Beta 7 is now available for LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours or so.
This is another small update. We have a few more tweaks to the flight model NaN crash reporting to help us track this down, a couple bug fixes, and improvements to AI airliner landings.
This weekend we’ll be in Cosford for Flight Sim 2019. Well, not me personally, but Philipp, Marty and Thomson are there.
This summer when Marty asked if we could run the Vulkan version of X-Plane on our machines at the show I laughed a bit and then said “hell no” – at the time we were running scenery packs in the sim with default aircraft, but Vulkan was still a work in progress.
Vulkan is still a work in progress, but there has been a lot of progress, so when the marketing guys asked again I said “sure, yeah, what could go wrong” and Sidney cut them a build. We also told them not to throw out the shipping version, but if the app is well behaved people at the show may get to fly the Vulkan build for the first time.
At this point I’d judge us to be in the middle of the X-Plane 11.40 beta run. Beta 6 is reasonably stable and has fixed a bunch of problems that broke third party aircraft, and it’s now available to steam users. We’re still tracking down a bug where the physics code produces a NaN value. Since it just happens while flying and we haven’t gotten any useful reproduction steps, we’re pursing it by adding more checks and looking at automatic crash reports.
Please, always auto-report your crash. We don’t need you to fill out the description text field – just the auto-report and email is enough. We are looking for as many reports as possible, and we will probably stick with two betas a week until we chase this one down.
Third parties: if you haven’t yet, please test your add-on with the experimental flight model off against beta 6 – we don’t have any known bugs with the legacy flight model and third party aircraft at this point.
We are also killing off the last beta bugs in the new version of X-Plane mobile. There’s some really cool tech going into the lighting on mobile that I’ll write up soon in a blog post.
Beta 6 is now available for LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours.
This is another small update, with the main bug fix being for plugins trying to override engines. We also added a new feature: aircraft authors can now specify a preferred climb speed for when their aircraft are used as AI.
Update: B6 is also live on Steam.
Beta 5 is now available for LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours.
This is a small, quick update to fix the high volume of crashes we were seeing in beta 4. It also happens to include the latest cut of Gateway airports, which adds over 1400 new 3d airports.
Update: 11.40b5 is also now live on Steam.
Beta 4 is now available for LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours.
This update has a few more flight model fixes based on user feedback, a GPS error fix, and a fix for scenery decals.
UPDATE: We received a high volume of crash reports over the weekend with this beta. Because of this, we did not release it on Steam. We hope to have another beta out ASAP to help address the crash frequency.
Beta 3 is now available for LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours.
This update has fixes for a handful of user reported issues, as well as weather and time saved in .sit & .rep files.
Beta 2 of X-Plane 11.40 is now available for LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours.
This update has a few fixes to the experimental flight model and ground trucks. It also contains updates to code signing that start our preparations for the release of macOS Catalina.
We have a lot of exciting news for XPlane2Blender users on three fronts: the Blender 2.49 Converter, Blender 2.8 support, and v3.5.1-beta.2!
Firstly I want to say a huge thank you to all the community for all your patience, advice, and support during this time of heavy development and slow releases. One of the biggest changes, I think, to XPlane2Blender in the last few months has actually been all of you! I’ve asked for advice and gotten constructive comments in droves, I’ve asked for projects and I’ve gotten example files to work with! I even asked for help with contributions to the project and gotten several pull requests to merge! Your passion for Blender and X-Plane inspires my passion for making the tools you want and need!
Now for the details!
The XPlane2Blender 2.49 converter has been in development for nearly a year, and the alpha is almost here. Some doubted if it was even possible to save these old projects, but the results speak for themselves. Observe these screenshots of Laminar Research’s KingAir C90B, F-4, and Boeing 737 that have been converted and exported with XPlane2Blender for 2.79!
These are not proofs of concept, they actually work very well! Animations, manipulators, panel textures, meshes, lights, OBJ directives like shading, no shadow, DISABLE_DRAW, ATTR_light_level, and more, autodetecting textures, and preserving workflow features like picking the same OBJ file names and BULK export vs Regular export are all in the alpha. Basic scenery objects also convert, but some directives aren’t included yet.
We are not feature complete, and it will never be perfect: pre-conversion and post-conversion fixes will likely be necessary. However, spending only a day or two for the conversion is far better than redoing years of work!
The alpha is about two weeks away from release. In that time I HIGHLY recommend finding your old projects and doing the following
The cleaner the input file, the cleaner the conversion, the better the 2.79 file. That is why I’m releasing this guide before releasing the alpha – so that some of this work can be done beforehand and day 1 questions will be about the converter and not 2.49 problems.
One last note: Releasing our internal version of XPlane2Blender for 2.49 does not indicate support for it. It is merely there to help prepare your project for use with the converter. Remember, we’re trying to run away from 2.49 as fast as possible.
A person recently e-mailed me: “Will Blender 2.8 have support before the New Year?” My answer: Yes! Yes it will! Don’t lose hope!
During the alpha cycle for the converter I will be finishing the alpha for Blender 2.8 as fast as possible. We’re very close – the UI is working and I’m about half way through figuring out which API calls need to be replaced and how.
Before September is over you will start seeing more commits on the 399-blender-28-support branch. To keep up the hope, check out this screenshot of the BD-5J Microjet in XPlane2Blender in 2.8!
When I put out a desperate plea for some help developing the project I was gladly surprised by Kim Brandwijk, who has made several high quality pull requests that are small enough in scope to be added to v3.5.1.beta.2. I regret that I did not have time to merge them in a timely matter, but now with both alphas releasing soon all users can look forward to some excellent optimizations and speed increases soon. Hopefully the pull requests and community development can pickup some energy again.
I hope you all are as excited about this as I am! It has been a long summer of lots of coding, but I think people will be very happy with all the new features! Stay tuned for more news!
This version update includes the modified C172.acf and C172_G1000.acf that use the new nosewheel steering parameters, so you can try out the new bungee steering in default aircraft now. We’ve heard pretty positive feedback on the new handling from the pilots we’ve asked to try it so far!
The interaction of the nose wheel with the rudder and brakes now closely resembles a real C172: The nosewheel is no longer rigidly connected to the rudder, but by a spring-loaded steering bungee. This connection allows a steering angle of about 10 degrees, giving you three times the precision in steering that you had previously! But sometimes you don’t want precision, you just want to make a tight turn – in that case, you use differential braking. This will pull the plane around in a tighter turn, and with the new steering bungee, the nosewheel will follow that turn without skidding, because it can castor beyond the steered deflection.
If you don’t actually have hardware brake pedals, X-Plane will add the differential braking for you when you ask for maximum rudder (using your joystick twist axis).
For aircraft authors looking to incorporate the new parameter into their planes, there is a much more detailed description here.
Edit to add: As usual, Steam release will be delayed about 24 hours–expect it to be live sometime tomorrow.
A minor patch is now available for LR customers. We expect to release this on Steam in about a day. You will need to run the installer and opt into betas to get this version. It includes improved C172 steering, an asynchronous map, and .lin fixes. Full release notes here.
Update: the announcement here says better C172 steering but actually the aircraft file has not been updated and behaves exactly like the C172 in the previous release. The physics model does have an update that allows authors to simulate bungee-cable steering (like the real C172 has) – we’ll enable this in the default Cessna soon.