First: X-Plane 10.04 rc3 is live – please grab it – make sure to check “get betas” to get this patch! (If you are already using 10.04 betas, simply go to the About box to update.) Because this is a release candidate (we think it’s good to go but we’re not sure) you must still check “get betas” – that check box should really be “get crazy experimental stuff that is not yet officially released to the world.”
I think we are reaching the point where we can slow down the rate of patches just a bit. Like past X-Plane releases, the first patches came out fast and furious, because we wanted to get critical bug fixes to as many users as possible. We are now reaching a point where we can slow down and get more done between each beta, which I think will mean better rate of improvement for the sim overall.
Of course, if we get a really huge bug fix (e.g. an ATI performance boost or a fix for NVidia start hangs) we’ll cut a tiny patch off of 10.04 immediately; our source control system lets us do an incremental update very easily.
So with the next patch we will be able to work on some bigger bugs:
- I think the next patch won’t be a full 64-bit patch, but it will contain a lot of the ground-work to get 64-bit working. We’ve already started on this code; by splitting it over two patches we can more rapidly deal with any kind of incompatibility introduced by the newer code. (Our goal is of course to make sure that any machine running 10.04 can run the 32-bit version of X-Plane when we support both bit depths.)
- Austin received a lot of feedback about the UI while we were in Mallorca, and he has already started this work, although I am not sure what will be released when.
- I will be digging into “Galloping Gertie” (our internal name for the many weird shapes the roads take when the road-placement code goes haywire). This is going to require some pretty major work to the road generation code, but of course it’s a critical fix.
- While the volume of complaints about performance have gone down, there are still one or two performance tuning changes I want to get into the sim.
There are only about four things I work on when I am in the office: performance, fixing bugs, developer tools, and the installer. Hopefully with 10.04 installer work is done for a while and I can get one major area off my plate. This should leave more time for developer tools and documents, which I try to leave a fixed amount of time for every week.
I just posted new versions of the installers with a few bug fixes. Let me try to clarify the situation.
The X-Plane installer and updater have been merged. The installer is now capable of updating. One app does it all now.
Therefore:
- If you bought a copy of X-Plane, use the X-Plane installer to update your copy of X-Plane. It will require a DVD or USB key, just like X-Plane does.*
- If you are just trying the demo of X-Plane, re-run the demo installer – it will update your demo.
- Or, easiest of all: just go to the “About Box” in X-Plane and let X-Plane check for updates and run the entire process. Simple!
The newest installer is here; if you haven’t bought X-Plane 10, the demo installer is here.
* Why does the full product require a DVD or USB key to update? The answer is that it will download files that are only part of the full installation, not just files that are part of the demo. This is part of our migration toward being able to update scenery and other full-sim features online.
Announcements on the plethora of betas that went up this weekend.
Edit: beta 5 is temporarily offline while we resolve a missing scenery texture. So you’ll get beta 4 if you update.
X-Plane 10.04 beta 5 is now available. Release notes here. I think we will be winding down the 10.04 patch in the next week and going on to 10.05. There are a number of cosmetic bugs that I hope to get fixed shortly; it looks like they’ll have to go into 10.05 and not 10.04.
What’s the logic behind this patching? Basically we’re going to keep doing small patches until we get a certain set of bugs fixed – bugs that we think are important and that we can fix without tearing the sim to bits. The patch runs sometimes have to be closed off to burn new DVD masters* (this is the case with 10.04). In all cases, if you don’t want to deal with beta chaos, you can ignore the betas and get a new patch every few weeks with a little more performance and a few more bugs fixed.
I spent some time yesterday retuning cloud performance and the effect of the cloud rendering setting. Besides trying to find a better performance-quality trade-off point, the old slider had way too much range on it. It defaulted to 50%, but that 50% point really represented “a good setting for a high end gaming desktop”; going past that would put you into the range of “this isn’t ever a good idea, but the engine can do this without crashing”. The side effect was that running at 25% clouds (a very reasonable setting) would feel demoralizing because the setting scale was so vast.
The new scale marks a “100%” point at about where I would put it for high quality if you’re just sitting on GPU power (e.g. small screen, nice GPU). You might still want to turn it down for performance reasons. The range from 100%-150% is highly experimental land…if you want to turn it up to eleven, we’re not going to stop you.
WorldEditor Developer Preview
There is now a binary build of WED 1.2 (download here). This is a developer preview: WED is still in environment and doesn’t meet the criteria for beta software. Basically: do feel free to poke around with it, but don’t use it on your real work. Don’t edit your scenery packs with it – make a copy first. WED 1.2 has not been tested enough to use for production yet!
The main feature of interest is ATC taxiway editing: WED 1.2 contains complete support for taxiway networks, as well as “flow” information to control the direction of operations. A number of weird ATC bugs actually stem from the automatically generated taxi layouts that X-Plane produces when the apt.dat layout contains no taxi information. By providing a custom layout, you can get the AI planes to behave quite a bit better.
* We periodically re-burn the disc 1 master to put the latest sim on it whenever we are preparing new DVD inventory. If you have an old DVD, please do not panic! Once the updater is run, the sim looks the same no matter which DVD you have.
10.04 Beta 4 was released last night. The changelog can be found here as usual. Remember, you have to run the updater with the box checked that tells it you WANT to participate in the beta testing in order to get this version. Bug reports go here!
Posted in News
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Chris Serio |
X-Plane 10.03 beta 4 is out – just a few unrelated notes:
- Legacy scenery packs should work – I’ll write that up in detail in another blog post.
- If you have Paris or Denver installed, you need to update using the newest updater (version 3.02). If you update from the About Box, you get this version automatically. But if you have a version of the updater already on your hard drive, get a new one here.
- If your third party add-on worked in v9 and is still not in working in v10, please file a bug if you have not done so already. If you did file a bug, please bear with us – we’re killing off compatibility bugs with each patch, but there are still some major ones out there. (For example, I have on my plate to fix some bugs with OBJ materials that affect a lot of airplanes.)
And I meant to link to this: everything you ever wanted to know about global scenery but were afraid to ask.
I have a number of technical issues to cover relating to v10 scenery, so I’ll try to increase the blog post frequency to get through it all over the next week or two.
The short answer is: I think it will be fixed for everyone in 24 hours, but less if you want to get it by hand. Here’s the whole story:
The Paris DSF rendered incorrectly when we cut the global scenery. We discovered this after we cut the global scenery DVDs, but before they shipped out to users. I found the bug in the DSF generator (it was an error in airport processing) and fixed Paris and 5 other tiles. This was a top priority fix – it’s been fixed for probably two weeks now.
The Paris DSF is included in the X-Plane 10.02 beta series – that is, it has been available for over a week!
But here’s where things go sideways: since we’ve never updated global scenery before, you need a new updater to actually get the file. And what I am just realizing now is: while you need the X-Plane 3.02 updater to get the file, everyone is using the 3.01 updater, which doesn’t know to grab the Paris fix if you have Paris installed from DVD.
Hang on one second while I bash my head on my desk.
Okay. So there are two ways you can get your Paris fixed.
The Fast Way
If you want Paris fixed now, do this:
- Get the X-Plane Updater from here.
- Run the updater on your copy of X-Plane.
Paris should be fixed, at least I think.
The Easy Way
If you have already installed global secnery for Paris and you do nothing now, but get beta 4 when it comes out, X-Plane will use the latest updater to get beta 4 and you’ll get Paris anyway. I expect beta 4 tomorrow…maybe Monday at the latest.
If your joystick throttle axis won’t move the throttle (but will move in the axis tab) it could be that the autothrottle is on – autothrottle state appears to be saved across sim runs and airplanes in X-Plane 10. I am investigating this and we should have a fix soon, but in the meantime if you’re stuck, you may have to open a plane with an autothrottle on the panel (or use a key command) to turn it off.
Posted in News
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Ben Supnik |
A number of users have reported “ghosting” with NVidia Windows hardware and X-Plane 10. The artifact typically looks like this:
What you’re seeing there is the scene from last frame being left around where the sky was supposed to be drawn, but was not. As the camera moves, we get a trail of artifacts.
For a few days I couldn’t see this bug on my own system, and this afternoon I tried to reproduce it based a report from a user with the same hardware as my development machine. So after a bunch of failed tries and scratching my head at the German version of the NVidia control panel, I was overjoyed to see this:
I mean, how cool is that! That could be our new startup screen! It’s like a giant 737 is going to pop up out of the screen and eat us all. (Hint: if you are in the pit of a 747 and an airplane appears over the horizon that looks bigger than you from 20 miles away: run!)
It appears that this artifact is caused by turning on full screen anti-aliasing in the Nvidia control panel (with “override application settings”) but not in X-Plane. My work-around: use “application controls” for the control panel and set FSAA in X-Plane itself.
Here’s another fun one:
This shows up with moderate global shadowing. This shows up on the 285.62 NVidia drivers; the 280.62 and (for the very brave) 290.36 drivers don’t have this problem.
I don’t think there’s a moral of the story here; we’re still working through bugs, but I did find the bottom of my in-box, which I hope is an indication that the patches are helping at least some users. There are a lot of different card/driver/OS combos, so working through all the combinations (as Windows X1000-users are finding) will take some time.
A number of third party authors (bravely) promised X-Plane 10 updates to their airplanes. And I believe that a tune-up to be X-Plane 10 compatible isn’t going to represent a lot of man hours.
That is, unless you try to do this job now.
I have a number of open bugs where version 9 airplanes don’t load quite right in X-Plane 10. If you have an X-Plane 9 airplane and you try to work around these bugs, a few things will happen:
- You will only be able to work around some of the bugs, as others are pretty hard-baked into the sim.
- When I actually fix the bugs (in the next weeks) your airplane will be “broken” yet again, since “fixing” the bugs now means trying to make a right with two wrongs.
So third party authors: please do file bugs if you haven’t already, and give us a little time to work through them. Please do not try to work around these bugs, only to have your airplane become “re-broken” when we get the sim corrected.
And users: please be patient with your third party airplane authors. They can’t make their plane v10 compatible until we fix some bugs, and if they try they’re just going to get thrashed.
There are some things that do need to be reworked for version 10, particularly for HDR mode. But a lot of the reports I get are just things that are funky in the sim.
How to File an Airplane Bug
Since I am getting deluged with bug reports, support requests, questions, etc. I want to describe the best way to get an airplane compatibility bug to us. By following these guidelines, you’ll make it easier for us to kill off compatibility bugs fast.
- Please file the bug only once. If you have filed the bug and haven’t heard that it’s fixed, you do not need to tell us in every new beta that it is still broken.
- File bugs via http://dev.x-plane.com/support/bugreport.html. We can route this form to whomever we think is best suited to handle the bugs. Please do not just email the last person you conversed with directly.
- Please only file bugs if an airplane looks different in the latest X-Plane 10 build and X-Plane version 9.70. X-Plane 9.70 is the version 9 release that we are targeting – no older version!
- Please get us reproduction materials – preferably a complete ACF pack, and preferably a cut down one if it can be simplified.
- Send us the v9 .acf file, before any modifications. We want to see what your customers would have seen if they just tried to use the plane. If you send us a version resaved in X-Plane 10, we don’t know what happened.
- Please provide illustrations of how the plane should look in version 9 vs how it does look in version 10. We need a reference point.
- Please try to keep reproduction steps as short as possible. If we have to make a 2 hours flight with 400 waypoints to see a bug, that’s a time sink for us.
A number of you have already sent us good bug reports – we will get to them as quick as I can. If all goes well tonight my fires will be out and I’ll be able to jump into this shortly.
If I could have a nickel for every email I see from a user who says “I have installed X-Plane from scratch 6 times, and it still does not work”, well, I’d have enough money to buy more servers to handle the download bandwidth.
If your copy of the X-Plane 10 demo is not working, please do not do a full reinstall. It will not help.
You can run the X-Plane updater at any time. The X-Plane 10 updater checks every single file in the install and replaces any file that isn’t exactly what it should be. When the updater is done, you basically have a clean install, but at a fraction of the download.
The demo servers are starting to show lower load – please don’t re-download and kill the servers all over again.
Posted in News
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Ben Supnik |
