I have said this before, but now it’s finally true: new file specifications are subject to change in the middle of beta!
In particular ATTR_light_level has changed slightly from beta 7 to beta 8. If you are using this feature in your objects, you will need to update your objects.
A new ac3d beta will be posted later today that supports the updated syntax.
You can read about the syntax here.
I just posted the new X-Plane AC3D plugin (3.2 beta 1). For the info, please subscribe to the x-plane-scenery yahoo mailing list. I will post links on the scenery website once the plugin has undergone more testing; during early beta I only need a few testers to tell me I broke things.
Please read the README that comes with the download completely!
An important note for anyone using an existing .ac file to make airplanes with panels:
The new plugin gives you direct control over manipulations. But older .ac files don’t have the manipulator set on any of the objects. Thus if you export your airplane, your panel texture will work, but the panel will not be clickable.
To fix this, for each object in the hierarchy that has panel texture, select the object, open the X-Plane Object Properties… dialog box, and change the manipulator from “None” to “Panel”. (If you don’t see this option, make your properties window a bit taller.)
Note that if you don’t need your panel to be clickable, setting the manipulator to “none” is slightly faster in X-Plane 930 and a lot faster in X-Plane 922.
Other details: you’ll need the Commands.txt and DataRefs.txt file from X-Plane’s Resources/plugins folder.
Panel sub-regions are now handled quite a bit differently – please be sure to read the README completely. If you were using the 3.1 plugin with panel regions, you may need to update your .ac file a bit.
Thanks to Janos (“sothis” on the .org) we now have a GIT repository of the scenery tools, with public browsing of the scenery tools code.
(Non-programmers – this basically means that source code updates for the scenery tools will now be available every hour, rather than every now and then when I get around to it. The rest of this post is for programmers.)
The X-Plane tools code have always been open source, in that the LR-created code is distributed under the MIT/X11 license (which basically says “do whatever you want, don’t sue us”). The public repository makes the process of getting the code a lot simpler:
- The master code is actually in CVS, but this public GIT repository is updated from CVS once an hour, so this code is very close to the latest we have.
- The full version history, tags, and other information that might be useful to a programmer are all present.
- The web interface supports online browsing of the code, as well as downloading a “snapshot” of the entire tree (as a zip, gz, or bz2 file).
Git is, to put it mildly, a confusing tool if you don’t already use it. However, the web interface allows you to simply fetch the code from a given date. If you are a git user, git cloning is supported via http, and we are working on getting the git daemon running too. The repo is read-only; if you want to send us a patch, contact me.
(Git users will note that most of my checkin comments are really lame. This is a bad habit that comes from using CVS too much. CVS’s checkin comments are per-file, not per-group, which makes them somewhat useless to search on. Typically CVS users rely heavily on tags. The bridge from CVS to git tries to group them into a single commit, which helps reveal the actions taken on the source code.)
In particular, when a new spec is being developed, during beta it may change. (During a beta of a future version, old specs won’t change.)
So…please do not release non-beta aircraft and scenery based on beta builds like 930.
Here’s an example: the current spec for attached objects is that the draw order is based first on lighting mode, then on the order listed in Plane-Maker.
It turns out that if we do that, polygon offset can’t be used in a number of weird cases. So the rules will have to change. I’m not sure what they will change to, but the decision will be finalized when 930 is finalized.
Cutting the next beta is a double-edged sword:
- Any beta that doesn’t have known bugs fixed is just not as good as it could be, and is putting buggy code in the field, where those bugs take away from testing.
- Sometimes bugs are severe enough that they occlude other testing (particularly if there is a crash bug).
X-Plane 930 Beta 3 will be out fairly soon. The biggest thing that is not fixed is the weird lighting on GeForce 6/7 hardware with pixel shaders on. It’s just my luck that we’d have a hardware-specific shader bug on the one chipset I don’t have right now. (I could pull my 9700 from the PC, but then I won’t be able to reproduce the evil “framebuffer incomplete” bug.)
We did find an intermittent crash during scenery load while flying – that’s the kind of thing we need to get into a new beta; we can’t tell what else is a real crash until that one gets cleared out of the way.
There is a crash bug that we haven’t fixed in beta 3: Austin and I have both seen a single, unreproducible crash during startup on Windows. If you have a crash during startup on Windows, please send a crash_log.txt with your bug report!
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Ben Supnik |
X-Plane 930 has a lot in it – I will try to cover some of the details of the new features soon, but some immediate thoughts:
- X-Plane betas are open to anyone who wants to participate. You don’t have to sign up, you don’t have to be approved.
- If you would not be happy with a buggy, broken, weird, freaked out version of X-Plane, do not get the beta! Just wait and enjoy 922 – when 930 is debugged, it will be free for everyone.
- If you make a third party add-on for X-Plane and 930 breaks it…report it, don’t fix it! Give us a simple report about how your add-on used to work in 922 and is hosed in 930, and show us where to get the add-on. None of the new features in 930 should break 922 content. Pretty much all of them do nothing until you choose to use them.
- If you make a third party add-on, get on the new betas early; the earlier you report it, the earlier we can fix it.
- Don’t release third party add-ons for 930 until 930 goes final. Until 930 is final, all datarefs, SDK features, etc. are subject to change.
- Keep a copy of 922 around if you want to fly during early betas.
- Don’t use early 930 betas on critical files – make backup copies!
The first few betas are usually pretty rough…the main reason is that Laminar Research is a small company, and therefore we have a small number of computers; even though I have five machines in my office now (and I think 12 operating systems) there are plenty of combinations of software, hardware and drivers that our users have that we don’t have.
So if you try the beta and it just blows up…don’t panic! Report a bug, and we’ll try to get it working for your machine. The pixel shaders and low level video driver setup code have changed, which means working out the kinks on every hardware configuration out there. (Programmers sometimes call this “write once, debug everywhere”.)
With that in mind, there’s a lot of cool stuff in 930. Better 2-d panel filtering and per-pixel lighting should make the sim look better for just about everyone; other features like 3-d cockpit lighting will be of interest to airplane authors. I will be updating the X-Plane wiki to document how to use some of these new features over the next few days.
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Ben Supnik |
A number of users have confirmed that the new ATI Catalyst 9-1 drivers fix the artifacts introduced with the 8-12 drivers! No need to stay back on the 8-11 drivers any more.
It’s nice to have this bug fixed – long time X-Plane users saw this as soon as they updated from 8-11 to 8-12 – they updated drivers and the sim got weird looking, so they just rolled their drivers back.
But a number of MSFS users have tried the X-Plane demo for the first time using 8-12 drivers and wondered how we could ship such a lousy product. The key, of course, is that MSFS uses DirectX drivers, while X-Plane uses OpenGL drivers, so the 8-12 drivers affected X-Plane but not MSFS.
I’ve been poking at the FRAMEBUFFER_INCOMPLETE messages that some people get. The best I have so far is: run with –no_fbos and –no_glsl (learn how
here). If you get this card and you have 2 GB of RAM, consider turning your rendering settings down a bit.
And 930? I got my last beta stopper fixed today, so it’s time for a scotch! I’ll post more on the beta tomorrow.
I’m always a little bit nervous about posting grand new initiatives … if we don’t actually do the initiative, invariably someone comes out of the walls later to say that we “promised” a feature that we didn’t do. But road maps are important. So, bearing in mind that this is not an official announcement, and that nothing has been decided yet, here are some areas of active investigation:
- An airport art asset library. Sergio already started this process by making some aircraft OBJs and other elements (like custom pavement types) available in the libraries that ship with X-Plane. We are looking at extending this over time to include more useful elements for building airports.
- Sharing airport building placements the way we do airport layouts. Right now, airport layouts are shared in a communal database under the GPL license. An airport building database would work the same way – it would be a collection of placements of airport buildings, GPLed and redistributed with X-Plane. The idea would be to make it easy for people to add simple buildings to their local airport and share the results with everyone.
- Using OpenStreetMap (OSM) for roads. We’ve been looking at OSM for a while, but it’s too soon to announce a plan.
- Sharing obstacle data with FlightGear. We already share airport layout data with flight-gear; this would be a similar initiative. We looked at OSM for this, but FlightGear’s data needs are a lot closer to ours. This is still in discussion; the FG guys are a sharp bunch, so I think we’ll able to work something out.
One of the common threads for all of these ideas is that X-Plane community members have dug into them before we have. This is not surprising, and I think it is a good thing!
Another common thread is that these are all open data sharing initiatives. Collaborative data sharing has come a long way since we redesigned the scenery system, starting in version 8.0. My hope is that over the next several months we can make some of these ideas a reality.
But first I have to fix my 930 beta features. 🙂
This week we’ve seen an increase in questions from new users, potential customers (both in the consumer and professional spaces) and third party developers. So before I start blogging about the guts of 930 and all of the new features and changes, here is some background.
I am the lead scenery developer for X-Plane; my main work area is the default scenery, the scenery tools and file formats, and the rendering engine. I also work on modeling issues because the same rendering code draws airplane models and scenery models. I don’t work on the flight model or physics – that and about a billion other things are all Austin – heck, I don’t even know what makes an airplane fly.*
My professional background is programming; I came very close to becoming an Air Traffic Controller – I went through a CTI program in California, but by the time the FAA called me for the next step of the process, over a year had gone by; I was deep in X-Plane already and the FAA was experiencing personnel turbulence. I think I really would have really enjoyed being an ATC, but my personality is definitely better suited for a small company like Laminar Research than for a big government agency.
This blog is primarily targeted at authors who create scenery and airplanes for X-Plane, and also for users who want to know more about the “guts” of the sim. It is not tech support; I will not answer tech support questions posted in the comments sectio — sorry. Please contact
X-Plane tech support – they are there to help!
There are a few website resources for third parties that provide reference:
- The X-Plane scenery website – contains all the file format specs and LR’s tools and code.
- The X-Plane Wiki – contains information on authoring planes, scenery and modeling.
- The X-Plane Plugin System has its own wiki.
- Robin manages our airport data – see his web page for downloads and file format specs.
- The X-Plane user’s manual is available on the contact page, just in case the version you have from your DVDs is not as recent, or you are trying to use Plane-Maker in the demo.
There are also a number of mailing lists – the scenery and plugin pages list the appropriate mailing lists for those audiences. I definitely recommend the mailing lists for developers and authors – traffic isn’t too bad and there are a lot of knowledgeable users!
I can be reached by email via bsupnik at xsquawkbox dot net, but I must warn you: my in-box is on the verge of complete structural failure! I try to answer everybody, but if your message gets lost, you may need to try again.
* This is actually not true – when I was in ground school, our instructor told us the real force that keeps an airplane in the air: money!
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Ben Supnik |
By now everyone has heard the news: Microsoft is closing down ACES.
This is not a happy day; there is no joy in people losing their jobs in this economy. And having your product canceled really hurts. I have worked on programs that have been killed after I left the team, and I have worked on programs that have been killed while I was working on them, and either way, it really, really sucks.
What does this mean for X-Plane? That is something we are trying to figure out now. Halting development on MSFS is an earthquake within the flight simulation world; it was not a scenario we were planning for last week. In some ways, it changes everything, but in others it does not.
In particular, a lot of things have become high priority that were always important, but are now on a much shorter time table. Improving our documentation, simplifying the user experience, etc. Our current users have already learned the quirks of X-Plane, but we now have more people trying X-Plane for the first time and tripping over those stumbling blocks.
We are only a few days away from going beta with X-Plane 930. 930 was a huge patch for us already, with lots of new features “saved up” over several months, but now it is even more stuffed, since there are also last minute features to make the sim easier for new users, and to add in new capabilities that we are being asked about.
So to current X-Plane users, I ask two things:
* Please be patient with us, and with new users – this is a very busy time and a lot is changing very quickly.
* As always, don’t panic. The first beta always has a few problems with certain video cards, and one or two really gross bugs. The quality of the betas will improve very quickly in the first week or so. Squeamish users should simply wait a few weeks, or skip beta entirely. Third party authors: please test your add-ons as soon as you can! The sooner you report the bug, the sooner we can fix it!
Our mission with X-Plane has not changed: it always was, and still is, to make the best flight simulator we possibly can!
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Ben Supnik |
