X-Plane 940 beta 7 is out. Now is the time to test your airplanes, scenery, and plugins. We’ve reached a point where we think we have the new systems code working. Please try the new beta, test your add-ons, and if something works in 930 but is broken in 940, file a bug immediately!
I’m seeing a number of bug reports where weird artifacts are showing up in 940…missing pieces of runway, flickering triangles…all sorts of good stuff!
I believe that this is due to some kind of bug relating to threading, X-Plane and the video drivers. I won’t say whose fault it is because I really don’t know. I do know that the bug appears to not happen on OS X. (But this could simply be because the threads time out differently on OS X.)
The changes to the rendering engine for 940 from 930 are substantial and aggressive – it’ll take us a little bit to fix these things.
When you wonder how come programs don’t use all 8 of your cores yet, well…this is why…multi-core programming is complex, tricky, tedious to debug, and often involves substantial changes from the original code.
If I have not emailed you back, it’s probably because I’ve been very busy trying to interleave X-Plane coding and packing up the house. But it is also possible that my email response bounced because my web server has ended up on a bunch of anti-spam “black-lists”.
Black-listing seems like a good idea at first: we’ll gather up a list of all of the IP addresses from which spam comes from, then publish them. Then your local mail server can use that list to filter spam – you never see it!
In practice it doesn’t work so well…example: http://www.mipspace.com/. The IP address for my server (XSquawkBox) is now on this list. Why?
MIPSpace is a list of IP Addresses associated with known commercial marketing companies.
Since my server is used for my own personal email and to run the SDK website, I’m not sure why I am on the list. I have sent them an email to clear things, but in general I hit an anti-spam/black-list bounce somewhat frequently now, and frankly I don’t have time to separately try to clear my name from every guilty-until-proven-innocent blacklist that pops up and screws up my email.
If I seem disproportionately grumpy about this, it could be due to one of two reasons:
Not replying to emails is generally bad customer service. (Okay, my in-box is backed up four months…that’s bad.) I don’t like the idea that a customer might perceive us (LR) as being unresponsive because some third party with no skin in the game decides to black-list us.
The blacklist has no incentive to be accurate – it’s not their lost customers if email doesn’t go through.
I’m not at all convinced that this is going to cut down unsolicited commercial mail and/or spam.
In the spam case, spammers can send from botnets – they have access to a huge number of ever-changing IPs. Unless we are prepared to blacklist the entire internet, the blacklists are going to pick up more and more false positives while spammers find ways to harvest fresh, untainted IP addresses. The whole IP-reputation strategy assumes that IPs are hard to change. In practice, IPs are very, very easy to change.
Commercial mail is a lost cause too – even if I am being solicited for commercial mail I don’t want, no program or automatic process is ever going to tell the difference between the confirmation of my invoice and a list of discounts from the same company. When it comes to commercial mail, the reputation damage has to be done to the company, not the IP.
(The company does have reputation to risk – if we are known as a company that doesn’t honnor a “do not subscribe” policy, then customers can choose to not buy our products.)
It could also be because I ran out of Viagra and don’t have a diploma from a prestigious non-acredited university.
I will be out of the office next week – it’s August, time to head for the mountains…no cell coverage, no internet, no computers, no electricity…no mountains actually. (This is upstate New York…mountainous to someone from Boston but not mountains compared to what Sergio normally deals with.)
As you know, LR often shows stellar judgement in managing release risk. So in true X-Plane tradition, I swapped in the new revamped website last night, just in time to head for the hills and avoid the fall-out.
Here’s the short version:
So if you saw weird stuff happen with the updater or the sim last night, please try again – it should be fixed. If it is still broken, please send an email to Austin and myself – one of us will hopefully be around.
I have also reskinned scenery.x-plane.com and wiki.x-plane.com to match the new site. If you find artifacts in those two sub-sites, please email me – I’ll fix it as soon as I can. The wiki site is a MediaWiki skin – it was pretty tricky to get it working, so it may be a bit before I work all the kinks out.
There is a bug in the newly released 931. When:
the attribute is ignored, which typically makes things appear white. The primary example that has been reported to me is the throttle quadrant of the Piper Malibu.
This is simply a bug in the shaders (which is failing to apply the diffuse tinting to ambient-only lighting conditions); I have a fix, but I’m not sure how soon it will be released. We will probably do a small bug-fix release with this and one or two other things, but this is yet to be finalized, since Austin is out of the office this week.
After almost three weeks in Europe, I am now back home!
Today Lori and I head to France – we will do a bit of site-seeing before the conference, and then Austin and I will go to Italy to work with Sergio.
I have received a number of emails bringing up crashes and performance problems in the X-Plane 930 betas – some of the writers are concerned that 930 might be a lame patch, going final with crashes and lousy performance.
The solution to case 1 is to use another driver call; the solution to case 2 is to make sure the rendering options provide a way to turn the feature off. (We simply cannot guarantee that a new, nicer looking feature run without a fps penalty – we can only give you a choice between better visuals and faster fps.)
This year Austin, Sergio and I will be attending the X-Plane 09 Conference this year, near Paris. I am excited by the turn-out – a number of people in the X-Plane community who all do great work will be there, in some cases meeting each other in person for the first time. And there will be cheese!
The conference is officially French, and I must admit, I don’t speak a word of the stuff. Fortunately, my beautiful and very patient wife will be there, and she speaks French quite well. So I have asked her to translate the rest of this blog post – a greeting to my French readers.
Bonjour. Ecoutez: Ben croit que je traduis le reste de son article sur ce blog, mais il ne parle pas du tout le français. Lorsqu’on était à Cannes, il a essayé d’apprendre à dire “Le chat est sur la chaise” – ce qui lui a fallu deux semaines! Donc il n’a aucune idée de ce que je suis en train d’écrire, et il ne saura pas non plus si traduis sa présentation correctement ou non.
Lorsqu’il commence sa présentation, je vous expliquerai toutes ses mauvaises habitudes. Est-ce que vous l’avez vu travailler? C’est tellement bizarre! D’habitude il ne porte pas de pantalon. Il s’asseoit devant l’ordinateur en buvant du café et en maudissant les “DSFs” – qu’est-ce que c’est? Je lui ai dit qu’il faut porter un pantalon à la conférence.
I am a very lucky man! I will see you all there.
With X-Plane 930 beta 8, we finally integrated the latest version of Max’s Cessna 172 SP. Grab the new beta and try it – he’s added a number of new features that demonstrate some of the newer X-Plane 9 airplane features.
The cirrus jet has been similarly updated. I plan to use the Cessna for a series of tutorials showing how to use these recent X-Plane features.