Update: this crash may only be happening to users who have ‘runway follows contours’ off.  I still don’t ever see this on my machines, even when I do what I think should cause the bug based on the code and crash reports, but we’ll get this fixed somehow.

To hack around this, open X-Plane.prf in your favorite text editor, find the line that says

renopt_sloped_runways 0

and change the 0 to 1.  You might be (temporarily) back in business with beta 6.

Ever wonder where your crash reports go?  Let me show you!

That’s a screenshot from the back-end tool we use to look at crash reports – in this case, it is a view of all crash reports submitted against 10.20 beta 6 on all platforms, sorted by how they crashed.  Clicking on the links drills down for more details, but in this case, the one picture says it all: the code to “inflate” airports (that’s the code that turns an apt.dat file into real 3-d triangles) is crashing.

As far as I can tell, it’s bad luck that this crash happens at some airports but not the ones that I visited during testing; anyway, beta 7 “real soon” – realistically it’ll be 24 hours before I can get another beta posted.

It’s always a good idea to auto-report crashes – we don’t have to worry about “too many reports” because, as you can see, the reporting software gets us a very nice, clear picture of what’s going on.

Anyway, I’m sorry about the delay – we’ll get this fixed and then regular testing can resume.

About Ben Supnik

Ben is a software engineer who works on X-Plane; he spends most of his days drinking coffee and swearing at the computer -- sometimes at the same time.

6 comments on “X-Plane 10.20 beta 6: the Fastest Way to Crash Your Computer”

  1. I am not sure if this is the right way to report a bug, but I try it:

    I use PilotEdge ATC on a iMac 10.8.2 with the VSProPlugin.xpl v0.7.7 – in x-plane 10.10 it works still perfect. Since 10.20 beta 6 (and now 7) I had problems with the communication. I try to use it in 32 bit mod, the plugin starts and I can configure it. I hear the ATC but he is not able to understand me – he hear something but it is not readable. When I test my mic in OS it works perfect. For me it is a issue with 10.20 beta – since I had installed it I had the problems.

  2. I’ve had several crashes, and I noticed that even when the runways follow terrain box is NOT check, the runways still follow terrain.

    But I’ve seen even more strange things with HDR settings box. While trying to restore my system settings, I enabled HDR and when I tried to set FXAA, i noticed a whole bunch more options. Like FXAA ONLY and then FSAA AND FXAA on at the same time,for all the setting levels. I thought WOW….. Here is a chance to REALLY test mthe capabilities of my GPU, but I set it at FXAA 2 and closed the window. The sim crashed to desktop before I could return to flight. I went back to that menu to get a screenshot after the crash and the options had magically reverted back to what they show for beta 5. I know this is not the place to report bugs, and I’ll report that and numerous others I’ve seen in beta 6 if you’d like me to, but I thought i’d pass this on as info after I read your post about this build being porked.

    FWIW, until beta 6, with a few very minor exceptions the 10.20 beta series has been pretty solid for me on my Mac Pro.

    Anyway, looking forward to beta 7.

  3. Hey Ben

    I still think you should try moving manual crash reporting into the beta software itself. It may relieve you of the tediousness of telling people not to post bugs here. You could even have the bug reporter as a cockpit control with a flashing red arrow pointing towards it :0). Ok, i jest…….but…….

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