X-Plane 10.21 rc2 is out; this recut of the release candidate backs out most of my changes to the lights; in hindsight my change was too ambitious/crazy at way too late of a point in the release process.  The runway lights will still look better in 4x SSAA, but (like X-Plane 10.20/10.11) they will look dimmer if your monitor is bigger.

We’ll do something more involved with the lights for 10.30 when we have time for a proper beta test, and when Alex is around to look at my changes and tell me I’m an idiot.

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.

25 comments on “X-Plane 10.21 Release Candidate Two”

  2. I play X-Plane on a 30″ monitor at 2560×1600 and this is probably why I think flying at night, the lights look way too dim, at least in 10.21rc1 it somewhat fixed the light problem for me as it looks a bit more realistic and brighter.

    Now that I read that you are going back to how the lighting was means that again, things will look dim again when flying at night. Is there a way to dynamically size the lights according to the resolution? That way it can look its best no matter what the user’s screen size is.

  3. I like the new lit objects (gas stations?) compared to previous betas. I am using an 27″ i7 iMac at full resolution, and flying at night looked much more realistic. Those objects still look just little too bright-white compared to traffic and other lighting but overall a nice improvement. Thanks for your hard work!

  4. I am using a 30″ monitor at 2560×1600. 10.21 rc1 was way to bright, the halo around the lights were huge ! It looked unrealistic and bad. There is a tweak at the org. if anybody wants brighter and bigger lights, so let them use that. Dont fix whats not broken. 10.22 rc2 looks perfect and i have some PIC time at night in a real airplane !

    A comment about the clouds – When you are flying inbetween a scattered/broken layer of clouds, the screen turns completely white, it looks unrealistic! It would be nice if that gets fixed one day !

    Another rant since im on a roll, can we seperate the deer from the birds ? The deer running across the runway at LAX doesn’t look right!

    Cheers ! Hope your enjoying or were enjoying a cold beer !

  5. Sometimes being an X-Plane user feels like being trapped in a world moving in slow motion. If you are moving at this speed (like seriously, sometimes this blog has comedy potential in terms of whats being worked on atm), I can’t see X-Planes major shortcomings which keep it a niche software being resolved in this decade. I wish Austin would get to work on X-Plane again (and stop launching a new aviation related project every other month), living up to his hyperbolic promises for X-Plane 10. We all put our money on the table, and I think it is time for Laminar Research to deliver.

    This is a flight simulator, and if I crash into a *not lit* skyscraper that is placed in the glideslope at night…. almost 2 years into bugfixing cycles… well what is there to say. It is laughable yet sad. I appreciate your efforts, but it just isn’t enough. It’s time for Austin to step up his game if he wan’t to keep X-Plane alive. For years I have seen fellow simmers trying to switch to X-Plane, only to give up after realizing how much is missing. So many great ideas, but then these GAPING holes. There is no way to get real traffic into X-Plane, something that has been available for FSX almost 10 years. 10 years. And there is nothing happening, not at all. Austin insists his way of doing traffic is right. He is so wrong, but he would never admit it. That is just one example.

    Laminar please stop development on your 25th iPad app nobody needs (and look like crap if you take glass cockpit for example) and FINALLY get X-Plane on track. It is possible, just pick it up and do it!

    1. *sighs*

      Quoting from the website you linked: “I encourage you to experiment – and see what works/looks best for you.”

      That might be great for those of you using supercomputers to run your installation of x-plane, but it can take my computer a good five minutes to go from starting up the boot process for x-plane to sitting on the runway. I just don’t have time to “experiment”!

      Reading the comments on this blog, I think there’s a lot of frustration about x-plane. Clearly, folks want to love it, but the authors of the app make it difficult. I mean, its great that so many parts of the sim are open to developers tinkering, but to the uninitiated, the appearance of lights, this far into the development of the sim, should be something which was sorted out ages ago. There really shouldn’t be a need to tinker at this level.

      I get the impression that a lot of developer time is spent on improving the tools and implementation methods for graphical models in an attempt to improve the appearance of the sim. This is all appreciated, especially by those people who get involved in developing their own scenery and models. But I also get the impression that the vast majority of users don’t want to mess around with betas or coding, and that efforts to improve the basic functionality of the sim would be far more appreciated.

      Ben, maybe you could give us an idea of how your time is really used, and what projects there are in the pipeline, both near and long term? Maybe put the fantastic amounts of detail that you divulge in the blog into some kind of higher level context?

      Things which pop up again and again in the comments, include:

      Improved UI *
      World landmarks
      ATC improvements
      Online multi-player functionality, including online ATC
      Realistic traffic
      Improvements to the way weather is rendered.
      etc etc. I don’t want to trawl through the blog looking for things – if you are reading this, you’ll know what I mean. The point is, these are all high level issues, and this blog seems to focus on development of very granular level items which I think most users would consider “nice to have”s, but lower priority.

      Do let me know if I’m completely out of order here, Ben. I’m just telling it how I see it.

      * on this subject, it just occurs to me that its always difficult to get the mouse arrow to hover exactly over the + or – side of a radio or nav knob. Its also frustrating that once you start twiddling a knob, you have to keep the view completely stationary until you have finished. Might it be an idea to make selection of these items slightly “sticky” in a sort of “snap to gridlines” way, if you see what I mean?

      1. Paul, you do realize you’re quoting from an unofficial 3rd party website that a user suggested to another commenter and not an official recommendation from Laminar Research right? No one is suggesting that users should be tweaking their lights to suit their needs. Ben has already said “if users want to go in and hack them, well, it’s all text files, so our view is ‘do what you want, please just don’t complain if it blows up.'”

        1. That’s a fair point, Chris, and I’m not trying to blame any fault of third party software on you guys.

          But my point was really that if the appearance of lights was something that was sorted and that people were happy with, then we wouldn’t see these kind of 3rd party websites even existing. And its not as if you guys are saying that all is well with the lights and the third party tinkerers are being overly fussy, because the preceding entries in the blog were all about changing (and hopefully improving) the appearance of lights and lighting.

          I would be the first to admit that I am no expert in these things. I am not a coder, and I only came to X-plane during the V10 run. I just would have thought that the way lights are rendered would be a fairly basic part of rendering a scene, so I’m surprised that its not a part of the sim which was signed and sealed earlier on, if you see what I mean.

          1. You put a red button on anything and someone will want to push it despite the caution signs. How the lights look is subjective. Real pilots will want them dim, sim pilots want them to be bright. No lighting setup will ever make everyone happy. We’re not tweaking the lights because we suddenly felt they could be better, we’re trying to correct a bug which caused them to be dimmer than we expected on SOME machines with specific settings.

      2. “Ben, maybe you could give us an idea of how your time is really used, and what projects there are in the pipeline, both near and long term? Maybe put the fantastic amounts of detail that you divulge in the blog into some kind of higher level context?”

        I really can’t do that.

        – I can’t discuss future work that is not yet officially announced.
        – Once we have that limitation, that hoses everything else, because any time I spend on anything that isn’t yet announced is dark matter in my schedule.

        Also, the _intention_ of the blog is to skew toward scenery developers, aircraft authors, plugin developers – advanced users who are creating things with X-Plane and thus can benefit from direct developer communications. This blog was never meant to be a marketing or general communications blog, although sometimes it turns into one.

        1. Happy to accept all of that, Ben.

          Its a shame, therefore, that there doesn’t seem to be much else in the way of communication from LR. On the “news” section of the X-plane website, there’s very little about the X-plane software itself. It seems to be mostly full of reviews of third party aircraft and news about LR’s other business activities. Its really only an issue because you guys have set your own bar high with the rapid release of new versions.

          In the absence of that kind of communication, keen ‘non-developer but interested party’ types like me, will just keep on looking for titbits of interesting info in this blog instead!

          1. Hi Paul,

            I’m going to pass this on to some of the marketing guys because I don’t think they’re reading this, and I think that kind of communication is probably more their domain than mine!

  7. I don’t know what you’re talking about running X-Plane 10.21rc2 on a 30″ display at 2560×1600. I can barely see the airport lighting, they are just tiny “pixels” on a completely black canvas. Looks terrible compared to 10.21rc1, which was actually the best and most realistic looking lighting to me compared to any of the other X-Plane 10 versions. Not sure what you’re seeing on your screen saying they are too bright or the halos are too large with rc1? They look good to me, although could be a little bit brighter with some more halo or bloom effect. Please revert the lighting back to what is was in 10.21rc1. The new rc2 lights look terrible like how they did before.

    And yes I am aware of the replacement light mod that chris made. I tried that on the new 10.21rc2 and it doesn’t look right as with 10.21b2 and previous versions. The new rc2 beta has broke that and it the light bleed/halo effect is just terrible with that mod.

  8. Today I got the Version 10.21 via the updater. With 10.20 I had 20-30 FPS in Hamburg (Aerosoft-Addon) and Düsseldorf (Aerosoft-Addon) with the Dash-8 400 (Aerosoft). Now with 20.21 I get 1-2 FPS. I cannot use the Simulator anymore 🙁 What have you done to X-Plane?

      1. Yes I know. But I thought that this was an Beta-Issue. Now 10.21 is final and has still such a performance problems. So you are still working on the problem, or do I have to live with the problem and go back to 10.20? How can I manage the downgrade to 10.20? Is there any way?

        Thx for helping.

        1. No – I’m saying: it’s you, not X-Plane. I worked with numerous users who reported this kind of thing and in no case did we find an actual performance difference between the two sims.

          1. Ok now it looks like before. One crash and numerous restarts later, I can use X-Plane again. I have really no idea why this happened. Before the update everything was fine. After the update nothing was fine, and now everything is fine again. But I did nothing for that trouble. But anyway … now its ok again. Nevermind.

          2. You are not the only user to report this! But we are quite mystified as to why this happens – everyone who sees this eventually gets their fps back.

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