Release Candidate Three is out – Steam version coming next week. I think this is going to be the final version of 10.50, mostly because I’m going to stick my fingers in my ears and ignore any more bug reports. Seriously though, if you do find a bug, please report it, we’ll fix it in a new patch.

RC3 took a while to get out because we had a number of severe bugs reported very late in the beta process. Several third party developers waited until our release candidate to even try the beta, and this has delayed the release schedule.

Third party developers: please do not wait until the release candidate to check your add-ons. Doing so means a few things:

  1. We might not be able to make the best fix due to a lack of time.
  2. If the problem turns out to be an authoring error in your add-on, exposed by a new beta, you won’t have any time to fix your add-on before the problem is revealed.
  3. This definitely impacts the efficiency of the entire beta process in a negative way.

WED 1.5 beta 2 will be out as soon as I can compile it.

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.

50 comments on “X-Plane 10.50r3 is Out”

    1. A preview of X-Plane 11 was given at FlightSimCon 2016. Google it and see it for yourself. Looked pretty awesome.

  4. Hi,

    I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask this, but I’m a Steam user and severely regret the decision due to the lagging behind of the Steam version. Additionally, I also started to develop X-Plane plugins, and for those I really like to launch X-Plane in a debugger, but I can’t do that because of Steam.

    In any case, is it possible to “upgrade” the Steam version to the normal download version without having to buy it again?

      1. That sucks, but it’s understandable. Thanks for the reply. I know I won’t repeat that mistake with the next major version of X-Plane, whenever that will be released.

    2. You can start the Steam version of X-Plane in a debugger.
      Put a file called “steam_appid.txt” in the X-Plane main folder that contains one line with “292180” which is the appid of X-Plane on Steam. Then, launch your Steam client and let it run in the background. Now you are able to launch X-Plane through your debugger for plugin development.

      1. Wow! This is huge, thank you so much for that piece of information! I can now actually reasonably debug my plugins start up.

    3. How about just attach to it as a running process? Works for me using the Steam version and LLDB on Mac.

      1. That works, but I can’t start it from my IDE in that case, and even worse, plugin start up happens so early that it’s impossible to attach before the plugin has potentially crashed and burned already.

  5. Well, You wish to say, that no needs to sit very long time on a river bank like as it did the ancient Chinese. Your idea is clear. Thanks for the clarifications and Good Luck.

    1. I don’t know what the “request feature” is. If there is something that was in the previous candidate and is missing now, please file a bug ASAP.

      1. It was “request altimeter”, which is still there. It doesn’t show when the plane is not powered up. All good Ben, thanks.

  7. Will this version make use of the new NOAA weather URL? I don’t know if the previous versions that mentioned an issue with weather was because it was using the old URL, or if the new URL was/is having intermittent issues.

  9. Great job done by you and your team Ben. X Plane is one of a kind!

    There is a lot of buzz around that X Plane 11 is on the horizon; is there any truth to this?
    It feels to me like XP 10 has only been around 4 or 5 years, but of course that is not the case.

    XP 10 is historic and I for one have no intention in moving on any time soon!

    1. I can’t comment on future releases and upcoming schedules.

      If you stick long enough with XP10 it will move from “historic” to “jurassic.” 🙂

  10. Ben,

    It is obvious that nobody of the X-Plane team intends to already give any statement about release dates, development state or anything else about X-Plane 11. This is more than understandable and therefore I do not intend trying to squeeze any details here.

    I’d just like to thank you and the whole team for creating the greatest flight simulation software I have seen on a PC – XP 10.50! And also I hope you don’t mind me to leave a little wish for the future:

    X-Plane 10 is not only the most advanced XP ever created but also a game changer to the whole X-Plane community: Tons of awesome payware and freeware – aircraft and scenery – have been developed for X-Plane 10. No other version of X-Plane before made it happen to have such amazing 3rd party add-ons. Therefore I really hope – and this is my wish – X-Plane 11 will be cabable of running all the aircraft and scenery that X-Plane 10 users paid for so far.

    The reason why many former FSX users moved over to P3D instead of X-Plane was that they spent hundrets of bucks for 3rd party add-ons which they could keep running P3D instead of FSX. I think it would be a nightmare for users, if they would have to toss away what they’ve bought for X-Plane 10 once X-Plane 11 will be released. This would hamper the change to X-Plane 11 a lot. Also many authors of great freeware spent months to years for development of really cool stiff to make X-Plane 10 even better. Who dares asking them to restart from scratch for a new version?

    Even if add-ons would only need a minor overhaul to regain compatibility, it would be absolutely acceptable.

    Maybe you could confirm that compatibility of X-Plane 10 add-ons to the future X-Plane version is at least considered by Laminar Research?

    Kind regards,
    Marc

    1. agreed, and I am sure it will, they really try to keep at least the most recent version add ons work. too many folks would be pissed and developers would have all that time lost if it would not work again. doesn’t make sense

    3. Marc, I very much agree with what you have mentioned. I VERY much enjoy X-Plane and have been a user since X-Plane 9.xx. I do not want to comment on how much I have spent on payware aircraft and scenery but I will mention the hanger is full.

  11. Waiting for WED 1.5 b2, but while i wait, would you be so kind to help me out with a little doubt (not covered neither by manual nor by tutorial). For ATC flows, the minimum ceiling should be a sum of runway msl altitude + desired minimum ceiling (eg. rwy at 2700 msl and target min ceil at 1500 thus 4200 as value) or it already considers the runway msl altitude (eg. rwy at 2700 msl and target min ceil at 1500 thus 1500 as value).

    Thanks in advance

    1. nevermind, i figured it out by myself. However after playing with WED and other 3rd party atc addons like x-life and world traffic (with agre editor), i have a concern thus a suggestion. Leaving aside the fact that ATC and WED are heavily under development, i’m editing an airport where the taxiway leading to the runway (let’s call it external taxiway) is closer to the ramp than the “terminal taxiway” (let’s call it internal taxiway), so the AI will proceed directly to the external taxiway which not cool. The only workaround is to create dead nodes, closer than external taxiway, connected directly to the internal taxiway, thus increasing the amount of nodes and edges. Surely there are many solutions, but imo two of them could be either add an information directly on the ramp object that suggests which edge the AI should look for, or a cleaner and more flexible solution could be directly in the code where according to the ramp start type (gate, tie-down or hangar) it will look for a closer edge behind or forward the ramp. This is regardless the fact that AI is not able to perform pushback yet.

      thanks in advance
      ne

      1. Our plan for this in the roadmap is to allow authors to specify “preferred routes” – spellings of pre-canned taxi route connections that should be tried first to make a link. At a lot of airports the routes are in the standard operating procedures (SOPs) so they use the same route every time – this would allow for that and band-aid around this kind of routing.

        1. Well that is another option, the same used by WT, which is not bad and guarantee correct behavior. However there are two things, firstly do not forget to allow different preferred route per ATC flow (imagine an airport with only one taxiway) and that take into consideration the critical condition when it is switching between one flow to another one that use the same taxiway in different directions. Secondly, in my opinion the biggest weak in this method, is the fact that it would require a huge amount of work from designers around the world (pro or non pro). Final considerations, although the cons is not minimal i see a lot of pros.

          I have one more last question, a big big one. Is there something under the hood related to the ATC? I’m asking this due to video series released by laminar on youtube that focus on ATC. Logically speaking the current state of x plane ATC is far from being one of its strength as promotional ad, so unless there is a huge revamp coming up…. any hint? no comment? 🙂

          Thanks in advance

          1. Why would preferred routes be a huge amount of work? The only information X-Plane needs is literally the list of taxiway names.

            Example: at KBOS they use taxiway bravo (the outer loop around the terminals) for departures and alpha (the inner loop) for arrivals. So in the south flow (depart 22R, arrive 22L, 27) you just need

            B N

            that’s it. That’s going to tell the system to try routes with bravo and november first before just making stuff up. Similarly for north arrivals you would only need

            N B
            33R N B

            in other words, this info could be (1) very compact and (2) provided incrementally – it wouldn’t be mandatory.

    2. It is (weirdly) specified in _MSL_ feet, so if the runway is at 2700 MSL and you want 1500 AGL minima, which is a sane number, then you need 4200. It’s sort of done this way for simplicity internally for X-Plane: it doesn’t have to go fetch the field height to do the calculation, just look up the weather and compare to the weather system itself (which is in MSL and doesn’t care where the land turns out to be).

  12. Hi Ben. I am a TrackIR user. Is there any reason why the “head roll” is not simulated in X-Plane? Any plans to add this in the future?

    1. Originally it didn’t exist because roll wasn’t useful for non-head-tracking users. We may add it at some point – it’ll be useful for the various 6-DOF VR headsets too. It has been available to plugins since forever.

  13. Regarding WED 1.5 b2, will laminar give some time to designers to update their airport to 10.50 before the release of the 10.51 or not? This way those who already have their airport ready for the 10.50 but are just holding for the b2 to upload to gateway will have the chance to see their airport soon in the 10.51.

    thanks in advance
    NE

    1. Some time, yes. But also, there will be more airport release vehicles.

      My view is that airport authors need to start thinking of airport releases like the subway – if you miss the train, the next one isn’t that far away – it’s not like an international flight where you have to show up two hours early.

      1. Train 1 – 10.30
        Train 2 – 10.40
        Train 3 – 10.45
        Train 4 – 10.50 Leaving the station shortly.

  14. I love the improvements to the AI ATC engine. Not 100% yet, but it’s a MAJOR (and welcome) improvement.

    I’m still in a fog about how X-Plane will generate static aircraft at start points. Currently, I have not seen ANY sim generated statics at any of my start points. I have no problem generating AI aircraft, but statics just don’t’t show up.

    With that said, I have quite a few start points where I DO NOT want X-Plane to generate a static aircraft. It seems like you mentioned a while ago how to block statics, but I’ve searched the blog and WED user’s manual, but I can’t find it. Is it possible for a scenery author to prevent static aircraft from spawning at a start point?

    1. To get statics:
      1. turn on the ren setting check box
      2. turn up OBJ density a bit.
      3. make sure your apt.dat is exported targeting 10.50 in WED 1.5b1
      4. make sure you have an operations type that is not none
      5. make sure you have a spot type that is gate or tie down

      To NOT have static aircraft
      set the operations type to none or
      set the gate type to misc

      1. So……. Am I correct in assuming that exclusion zones have no effect on sim generated statics?

    1. We are waiting for c++17 to be finalized!

      Just kidding … Jennifer’s writing up release notes now – she found one beta-stopping bug in the test build, which I fixed. Should be posted tonight I suspect.

  16. X-Plane 10.50r3 notes that the replay won’t work anymore as the file format has changed? I have loads I use for reviews that are only a few months old and some are damn good? Are they all gone? Thanks SD

    1. The replay format probably did change between 10.45 and 10.50.

      The replay and .sit file format has not been stable between free patches … pretty much ever.

      We are looking at setting the format up to be stable across a major version run.

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