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.
To assuage this concern, let me make a few comments on where we are in the beta process, the likely future schedule, and the problems themselves.
The Schedule
X-Plane 930 has been an absurdly long beta. Going into the beta I had the mindset that we should take the beta slowly to have time to discover driver bugs on a wide variety of hardware – why rush and miss something?
I think we took this too far. To run a “slow” beta we have run other development simultaneous to the beta, but that in turn has stretched the beta to epic lengths.
We are starting to try to clamp down and close out the beta now, but it is going to get interrupted again. Austin and I will be traveling to attend the
X-Plane conference in France, and from there we will spend two weeks working with Sergio in Italy. Given how rarely we go to Europe, we cannot pass up the opportunity to work with Sergio in person – we have a few problems in the sim where getting the three of us in one room is the best course of action.
Unfortunately our internet connectivity during the trip will be limited, and we can only bring some of our equipment, so closing out the beta while on the road is really not an option. Thus there will be yet another beta delay. Hopefully when we return, we can close the beta out for good.
Performance Problems
I have seen a number of emails regarding framerate with 930. A few notes on framerate and betas:
I try to save framerate for last in a beta. Most performance problems have two possible causes.
- We communicate with the video card driver in a way that is fast on our systems but astoundingly slow on other systems. We discover this from slow performance in a particular piece of the code on other hardware.
- The new beta does something new that is more expensive than what the old build did, and users have not figured out how to (or do not have a way to) turn this more expensive option off.
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.)
Either way, framerate work tends to be the last thing on my beta list for this reason: other bug fixes may cause framerate problems, typically in category 1 – that is, a bug fixes makes use of a new driver call that we find out has hurt performance. Thus I try to do all performance fixes at the end of beta when we won’t be adding new code.
This means that in practice, I have spent nearly zero time looking at performance. I am just starting that process this week, so it will be a little bit before I find problems.
Unfortunately often performance problems manifest only in the hardware I do not own – despite having a pile of computers in my office (a pile that seems to grow deeper and less manageable every year) there are just a ton of systems out there. So a lot of the performance bugs will get fixed by users trying experiments and reporting back to me – a slow process despite some of the really great efforts by our users.
Crashes
Crashes sometimes are manifestations of gross code defects, but often they fall into the category of driver problems too. I will be working to piece together the puzzle of strange behavior over the next few weeks; usually the solution is to not do some action that we thought was legal but fails in some hardware cases.
Don’t Panic
As always, my final message regarding the beta is: don’t panic. When it gets quiet over the next few weeks, it is because of travel, and even once Austin and I are back in the office, it will be slightly slow going to piece together problems on hardware other than our own.
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.
Posted in News
by
Ben Supnik |
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.
- Real 3-d lighting in the 3-d cockpit. Note how the map light tends to illuminate only some of the cockpit as it fades out.
- 2-d back-lighting on all of the major steam gauges.
- A bunch of parts can now be dragged in 3-d, including the door handles. This is done via manipulators.
- Walls! In 3-d cockpit viewer mode you won’t be able to leave the airplane until you actually open the doors. The cockpit viewpoint is constrained.
- The model has the glass parts separated out for correct shadowing, and the glass works correctly from all viewpoints.
- Panel uses cockpit regions for accurate lighting.
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.
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!
Posted in News
by
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.
Posted in News
by
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.
