to improve and revise some of the presentations since Mallorca; my voice is totally shot but once it comes back Austin and I can turn some of the talks into YouTube videos.
As always seems to happen, we’ve put a few features into the sim during the conference…why talk about a problem when we can just fix it?
So for the next patch, you can put a shortcut or alias or simlink to a scenery pack into the Custom Scenery Folder, rather than the custom scenery pack itself and that means…
…that the scenery pack can be on another hard drive. This may take the sting out of an orthophoto pack if you run X-Plane off of an SSD.
Edit: to answer a few commonly asked questions:
- This is new if you are on Mac/Win and want to use the file-browser-level alias mechanism. Yes, Linux nerds can use simlinks (I was actually surprised that this path works, but apparently it does.)
- We are only doing this for scenery packs. Scenery packs are the biggest single thing you can install, so to relieve hard disk pressure we will start with scenery packs. We might allow linking some other pack later, but for now we are not doing aircraft – our goal is to keep X-Plane maintenance simple, predictable, and supportable.
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Ben Supnik |
I meant to post this before, but: the new Catalyst 12-3 drivers fix a number of Radeon HD 7xxx-specific artifacts with X-Plane: incorrectly cut-out tree billboards and flashing triangles. So while I suggest latest drivers anyway, this update is particularly useful if you have a 79xx.
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Columbia, SC. Laminar Research announced today that in a surprising board room coup, the company is terminating owner, CEO, president-for-life and benevolent dictator Austin Meyer’s employment, effective immediately.
Randy Witt, VP of marketing, stated: “We couldn’t actually fire him because he owns the company, so instead we locked him in the first floor bathroom of his house. As far as we know the bathroom doesn’t have net connectivity, so he should be out of our hair. We left him some magazines.”
While many long-time X-Plane users were surprised that Mr. Meyer, who has worked on every version of X-Plane since version 1 and was the only X-Plane developer for the first 7 versions of the product, would be terminated so swiftly, others saw it coming. “We knew we had a problem a year or two ago when Austin started talking about plausibility all the time,” recalls Alex Gifford, Laminar’s resident mad scientist and autogen developer. “I had a really wonderful pig with a camera mounted on its head, but we couldn’t use it because it isn’t ‘plausible’ that such a pig would walk down the streets of New York. I thought to myself: the X-Plane I knew and loved would never have shied at putting random animals, some perhaps heavily armed, all over the sim. Just look at X-Plane 9!”
Senior grumpy software engineer Chris Serio concurs. “He wanted to remove the deer that randomly run across the runway at major class B airports. We begged him not to. We just looked at each other and said ‘who is this guy and what happened to the Austin we once knew?'”
But the final straw was Mr. Meyer’s early April 1st prank, stating that X-Plane would become a casual flying game similar to Microsoft’s recently released “Flight” product.
Barista-in-chief Ben Supnik describes the scene: “We were just appalled. I mean, publicly mocking our competition, preferably without using their actual products, while our own product has serious known bugs is standard operating procedure for Laminar Research. But the early release of the announcement was just unacceptable. Laminar has always been about missing deadlines, sometimes by several years. The notion that such a statement would come out over a full week early was just too much for us to bear.”
When asked how X-Plane might change in Mr. Meyer’s absence, Mr. Supnik hinted that the company would move to a table-based flight model with “at least four or five data points”, and that, with plausibility no longer a necessary design goal, the company was looking to license Skyrim as its rendering engine.
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Ben Supnik |
X-Plane 10.05r1 is now available – click “get betas” and run the installer’s update function to get it. This is a really tiny patch; we needed to fix language on the 32-bit Windows warning, and we took the opportunity to fix hard cockpit walls and the carrier landing while we were at it.
Everything we’ve discussed on this blog for the upcoming beta is coming – but for a future patch in a few weeks. That will be a major patch with a multi-week beta period and real enhancements to the sim. We’re already deep into development on this work; the 10.05 micro-patch is just a quick build to fix a few tiny bugs.
I expect us to go final with 10.05 in a day or two – there are only two code changes, so it should be quick to find any possible problems.
X-Plane 10.04 went final yesterday – as always there’s one bug that gets by you. In our case, “solid” cockpits (cockpits that constrain the camera so you can’t move through walls) are inoperative.
At this point it looks like we will do a tiny micro-patch to make 10.05 that fixes this and puts some new strings into the app. Honestly if we didn’t have string changes, I’d probably wait for the next real patch for the cockpit fix, but I believe that it is a low risk change if we must cut the app anyway. The main goal of 10.05 is to get the language just right in some of the dialog boxes for the next set of DVD masters.
The amount of change from 10.04 to 10.05 will be very tiny – comparable to 10.04 rc2 to 10.04 rc3 – literally one or two lines of code changed total.
In the meantime we are working in parallel on the next big patch.
Work on 64 bits is underway – I do not believe it will be available in the next big patch, and we have not specified any date (soon or far away). Simply put, I am staying out of the business of release dates for work like this. Our internal estimates have huge margins of error, due to the many unknowns of the process, and I don’t think we make anyone happy by saying when the feature will be available and then being wrong.
Who Will Use 64 Bits
When X-Plane or the installer checks for updates, it sends an identifier (called a “user agent”) to the server. This is a standard part of HTTP and all web browsers and web-communicating programs do this; our servers (we use Apache, like most of the universe) keep a log of the “user agents” calling in, which can tell you what web browsers and other programs are requesting web pages.
Here is an example of two user agent strings from a real access to our web page:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPad; CPU OS 5_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A334 Safari/7534.48.3
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Ubuntu; Linux x86_64; rv:10.0.2) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/10.0.2
As you can see, Safari and Firefox are both identifying what version they are and what operating system they are running on. This means the website owner can tell how many people are viewing with older browsers or tablets/mobile phones, and optimize the layout of the site accordingly.
Here’s what X-Plane looks like when it calls up our web server:
X-Plane 10.04r3-3-IBM6.1_64
For as long as we have had auto-check-for-update, X-Plane has include the operating system in its user agent string, just like web browsers do. This means that we can tell the approximate operating system split by looking at the user agent strings on the server.
With X-Plane 10.04 we have moved to the more complete string you see above – in particular, it includes whether the version of Windows is a 32 or 64 bit edition. (The above string comes from Windows 7 64-bit. Why Windows 7 is versioned 6.1 is beyond me. The extra “3” is an indication that the user has a full global edition of the sim – this is a paying user running on Windows 7 64-bit.
So I can tell you that at least for users who have updated to 10.04r3:
- The platform split for full copies of X-Plane remains about 63% Windows, 32% Mac, 5% Linux.
- Among full-copy Windows users, about 85% are on a 64 bit Os – that is a surprise to me, but a good one – it means a lot of users will be able to utilize the 64-bit port. (Among demo users it’s about 75% 64-bit.)
Uh, What Do You Guys Do With This Information?
Not much. We didn’t actually set out to do a hardware survey – rather we put a user agent string into the installer when we first wrote it, because it’s required by the protocol. Apache logs user agents by default, so it was only after running the installer a while that we realized that we could “mine” the log for platform information.
We do not:
- Try to correlate these user agent logs with customer information in any way.
- Archive the logs permanently – as anyone who admins a web server knows, the logs get very big, so the server keeps a few weeks of records, then throws them out. Our only change from the default Apache config is to cut down the retention time because our server gets a lot of traffic.
- Send any personally identifying information in the user agent string or otherwise. The server logs incoming IP addresses, but this is not part of our installer – all web servers know the IP address of the incoming requests; logging them at least temporarily is necessary to be able to identify the source of a web attack should one occur.
