We’ve been working for the last few weeks to get X-Plane 10.50 ready for public beta. My goal was to get 10.50 posted before I go to FlightSimCon 2016, but it looks like it’s going to be Monday or Tuesday of next week by the time it’s live.

A bunch of us (including Austin, who is presenting) will be at the Conference, and most certainly at the bar after – if you’re there, come say hi. We’ll be talking about the latest stuff in X-Plane 10.50, and possibly some stuff from the lab as well.

Getting the Planes Moving

As part of the ATC tune-up for X-Plane 10.50, Austin and I have worked on a number of features and bug fixes that should hopefully improve the rate of arrivals and departures at our airports. The current code can get pretty backed up, and we’ve had complaints from users about very long taxi times. (Ironically, this totally happens in real life, but I understand that you don’t want a simulation of KDFW when a thunderstorm passes through or KLGA on a Friday afternoon of a long weekend.)

Here are a few of the changes that help move traffic:

  • The AI drive better. And the better they drive, the less likely they are to bring traffic to a standstill.
  • ATC has a more realistic estimate of the speed of the AI aircraft. In 10.45, X-Plane launches AI aircraft as if they were real pilots at O’Hare. The actual AI drives more slowly and tries to err on the side of safety; by giving aircraft bigger margins of safety, ATC avoids go-arounds.
  • Simultaneous parallel-runway operations are now supported for VFR weather. One reason for go-arounds is that 10.45 has the hard-ball IFR rules (think socked-in) for runway separation, which means that very close parallel runways can’t operate at the same time. This is no longer a constraint on a nice day.
  • ATC uses same-runway-separation rules. These rules let ATC launch aircraft faster when they turn off the runway heading or when the aircraft are small. This means that if a C172 departs on a 10,000 foot runway, you don’t have to wait (five hours) for it to get to the far end of the runway.

There’s one more thing that really helps expedite traffic that you can do: make custom ATC taxi routes in WED for your airport. Having clean, correct taxi layouts with well-planned runway flows makes a huge difference in terms of ATC efficiency and AI operations.

To help you do this, we’re adding more tools to WED to easily edit and understand ATC data and diagnose problems.  WED 1.5 should be in beta in the next few weeks and has these enhancements. We will also put together articles showing some common problems with ATC layouts and the best way to author them in WED.

 

 

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.

31 comments on “Pushing More Virtual Tin”

  3. Oh no, you done told us tomorrow, I done took off work, run the ol lady out the house and ordered pizza☹️

  5. One of the things that bothers me, with AI, is that it treats Helis same as planes.
    So it looks quite ridicules to see a “helicopter” taxi and take off just like a GA aircraft.

    My suggestion is:
    If you can distinguish between “helicopter” and “airplane”, just ignore it and pick other random one, at least it won’t be silly. Although it makes me laugh.

    Keep up the great work.

  6. I like the sound of the tools in Wed to help with ATC taxinets and flows.
    I have noticed 10.45 will repeat taxi instructions more often even if on the yellow arrows. I wonder if this is because I’m taxiing too slow?
    Good luck with 10.50, and at FlightSimCon.

    1. There should be only reason why you get a repeat of taxi instructions:

      1. If you don’t read back the instructions, they are repeated.
      2. If you get off of the yellow arrows, new ones are computed. If your best option is to just go the way you were supposed to you might not see a change. (You can see this in the log.)

      There is no minimum speed – go as slow as you want.

  7. Sounds awesome.

    Does the ATC also have improvements in air handling? E.g. not vectoring you into mountainsides? 😀 Or having you descend to 3000 then up to 5000 then back again as you make your approach?

    And one selfish question: Is real weather fixed? As in it stops getting disabled when changing wave heights, etc…?

    Thanks for the hard work!

    1. Unfortunately there is -still- no minimum altitude support – this is the one feature on our short list of fixes that I didn’t have time for in 1050. The climbs and descents on approach are fixed. There will be a full list of fixes in the release notes.

      Regarding real weather and wave heights: I think that the wave heights now depend on the wind speed of real weather to avoid super huge waves. But if you use a dataref to set any aspect of the weather, including wave height, real weather is disabled. This is not, and never has been a bug.

      2. I used to be able to set larger waves when I was near the Ocean, and I’m pretty sure that I was still able to go back to real weather after setting it and it would work. Not sure which version that changed but it was nice as X-plane doesn’t know the diff between Ocean and lake, so if you could somehow have the option of manual wave height again it would be nice….. The ocean never looks right with tiny waves 😉 or even better have X-plane just know whats ocean…. (also a new ocean shader would be nice haha)

  11. I would be happy and honored to beta test WED 1.5. I have over 50 airports published already to the gateway. Let me know…
    Matt

    1. Once the Beta-period begins, anyone can try it out … you just need to run X-plane installer/updater and have “check for betas” (or something like that) checked when you do… There is a reason it is called a “public beta” 😉

  14. Do you know if the proper order of ATIS/AWOS information for comm and screen made it into the beta? Austin had indicated that it would be an easy add for 10.50.

  15. Are you still working on the fog code ?
    Do you plan to have it included in the XP 10 run ?

    By the way, I read about the next improvements you showed at FlightSimCon for XP (I bet v.11), physically based rendering, new interface, new sound engine… That’s exciting ! Great work !

    Cheers.
    David.

  17. Hope Austin has remembered to put the thermals underneath the cumulus where they are in real life.

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