Robin Redoes the Airport Data Page
I really like what he’s done with the new page – see it for yourself here!
I really like what he’s done with the new page – see it for yourself here!
Thanks to those who replied to my previous post…and my decision is: to wiki. It’s relatively easy to make the Wiki look as good (and I use the term good loosely) as the non-Wiki scenery website. By comparison, it would be very complex to make the scenery web-site interactive and faster to update. (And update ease is very important – one of the reasons why there is so little documentation on the scenery website is that it is so hard to document.)
If you run X-Plane 9.21 (or 9.22) on a Macintosh with an old ATI or nVidia graphics card (with no pixel shaders), you somehow squeeze 25 fps out of X-Plane*, and you can try a test build, please email me.
I have a change in the panel code that I need to performance test against older hardware!
Besides X-Plane for iPhone (which I now call “X-Plane general aviation” to avoid confusion) there are now two new apps: X-Plane Airliner and X-Plane Helicopter. The helicopter version uses part of the Grand Canyon and the airliner version uses part of Southern California.
All three apps (the general aviation version has a free update) have a fix in the DSF lower that should help avoid crashes.
Basically while X-Plane used to run under memory limits for the phone, it would temporarily go quite a bit over memory the limit during the DSF load, as the DSF loader would use some temporary memory. The new code very carefully purges temporary memory as it runs, and thus never exceeds its final memory footprint. Before 9.04 there was always a risk that your phone was in a tight memory situation to begin with, such that X-Plane going “over budget” would cause the OS to kill it off. (Rebooting the phone apparently purges memory or something.)
So…this is a long-winded way of saying: if you update X-Plane iPhone to 9.04 and still have the app quit at launch (or right after launch), please send us a crash report!
A few things are in the works:
And on the iphone front: the next X-Plane iphone free update should improve memory use during DSF load. This in turn will hopefully address the application suddenly quitting on “loaded” iphones (that is, iphones with a lot of email accounts or other background tasks that use memory). Memory was temporarily spiking as we optimized the DSF during load. I am not sure when this will make it to the iTunes store.
User Rs2Play is now the first user to be banned from the X-Plane Wiki. WikiMedia has some automatic features, like banning all associated IP addresses with a banned user, so if you find yourself kicked from the Wiki in error, email me and I will fix it. (This would only happen if you were in the same shared IP pool as the user in question.) Thanks to the users who immediately removed the spam while I was out of the office.
I am back from India — I seem to have done a particularly lousy job of telling anyone I was going off the grid this time, so if you were wondering where I was, well, now you know. I am sorting through about 700 emails now, so it’ll be a few days before I can respond to even just the “really time critical” stuff.
Lines are a bit long here in Maryland, and we’re not even a swing state. Doesn’t matter! Go vote!
Starting Wednesday I will be out of the office – Lori and I are going on a 2+ week trip to India!
So first, the obvious: your comments to the blog won’t show up until I get back and can moderate them. Similarly, I will be even less on email than I am now. I am trying to dig out my tech support emails as much as possible before I go!
I will announce this before I go: I finally got an end-to-end render of a global scenery tile using CGAL 3.3.1. Andrew did the original work on this, modifying parts of the scenery generation code to handle his NZ scenery. I’ve been working on the rest of the algorithms and finished it today.
This doesn’t mean very much immediately, but it…
The next steps will probably be to create a new release of the tool set, including perhaps a bug-fixed Mesh Tool, etc.
The 2.05 installer is now released – this is a multi-language update that fixes a few bugs and makes the map interface more usable. If you have existing DVDs, you may want to use the new 2.05 DVD installer because it scans the scenery folder very quickly when you pick “add-remove scenery”.
(The old installer would check the signatures of all scenery files – this one simply checks whether they exist.)
No URLs have changed – installers will always have the same file names and live at the same URLs; you can pick “Get Info” or “Properties” to tell their version (or run with –version on Linux).
I have a ton of emails I need to get through, so if you emailed me, I do apologize; I will try to clean out the pending tech support issues, etc. in the next week.