X-Plane 10.50 Beta 6 is now live. Here’s the full notes. As always, please report bugs via the bug reporter, not in the blog comments. (And if you blog about a bug in the forum, you might as well be reporting it to your cat – we do not have the resources to scrub dozens of forums for bug reports! You are welcome to discuss bug with other users in forums, but if everyone assumes someone else is going to write the actual report, X-Plane stays borked.)

A few high profile fixes:

  • The black texture/crash loading airplanes bug is fixed (again – hopefully!). If you see any pitch black textures, crashes loading aircraft, or cryptic error messages about “negative reference counts”*, please report this ASAP!
  • I found a race condition in the art asset loader. This is the kind of thing that would cause a crash very rarely, but the results would be inexplicably bad when they did happen. So that was exciting.
  • A bunch of random crashes that we found by the auto reporter are all fixed. If you are on Windows and X-Plane 10 crashes, please click the auto-report – while we don’t have time to look at every crash report, we can look at the highest frequency crash reports and fix them, so complete data really helps.

Async ATC

For X-Plane 10.50 I restructured the code that loads ATC “controller cabs” (that’s the simulation of the actual control tower, and it contains the data X-Plane needs to route AI aircraft on the ground) to be fully asynchronous. In X-Plane 10.45, building cabs can cause the sim to stutter for up to 1/4 of a second as the cabs are loaded.

What I discovered last week is that while I had written the code, I hadn’t actually included it in 10.50. So it’s in beta 6; I’ll keep an eye on the automatic crash reporter; this is the kind of thing that is supposed to go into beta 1 (so that once we are stable, the sim stays stable), but it’s also a key fix.

The new ATC controller cab loading code is stutter free. But – please do not report “the sim stutters” as a bug. The rest of the sim is not guaranteed to be stutter free; it depends on the scenery you use, the rendering settings, your hardware, etc. Until we have evaluated everything the sim does while flying and rewritten everything that can stutter, we don’t guarantee locked fps and smooth flight. The rewrite to ATC controller cabs is a big victory (we also removed a stutter for pro customers using USB keys and made the static aircraft stutter free) but there is still more to do.

Becoming completely stutter free using multi-core is a long term goal that we need to keep making strides toward, but it’s not a “do it in one patch” kind of thing.

Third party developers – please try your aircraft on beta 6! If the black texture bug really is fixed then our bug list is now very short, and the beta won’t last much longer. Please make sure your add-on works, so that you don’t find out about bugs after we go final.

 

* For the programming nerds reading, when it became clear from automatic crash reporting that we had a reference counting bug that was causing crashes, I made the reference count sanity check assertion run in full release builds, so we could get a guaranteed reliable crash and auto-report instead of depending on all hell breaking loose due to doubly-freed objects.

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.

30 comments on “X-Plane 10.50 Beta 6 – Moar Bug Fixes”

  1. are you going to maintain limitation on atc planes as number cores in cpu? eg. 8 cores = max 8 ai planes

  2. you have to be the laziest professional programmer i know. 6 betas for you to figure out that you didnt include a code that you been writing for at least half a year.

    Maybe its time for you to leave LR and let some other people do the coding?

    1. I totally am! When the rendering engine needs to initialize a shader, I totally go for lazy initialization. If I have to type a long keyword, I just let x-code complete it for me. The other day I let the compiler find my syntax errors!

      Anyway, the problem was definitely _not_ this.

      Bens-iMac:design bsupnik$ git branch -a | wc -l
      109

      I’d say that if you think that’s a pretty bad f—up, you should probably have Austin _also_ fire whomever does the project management for X-Plane 10 desktop, because that guy clearly isn’t paying any attention either.

      Anyway, austin at x-plane dot com … you can share your feelings with him directly. 🙂

    2. laziest?! I totally think otherwise, I can not imagine how a programmer can have as much information and work in many parts of the simulator in such a short time, fixing a lot of bugs.

        1. Precisely. You have to turn a lot of earth to make a field full of crops. And word has it you’re human. 😉

    3. Pretty sure LR can’t just troll stackoverflow for everyone’s trivial solutions to physical simulation, and cross platform graphics issues for their rendering engine.

      I’m also sure they don’t each maintain their own branches for:

      10.45 (incase a 10.46 needs to address a bug now)
      10.50
      11.x
      Experimental branches

      Additionally, due to intel’s slowdown of year of year single core improvements, X-plane has had to transition from being a single threaded loop to incorporating as much multiprocessor functionality, without the benefit of a refactor.

      Effective use of multiprocessors for general computing is not trivial, and is one of the hardest problems in computer science.

      Also, LR is being nice by letting us get early access to new versions, but beta is exactly where finding issues like this is supposed to happen.

      However, I’d like to give you the benefit of the doubt. Where can I purchase your flight simulator?

      1. (Er, they do maintain their own branches and merge them. Forgive me, I crossed streams with my sarcasm/not sarcasm)

      3. Is it “line o, word o” or “line 0, word 0”. I can hardly tell the difference. You should also fix your fonts 😉

      4. You mean you’re not going to yell at him for not using the Bug Reporter? Yer gettin’ soft. 🙂

  5. Ben, I hope you keep going all your comments and explanations here.
    Your comments and explanations really help me understanding the progress of X-Plane under the hood. Comments like those stated by jb do not contribute to the progress of X-Plane and should be disregarded.

    Back to topic:

    In advance of the WED 1.5 (beta) release – is there a way to manually mark a custom scenery as “RWY not following terrain”? I believe your current plan is to first release the 10.50 final before releasing WED 1.5 (beta). But maybe it would be interesting to also test the individual, scenery based terrain following feature with custom sceneries before releasing the 10.50 final. I don’t know how much rocket science there is behind this feature (I am not a programmer) but testing WED 1.5 (beta) hand in hand with X-Plane 10.50 beta may be worth to consider?

    Just my 2 cents.

    Kind regards,
    Marc

    1. Yes – in WED 1.5 you can tag a scenery pack as “always flatten” by airport. You get exactly what you’d get if the user had disabled “runway follows contours”.

      1. Thanks for your reply.

        Will the “always flatten” mark be stored withing the apt.dat?

        Regards,
        Marc

      2. One question related to airport flattening. I found a runway crossing a Dsf boundary and noticed an induced bump along the line of the boundary. Will the airport flatten option in wed 1.5 flatten airports that span across 2 or more dsfs?

        1. I’m not sure, but I do know this.

          _If_ the problem is fixed by turning off contoured runways, then it _will_ fix it; if turning off contoured runways leaves it borked, then it’ll be borked with the per-airport flatten too.

  6. Regarding: “while I had written the code, I hadn’t actually included it in 10.50. So it’s in beta 6” … “this is the kind of thing that is supposed to go into beta 1”

    Just last week I had an online discussion about “something” “someone” had seen in the flightsimcon-video (nope, it was not about the ATC) and was wondering whether that’ll possibly make its way into 10.50 … my comment was “nope, not going to happen” to which they responded with the optimistic “but it is still only a beta, nothing is set in stone before RC” … and my comment was from the basic software development phrasebook “adding new features after the beta starts is way too risky … intended features might get dropped from the release, but no sane person goes adding new stuff during beta rounds”.

    So, I must thank you for three things;
    – first, for undermining my internet authority … you have definitely proved me wrong, always good when I don’t get too full of myself 🙂
    – second, for your courage … I definitely would not have the cojones to add new functionality during beta-phase (due to having too many bad memories of doing that in the past) and
    – thirdly, for making me question your sanity, because the world truly needs mad scientists working on code and no mistake 😀

    1. If it helps your internet cred, you can point out that while we are adding async ATC cab load to b6 and not b1, it is (1) the wrong way to do it and (2) because the code was already done and ready and tested, not because I just woke up and went … beta 6, let’s go take the really complicated ATC code and thread it!

      (Mind you, sometimes we -do- make those kinds of decisions…I’m trying to stop doing that though.)

  7. Hello Ben, the latest beta is great. Auto-gen is amazing. I had a question about clouds. I don’t know if this the right place to ask but here it goes. For those of us who like tweaking the clouds textures, is there any way to get an idea how x-plane renders the different cloud texture sets? 4 rows, 4 columns in each set of cloud puffs. If we knew more about this then the x-plane community might be able to contribute textures like they contribute lego airports using wed. Thanks in advance for your reply.

    1. You can do what our artists do: repaint each cloud texture with a series of letters or numbers and colors identifying the texture’s shape.

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