X-Plane 10.30 beta 8 is now (after 27 hours of syncing!) live – more bug fixes listed here.

Aircraft, scenery and plugin authors: this may be the last beta; if things go well we’ll cut an RC next week.  If you have been ignoring 1030, go get beta 8 immediately! If you have been ignoring your users reports of problems with 1030, please start investigating.

If there is something in your add-on that doesn’t work with 1030, we don’t know about it and we can’t fix what we don’t know about.  Please get this beta and make sure your add-ons work as expected!

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.

38 comments on “X-Plane 10.30 Beta 8 is Here – Authors, Test Your Aircraft!”

  1. Why is the download so slow???
    It can drop even at 20kb/s since some betas ago… 12 hours of downloading wait!!!

    1. There’s likely a high demand and a much larger download size than normal with the DSF recuts. I would expect it to be that way for a bit. Early adopters pay a price! 🙂

    2. Because you are quite likely not the only one downloading at the moment …. and bandwidth is still not an unlimited resource. So, it is normal, that when user demand spikes (as it always does with new, cool releases), and everybody shares the limited bandwidth … that the single users gets slower download speeds.

  2. Quick question and sorry if this has been asked already and / or this is the wrong place but is there any update on Oculus Rift? Does 10.30 Beta 8 support it?

    1. I think that it does not. They just put out a new (and incompatible) SDK for the Rift, so Philipp is re-working our support. Once that’s done, I think we’ll enable it. If that works gets done in 10.30, then great; if not, we’ll cut a 10.31 to turn the Rift on.

      1. Excellent – Thank you for your reply. I’ve ordered the DK2 Oculus Rift mainly for flight simming and especially for X-Plane.

        Cheers 🙂

      2. Great news! I have been waiting for this since I got the DK1 last year. Let us know if you need testers! I have both a DK1 and a DK2.

  3. Hi Ben,

    How is WED 1.3 and the gateway progressing?

    Thanks for fixing Botany Bay at YSSY. 🙂

    Regards,

    Duncan

  4. Just to say thank you Ben and all the others that have worked so hard to get this far. Much appreciated.

  5. Beta 8 is nice, great to have DSF fixes, especially KORD.

    However, I use custom scenery packs over Global Airport lego bricks, however in the case of KFLL, Butnarus new FLL is great, but it is covered in lego bricks. And the new DSF KORD is very helpful to reflect the new runway, however to keep that, I need to use that global airport version which contains the dsf. In both cases, I use custom packs for higher details accuracy. Is there a way to you can list or tell me which +- folder in the global airports folder pertains to KORD and KFLL, more importantly with KORD, how to remove certain lego bricks, I want to keep the underlay with the new runway, but do not want duplicate objects which are by nature generic.

    If this is possible, please describe how or provide me a link on how to do this.

    Thanks

    1. Hi Chris,

      The new recuts should have -no- impact on airports. For airports, simply make sure that “Global Airports” is lower in your scenery_packs.ini than any custom scenery packs you have installed.

      1. If a global airport is still clashing you can do this…

        Go to the custom scenery airport and find the overlay dsf tile in Earth nav data and then go to the global airport folder and find the same dsf and remove it and save it, it will stand out because the global airport dsf will be a larger file size than the ones around it as it has a scenery on there. KBOS was the worst.

        On b8, it feels really good and clean 🙂

        1. I am -not- a fan of this: as soon as you get an update, x-plane is going to helpfully undo the “damage” you did. 🙂

          If you are willing to go and hack and slash to fix a conflict problem, here’s something simpler:

          1. Make a new empty scenery pack in WED.
          2. Draw exclusion zones all over the airport in question…exclude -everything-. Export it using “Build Scenery Pack”.
          3. Priority your scenery packs as:

          custom
          your new hacked pack
          Global Airports

          boom…you’ve now put in the exclusion zones the author of the custom pack should have put in.

          1. Yes that is a better permanent solution Ben, I’ll try that.
            As a thought, would the Global Airports folder be better with the xxx in front like with:
            xxx_Global Airports

            Like Alpilotx uses for scenery so it sits at the bottom of the list?

          2. No, because there are only two cases:

            1. You have a newer install (started at 10.25) – scenery added after global airports will ALWAYS be put higher in the .ini file or
            2. You have an older install (custom scenery added before 10.25) – your ini file is wrong and will stay wrong.

            The priority scenery packs are added is the ORDER OF DISCOVERY! NOT alphabetical!

      2. Hi Ben. Thanks. How do I arrange them as so? Even if so wouldn’t the Lego bricks appear meshed with the custom pack anyway? Please clarify. Or Until Butnaru updates kord

        1. In scenery_packs.ini, the overlay pack must be listed FIRST in the file before “Global airports.” Simply cut and paste the lines to be in the right order.

          If the custom KORD pack is first in the .ini file and you still see both, then your custom pack doesn’t have exclusion zones and the author needs to fix it.

  6. First of all: congratulations, and job well done, and thanks (lol)

    I really dont know if this is the right place to report a bug.

    Add-on: AMX International Fighter Advanced Simulation (x-plane.org)

    Bug (probably): Nosewheel steering function doesn’s work anymore like previous x-plane version 10.25; To make tuns during taxi out i have to press left toe brake or right toe brake.

    Any ideas guys ?

  7. EDVE is fully wrong. The ILS frequency ist 111.1 and still some years the Runway was longer 2200m

    2. Hi Jens,

      it is most likely my EDVE Braunschweig that you are talking about. When making these airports I went off the “google earth” image that I saw, it is quite possible that these images are old and do not show a recent development.

      I will look at the airport again with some fresh data and if there is something wrong will upload a fixed version when the scenery gateway goes live sometime later this year (hopefully ;-).

      As for the ILS frequency, there is a new nav database supllied by Robin Peel every few months (recently not so much) that should reflect official data. You can change ILS frequency locally on your computer by editing the data yourself, though.

      Jan

  8. I have been thinking about this for some time now and this update just nails it for me. This may not be the most appropriate place to post this comment but it does provide a context for what I am about to say.

    I remember being slightly annoyed that I had to pay the full freight for v10 when I already “owned” v9. But in retrospect, when I consider the massive updates since 10.0 including 64 bit, the new GPS, the significant update in speed of loading, significant frame rate improvements, much better clouds, recut DSFs, new art assets, free airport scenery, and all of the new features and functionality you provide to go along with the changes (datarefs and etc) I think X-Plane is a bargain. And all of this additional functionality and feature additions to X-Plane have been in point releases! I cannot think of another developer that provides so much ongoing value.

    All of that is to say thank-you for making this hobby of mine so enjoyable. Yes I will mumble and grumble whenever v11 is published and I will begrudgingly pay whatever fee you charge for the new version and then once again happily reap all of the benefits of the updates to that series.

    Oh, and by the way, being able to hear directly from the developers and those coding the project, although a little more common in the “app” world for mobile devices is almost unheard of for major Windows/Mac desktop software publishers. So thanks for that too.

  9. Please enable beta option on steam also. The steam community is growing, but we feel a bit left out with not having access to the new GPS and such like DVD people do.

    1. Hi,

      We are _not_ going to enable betas for steam. Adding steam to betas doubles the work-load of running a beta program, and we do not have a lack of beta testers at this point.

      Steam users absolutely _will_ get access to the GPS; as soon as 1030 goes final (which will be soon) then the Steam version will be updated.

      cheers
      Ben

  10. Hi Ben
    Is there a way to get our preferred voice back? I’ve always used Samatha, she got a little attitude and I can’t stand this dick we’re hearing now, not only is he slow and can’t talk prain.

    Cheers
    tomcat

    1. I don’t know. The reported bug was that when the system default voice wasn’t an English speaker, the ATIS sounded crazy. So “system default voice is ATIS” isn’t a great design idea. We can’t require non-native-English speakers to use an English-speaking default voice just for the ATIS.

      1. Thanks Ben, that’s not good. I use XPLMSpeakString in all my scripts with Samatha as my default system voice. I don’t know who this dude is talking now, but he sounds like he smoked one joint to many. Put those heads together and come up with somethin different, please, I almost went back to beta 7, then I just disabled everything. Ain’t no dude tellin me I’m off course……

        Cheers
        tomcat

  11. 1) Tested the cylindrical node warping adjustments (Cntl-arrow, and arrow), there nice and easy to use/move around the screen to set the points.

    2) Played with cloud deck and breakout on an ILS. Better than before, but pluging in cloud base MSL does not agree with visual of approach lights, and if you press “CAT-I” you get different MSL base (near field elevation), but proper visual of approach lights. More playing around required to check out and file bug report.

    3) Observation: At Dusk, flying into low level status cloud deck, the earth is nearly black, occasional ground contact, and when subsequently descending on glidepath, go into solid clouds where the “light” level increases to daylight levels rather than remain nearly dark(black). Again, I’ll play around some more and then file bug report.

    4) Observation: At initial takeoff roll, surface “roughness” of a smooth runway (KBUR Rwy 08) makes the wings rock +/- 5 degrees until airspeed above 10-20 kts. Not sure if this is modeling the thickness of the paint markings or not enough “gooeyness” the tires. As this rocking motion is near 3-5 Hz, the three external computer/screen visuals don’t remain aligned.

    1. Thanks Greg, but please do file bugs or contact Austin or myself directly…I am really, really, really trying to stop users from filing bug reports on the blog!

  12. Hi Ben,

    I’ve been away from the internet for about a month, so it is nice to see the progress that has been made. Will the recut DSF’s cause any issues with custom scenery?

    1. Probably?!? 🙂 Hopefully not?

      I think the main risks are that if authors are modeling _to a specific DSF_ (e.g. cutting their buildings to match a particular mesh or putting exclusion zones down only for PARTICULAR autogen) then a recut can change the underlying DSF and break the “match”. I encourage authors to use techniques that do not depend on the particular DSF (e.g. build a “basement” on buildings and exclude EVERYTHING that might exist) … otherwise the pack can look good with base scenery and bad with HD scenery, for example.

  13. Hi Ben, the patch notes talk about a “Custom Data” folder where custom nav data can be put in. Does X-Plane also look for apt.dat style files in there?

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