X-Plane 10.42r1 is available for beta – the release notes are here. This is a very small bug fix patch that mostly aims to address problems we’ve found with digital download over the last few weeks. (We have already significantly upgraded the capacity of the digital download authorization servers, and a new installer release will finish this work next week.)

Even if you don’t use digital download, please do get the new build by running the installer, checking for updates, and checking “get betas”. Once some users have tested 10.42 and we release it, we can move on to 10.45 and more interesting things.

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.

14 comments on “X-Plane 10.42r1 Available for Beta

  1. Thank you Ben

    I have though a non-related question I do hope you find the time to answer. It is however very important to future updates and releases. Do you have any plans for changing the size of the installer “world image” in X-Plane. Scenery installation is tedious in such sense that It is very un-accurate and more than a few times this has been a huge annoying problem. As an example I want to install Global Scenery for only Scandinavia or preferable just Norway since I mainly fly only there. Or if anybody is like me, we have then multiple installations of X-Plane. I have i.e. one for IFR, one for VFR, one for only US, on for only Norway (well as small as possible to select that is) and one for Helicopters and so on.. So my humble question and request is that you guys make a bit more intuitive selection solution where we can either select from a predefined list, or country by country world map function.. I bet this cost developing wise, but I do also believe we could benifit from this down the line, performance wise. Hope you understood my point and keep up the good work. Love every new beta 🙂

    1. I, on the contrary I fly across Russia but I want a full landscape of the Earth including the polar zone of the Northern pole and Antarctica.

  2. Hi Ben,

    always happy to see a new version, even if it´s just fixes that haven´t (fortunately) affected me so far.
    Do you have any idea when we can see the next injection of global airports? I think the last one has been several months ago, if I am not mistaken?

    Loving X-Plane a bit more every day!

    Cheers, Jan

    1. We’re going to push out the approved global airports in 10.45; I expect to get 10.45 public beta started within a few days of 10.42 going final. So it should be a week, maybe two, but maybe even less.

  3. Ben! When will Global scenery provide magnitudes better resolution compared to todays? HDD/SSD prices have plummeted over the years. Even today one can buy a high end 256GB Samsung 850 Pro for around 120$. That *is* really cheap. I am currently running XP10 from the 512GB version of the above but would love if it was possible to fill my drive up with higher res data. If it would be possible to reach a compromise, somewhere in between our current Global scenery and Alpilotx’s fantastic scenery efforts this would be warmly welcome.

    Personally, I would not at all bother if solely Europe took 100-150Gb. Raw resolution (as opposed to tricks like tessellation) is essential to give a realistic impression. Of course, this becomes even better with tessellation added *as well*.

    Thanks a lot Ben! I really appreciate the work you all are putting in! I might as well add that I personally *love* when you describe tech or current progress with images and videos. It really makes things easy to understand, as well as fun to take part of. So if you are in for it, I’d love to see images showing off new tech in different stages and compared to earlier iterations, like we did with 64-bit and increased visibility. Thumbs up in either case!

    1. How would we get you that data? Blue ray isn’t wide-spread in our user’s machines, dual-layer DVD is not getting any bigger, and the digital download product is pretty big by download standards – already the biggest game on Steam.

      So “orders of magnitude” (which is, at a minimum, 100x I think 🙂 … it’ll be a while before we can easily ship you 100x the data density.

      1. At some point, either media capacities will increase, and Blu-ray will become as ubiquitous as a CDROM, or the world will get wired with fiberoptics and download speeds will increase by orders of magnitude. Right now download speeds for the HD scenery is not horrendous, it just takes a little bit of work to earn that free terrain. (Although I’m sure Andras appreciates his donations).

        But I would ask not if LR is going to ship more polygons, but what can we do with the polygons we have, as in tesselation….is there any chance of that being a part of the 10x run?

        What we have continues to get better, in many ways. I’m hoping digital downloads stop hoggin’ all your time, Ben! But thanks for the improvements we do get to see in the desktop sim.

      2. Hmm. I think eventually it may become viable to optionally ship the whole game on an external USB HDD.
        1 TB of storage is already under 50$. Updating the core simulator would still be viable with internet, and with connection speeds only getting faster, even a 100GB download for some new terrain tiles could be done over night for most people.

        Then again, I understand that there will always be the very vocal guy in his Mountana forest cabin on his Linux laptop of 1995 with no internet connection, electrical power supply or running water, who will curse and spittle if he can´t play the latest version with maxed out sliders ;-).

        Jan

  4. I see a nice framerate gain of 5-10 frames with my usual set of default conditions and settings in 10.42.r1. I found the only way to get that framerate before was to close in the visual distance via the visibility slider (usually 5nm – 8nm), but know it will run without adjusting the slider… I’m Mac (Mavericks 10.10.4). Has there been anything adjusted to the extended scenery for this effect to happen?

    Could you Ben elaborate on your comment “Crashes on OS X are once again attributed to X-Plane or third party plugins.”?

    Cheers Thanks SD

    1. Stephen, any fps change you see is on your system – there are no framerate-changing code mods from 10.41 to 10.42.

      Re: Crashes on OS X are once again attributed to X-Plane or third party plugins – here’s the story.

      X-Plane has a built-in crash reporter that does two things:

      1. When a crash occurs, it checks whether plugin code was running or not.
      If a plugin code is running, we log the plugin and let the crash happen – the OS will then collect the crash in a way a plugin developer can use (apple crash report or MS mini dump or Linux core file).
      2. If a plugin is not running, we gather up the crash ourselves using Breakpad (an open source crash reporting lib) and put up the dialog box to send it to Laminar Research. If the user opts in, we then send the crash report to our server for collection.

      Yosemite broke this process – Apple deprecated the hook Breakpad uses to detect crashes. Thus on Yosemite, neither steps 1 or 2 work. (On all versions of Windows this process does work.)

      Starting with 10.40 we now detect crashes using the standard Unix signal mechanism and run step 1 only – we note in the log who crashed, and then let the OS handle it.

      This change is a stop-gap to at least get users to stop reporting to us crashes in their plugins – without this, we would get a “bug report” in x-plane every time SASL crashed.

      Actual crash reporting is still not working – there isn’t a breakpad fix for Yosemite, so it’ll be a while before we get full crash reporting.

  5. x-plane can’t let hardware full working

    even fps is low at about 20fps but the perfomence monitor show that the cpu and gpu userate is even can’t reach to half

    I think x-plane is doing bad in perfomence optimization.

    the gpu is low using in all time and cpu 100%use only at loading game,when into game the cpu is low using all time.

    can developers change it?

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