There’s a new 11.02 release candidate available – if you had the 11.02 beta, you’ll be notified to auto-update.  In a break with previous policy, this RC is available now on Steam as a beta, despite us not having had time to kick the tires.  (Normally we wait 24 hours to make sure the beta isn’t nuclear before posting it to Steam.)

Release notes here. This build has some work Sidney did to improve pauses and stutters when loading orthophotos. Also, by request from X-Plane users at FSConn: a new art control gives you writable access to the fog ratio (for fog hackers) – set “fog/fog_be_gone” to…well, whatever makes you happy. I can’t promise this art  control will be around forever, but right now it works and is writable (unlike “fog/std_deviation_cutoff”, which is controlled by the sim to match real world observations).

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.

87 comments on “X-Plane 11.02 Release Candidate 1

  1. Ben, it was great meeting you at FSCon and I am so thrilled that fog_be_gone made it into X-Plane 11 so quickly. Thanks for humoring the two of us and our request. 🙂

  2. Thank you so much for allowing Steam users access, Ben. I went from 9-23 fps with the original Steam release version to a steady 35+ fps with this beta. Since I spend many hours a week in the sim flying FSEconomy missions and really enjoying myself, this is huge for me. I have an oddball PC. It has an old-but-oddly-strong-for-its-age Intel 980X Extreme processor and 24 GB of RAM, but a newly upgraded video card (a really fast one, a Titan Xp). So, obviously CPU-gated, and the great work you’ve done with CPU-operation efficiency in X-Plane has had a huge effect for me. When I build my new system, that will bring more improvements in speed, but in the meantime, thank you so much – I’m on top of a cloud deck in Alaska right now watching the clouds roll (smoothly) by.

  3. Ben, sorry to be stupid but where do we go to change the fog ratio? And thanks for another great update.

      1. Tyler, thanks. Set it to 0.000000 and that works. What number range applies? And how do I make it stick because it seems to resort to 0 when I shut down? Thanks.

        1. This is a raw dataref only, so it does not behave like a typical X-Plane setting. Our intention in exposing this is to make it available to “hackers” and plugin authors. Unless someone wants to develop a plugin to manage this setting, it will always default back to 1 at sim start. (It’s a ratio between 0 and 1, so 0.5 gives you half the default level of fog.)

          1. If this is for hackers, maybe it should not be stored in sim/private. The new flyWithLua versions will not accept that path.

          2. sim/private is how you know it IS for the hackers. If it was a public dataref, the implication is that it was a long term supported part of the interface that we will honor indefinitely. This is NOT that – this is something you can poke at until you can’t – it may go away at any time. I’m not going to INTENTIONALLY delete it, but if it’s not easy to support, we’re not going to write backward compatibility code for it.

            If FWL won’t write private datarefs, y’all have to take that up with Carsten or use another plugin – ANY plugin can write a private dataref with the XPLMDataAccess API.

          3. Thank you for this tool Tyler. As one who has flown (right side/left on rotary wing) many hours, I find 0.2 to be what I would expect to see. Never completely without haze, but about right if no fog alerts. I would love to see somewhere in this area the default with the dataref available for those who want more/less. Thanks again.

  4. As a steam user, (finally) I’ve flown the updated 11.02r1, and all I can say is T H A N K Y O U Laminar, for the big improvments in FPS and smothness… I went from 25 to 35 FPS with high detail settings (runing on i7 4770 with GTX1070)… what a difference! I only did a quick flight with default C172, so for now I have no bugs to report… I will test it deply later.
    Any advise regarding “threaded optimization” for nvidia graphics ?
    Looking forward for the roadmap updates, keep up the good work!

    1. Threaded optimization should be turned off, which is something X-Plane will do automatically for you unless you explicitly enable it in the Nvidia settings. The reason is that the sim assumes it has access to all CPU cores for its own tasks and schedules work accordingly. Overscheduling the CPU will therefore have a negative impact where the sim will fight with the Nvidia driver over CPU time which will negatively impact the overall performance.

      1. Thank you for your cleared explanation, Sidney. I’ve read several discussions about it, leading to more confusion. With yours, finally, i understand the concept.
        Regarding CPU is there any particular config to set, for exemple in BIOS, to improve performance… ? I have an i7 4770.

  5. But no fixes for the many Aircraft flight bugs that have existed for many months.

    1. This is not surprising. We have NOT fixed EVERY stutter. We will make a clear statement when the build is “stutter free”, and it won’t be for a long time, because we’re not stutter free until EVERY possible piece of code that might stutter is fixed.

  6. Nice improvements loading orthos.

    If you don’t mind sharing, what is LR cooking next?

    1. The road map from FSconn still stands: we have gateway airports to release once 11.02 is done (which I think it is _not_ — some bugs are in the RC), and then we’ll all focus on 11.10, with new art and a bunch of engine changes.

  7. I am getting two different numbers for the rc release which confuse my old mind.
    Ben shows the latest update as 11.02r1 while my XP 11.app icon in my XP folder shows it as 11.01r2. People are being confused between this and the betas!

    Thank you

  8. What happened to the clouds where I get stutters panning around while flying around them? A month or two ago they had no impact on my system and now there is a significant difference in performance on cloudy skies vs clear skies. I recently upgraded from a 4770 to 7700k with no change in stuttering at all, which leads me to believe something changed in the betas. Hard to appreciate 60 fps when the sim is stuttering.

  9. Ben,
    That did not help. PCs are showing 11.02.01 while Macs are showing 11.01r2 in the log.txt.

    On the forum, it is very difficult when all the talk is on 11.02 and I do not have it anywhere on my Mac. I can live with it, but why the difference?

  10. My mistake, I forgot to check betas when I updated!

    Sorry to have bothered you!

    Mick

  11. 11.02 has made the fps everyone was talking about – I’m surprised. BUT… It could be because the airports I tested it at were the nice default airports that ship with X-Plane. But 11.02 has deleted these airports, so only the WED versions now exist. Was removing Aerosoft airports planned due to copyright issues etc., or have the airports been removed unintentionally? I’m not going to be happy if I don’t see them again…

    1. Most of those airports were removed because improved versions of them have been added to the “global airports” (default airports). Having the Aerosoft version in the folder would suppress those new (better) airports. Just compare the old Aerosoft LFPG to the new LFPG.

      Jan

      1. And by the way, thank you SO MUCH for the fantastic piece of art you have creaved. I can not imagine how many hours you have spent during the last four month, working on this monster.
        Your videos are very interesting too, and very useful.

      1. Right. I can agree with most of this, but London Heathrow has definitely gone back too many steps. Most of the buildings are missing, and the iconic control tower has gone. This is probably the Aerosoft airport I flew from the most, so it’s very annoying to see it removed.

        1. I just updated to 11.02r1 and the Aerosoft – EGLL Heathrow is still in the Custom Scenery folder, as are Aerosoft – EDDF Frankfurt, Aerosoft – EDLP Paderborn-Lippstadt, Aerosoft – LFMN Nice Cote d Azur X and Aerosoft – LPFR Faro mentioned as gone a couple of posts below. In fact, IIRC, the only one that I have seen disappear is the Aerosoft LFPG.

          1. LFMN’s discontinuous taxiways and missing parking areas are fixed (phew). “LFPG Paris – Charles de Gaulle” was installed, which is not an Aerosoft scenery, and conflicts with my naming system — seems to be a default airport.

  12. I have here on 11.02r1 home screen, in general, about I have 11.02r1 (build 110201 64bit) option to install beta updates, checked.
    Is this correct, I have the latest beta installed?

  13. Hi Ben ,

    The Steam update is deleting folders in the Aerosoft sceneries. Object and ortho folders are gone in LPFR, LFMN, EDDF, EDLP…

    1. Do this (if you haven’t already), unassign the public_beta on steam, and it will redownload and install the official version, 11.01, with all the original Aerosoft Scenery. make sure you copy them to another folder on your drive as a backup, reassign the public_beta, and after the update to 11.02r1, place the Aerosoft Scenery on Costum Scenery folder, and run 11.02 with Aerosoft airports
      Happy flying!

  14. OK, Gotta ask. I’ve tried to download the 11.02rc update for my Mac but I’m getting 11.02b1. Tried it again with the beta block checked (same as with the first time) and this time it says I”m fully updated. Log.txt shows “log.txt for X-Plane 11.02b1 (build 110200 64-bit).

    Is this the latest Mac version?? I downloaded the zip file from xplane.com. If it isn’t I have no idea where to get it!

    1. Update: A few hours later another person having the same problems that I’ve had notified me that he had received the correct download. I tried it again and amazingly I now have RC 1. It looks like the Highwinds server could possibly have been the culprit since both of us are out here in the West Pacific.

  15. ortho loads are much better but still stalling out to something eating the cpu when loading

    is there any way to have the sim start loading sooner? over a longer time vs how we have it now where when you hit x dist from the edge of the tile block it loads everything for the next block at once?

  16. I’m so sorry but this feels like an absolute mess of an update. The earlier release 11.02b1 didn’t stutter like this does. This is on a stock, clean, vanilla installation of XP11, with nothing changed since the last update. The frame rate is fine, but the stuttering, and 4 second pauses are unbelievable. Cloud shadow shimmering in cockpit view is also not fixed, which was apparently going to be fixed in one of the previous updates.

    Well, I’ve just realised it is beta after all, so these things are to be expected. But even in the stable versions I can see autogen lights through the clouds, making it absolutely POINTLESS flying at night or when it’s dark. Absolutely pointless, given that clouds are a BASIC principle of a flight sim.

    1. I would like to clarify it’s the cloud shadow on the ground that shimmers, not inside cockpit.

  17. Interesting… Am I the only one who noticed a HUGE FPS drop on this one?
    With a nVidia 1080 and mid graph settings I went from 50FPS to 17 FPS.

    VRam usage seems low, and I can consistently reproduce this by just moving from 11.01 to 11.02. FPS always 50 on 11.01 and always 17 on 11.02 🙁

    Bug filed.

    1. I see dramatically decreased FPS (from 35 to 15) but only in broken / overcsst situations. Not all the time though, so it’s very hard to put a finger on it. But it def. came with this update.

      1. Have to take that back, my mistake. 8096 res cloud shadows do come at a cost at higher coverage levels. All good now!

      2. I can confirm some situations of FPS deterioration (<20) only in broken/overcast weather. Was about to land in Atlanta yesterday in OVC and rainy conditions and the sim went from an average of 35-40 to <20 all of a sudden. This only after the latest update.

    2. yes, looks like any “external view” option cuts framerate drastically, even just external view with HUD. Hopefully a simple bug to reproduce and fix.

    3. I have intermittent low frames with a 1070 video card. However, using GPU-Z, it looks like I’m bumping up against the 8 GB usage on the card and the GPU-Z is reporting a GPU Bus Load in the 20% to 40%. I read that as swapping memory and that’s the cause of my FPS issue. What I can’t figure out is what is consuming all the VRAM. 8GB is a lot and moving up from a 970 card just six months ago…well I thought it would buy me more time and there aren’t many options left anyhow. Just completing a short flight in the CRJ200, I noticed in the outside view if I was toward the back looking forward, FPS would drop to low 20s, pivoting around to the front looking back, FPS would be in the 50s. Jet exhaust puffs? Not sure what it could be. Try using GPU-Z and see what your memory consumption is and note if you see bus load % above zero. Good luck.
      (I do use ortho (ZL17/18) and xenviro.)

    4. no, your not the only one – with 11.02r1 I also see very low FPS/heavy stuttering in outside view (in 3D cockpit this is not the case) compared to 11.02b2

  18. After intense testing i could say there are no performance improvements and the stutters 3 sec. are still there.

    Laminar slow down the code for what ever…
    I could run 3-4 programms in Windows with no negativ effect to the cpu.
    That means that XPlane don’t use much more as 50 % of the CPU.

    That slightly get me the feeling that Laminar want’s to slow down the code for what reasons ?

    No it’s time for answers. Why we get not full power ?

    With my calculation i must easily get 60FPS instead of 23-30 with my current settings.

    Thats not fair !

    1. It’s all part of a devious masterplan from Laminar, which are a well-known major shareholder in Reebok Exercise Bikes Division. “Pedal faster to get a better frame rate!”

    2. John,
      Ben has explained that many times in the last weeks/months and I guess he is tired of doing it again and again, so I will try:

      X-Plane, in the moment, does not make full use of all cores of your CPU.

      Your CPU probably has 4 cores, that is somehow like having 4 CPUs built in one. Most of the X-Plane work is done by 1 core alone. This core is at full load (100%), but the other 3 cores have only very little to do. When you look at the CPU performance somewhere, you maybe only see the average load of all your cores. In this case, it would be around 25% (100% + 0% + 0% + 0% = 25% average).

      You may ask now, why are they doing that to me and don’t use all my cores?

      Simple answer, because that is not possible when using OpenGL for rendering. It is nothing personal, they don’t want to punish you with bad FPS, it is just a technical restriction.

      I am sure, you have read, that OpenGL will be replaced by Vulkan/Metal in the near future. These far more modern rendering APIs will make it possible to make better use of all cores. Though, as far as I know, it is still f***ing d**m complicated to program this to really work.

      Good luck, Ben and his colleagues are, as far as I know, f***ing d**m good programmers who really do their work with heart.

      So, please relax, enjoy what you already have and look forward for X-Plane 11.10, 11.20, 11.30, … to see a big performance boost.

    3. John, you’re renowned here for the constant bashing against LR, as well as demonstrating your complete ignorance and ineptitude in understanding game development, as well as how the game engine works.

      Your typically ungrateful and self-entitles post over the past few months are becoming a sickening bore; please give some thought to your posts. Stop spamming.

      Performance updates will come, if you bothered to absorb the past few update blogs on this website.

      Your understanding and example given of CPU utilisation is laughable.

  19. It seems the aircraft loads before the scenery completes its loading, leading to a pause as what feels like some scenery pre-render operations take place. Then, stutters or pauses start again when changing scenery view angles or new scenery views are rendered as the aircraft turns during taxiing, and previously not rendered areas come into view. Once a complete look-around has been done, with or without any such stutters, there’s no more pauses. The only other pause I see is when changing local time via the time_advance or retreat commands, and we go from daylight to night or viceversa.

    1. Some of that is X-plane badness: shaders for night are _compiled on the fly_ when you first hit night. That’s a bad design by me, and it’s going to get replaced.

      Some of this is the OpenGL driver: the driver doesn’t always fully prepare GPU resources until they are needed, resulting in stutters. That will be fixed by Vulkan.

      No one should think that EITHER of these things are addressed in 11.02, and I’m having some buyers remorse at even USING the word stutters in release notes. The reason is simple:

      – 11.02b1 had a bunch of code that could stutter.
      – Sidney fixed some but not all.
      – Now everyone tells us about every other stutter that still exists.

      So I’m not really sure how we (LR) can communicate what changed in a useful way here. Sidney fixed a _two second hang-up pause_ — that seemed big enough of a bug fix to mention.

      1. I keep up with your DEV blog reading everything as it comes out and appreciate reading the progress updates as well as watching the videos. Communication seems pretty clear to me.

        I still get surprised by the constant confusion coming from other forums miss quoting or giving poor interpretations of what you actually reported/said. Hopefully buyers remorse won’t stop you from sharing the details due to some tunnel vision users temporary insanity.

        A lot of passion flying around up there.
        Keep up the awesome work……..

        1. I find very little not to like about the beta releases. XP11 is stunning, performance has been on the increase even in the low-end sweet spot of settings my outdated system can handle. In fact, I don’t even keep a running backup of the previous betas like I did in the XP9~10 days. Yeah, it’s not perfect; it’s a very complicated world-sized app that’s constantly moving forward. Many problems come from third party plugins that customize a moving target or settings that are too optimistic. I’m looking forward to the coming challenges of the next versions.

  20. I just wanted to say a big thank you for giving control back over the Haze with the fog_be_gone dataref. I was ready to give in and go back to P3D. Yesterday I did a couple of flights at .2 with real weather and the realism was amazing. This is what I see when I fly IRL in my region.

    Like so many people have said it would be good to have a slider option built into X-plane 11 so users could move to suit the area they would be flying in.

    1. Yep, it is something I am happy about to.
      I tried to scale “fog_be_gone” by

      (1.0 – spread/spread_temp_range) + haze_bias

      with haze_bias of 0.2 and spread = temp – dewpoint

      The result is a very good simulation of the fog/haze

      Thank you Ben for that dataref

      1. Dear devs,
        would you please add such slider for the benefit of everyone – not also for xplane-hackers – this would be a positive addition. And look, the formula above has also been delivered.
        So please put all this into the GUI for everyone!
        Thanks and kind regards.

        1. No.

          I am planning to revisit fog for _large_ view distances at some point (E.g. 50 sm visibility) but:
          – For vis of 15 sm or less, I believe default calibration is accurate, based on a number of checks we’ve had real pilots perform.
          – For large visibility, no setting of the art control gives us the look we want.
          So for large visibility, my plan is to reinvestigate the shader.

          1. On my Xp11 installation , when the metar is cavok or have a report of 9999, the visibility is assigned by the realweather to 10SM, for me I think it’s a bit exaggerated, because the sky become blue (the clean ratio of skycolors) when the visibility is near to 20 sm(before this the haze ratio is predominant). To get around this, I did a personal lua script that changes the realweather file, swapping 10SM, CAVOK or 9999 for 17SM.
            I thing that a few realweather slides, to control the maximum visibility (when 9999 is reported), turbulence (convective effects, thermal ratio…), should be nice to the users adjust the real weather (I like the turbulence!)

          2. The sim should increase visibility when reported vis is > 7 sm and the dew-point spread is large. If you see a low final visibility for weather that is clearly “really crisp”, please file a bug and include the METAR.

          3. I did some tests and found some stations that did not change with large dew_point spreads.
            Bug filed with the metar file and some stations pointed.

          4. My impression is that the main reason for complaints might actually be caused by the tone mapping that results in very flat and lifeless colors. The same amount of fog but with more contrast looks much better right away. Maybe tone mapping could be tweaked a bit in the future or you could add some sort of post processing to get a less bland and more realistic look without changing much on the fog/visibility level side?

  21. Hi Ben,

    A few people have noticed and are curious as to whether the automatic disabling of Nvidia’s Threaded Optimisation on starting X-Plane 11 is intentional by LR or a driver issue?

    1. Intentional! Sidney wrote that code on purpose! 😉

      When a user has four cores and the threaded driver on, there can be more multi-core work than the machine handles, causing catastrophic FPS failure – this was where the “OMG 4 fps?!?!?” stuff came from around public beta 1. So we turn it off by default – you can turn it back on if you feel lucky.

      1. Excellent, thanks for the feedback. Does that include virtual cores or purely physical? When would it be suitable to enable Threaded Optimisation?

        Kind regards

        1. Virtual cores too. Regarding threaded optimization, YMMV – we have no recommendation that you should ever use it. If it works out for you, great, but it is _not_ part of our engine design – it’s a thing NV does that sometimes helps and sometimes screws things up.

  22. Hello everyone,

    Probably is a stupid question, but where all the open X-Plane dataref are listed ?

    Thanks,
    Cheers
    Stef

      1. Thanks Tyler, I’ve imagined that also, but I can’t found fog/fog_be_gone inside it (and many other are inside x-plane) is it normal ?

        Cheers
        Stef

        1. It’s not a public dataref, it’s an art control – you need to prefix it with ‘sim/private/controls/’ for programmatic access, and the compatibility rules are “we may break this in any way at any time, ABSOLUtELY DO NOT base your add-ons on this’. it’s for hackers only.

          1. Thanks a lot Ben, it is clear now 🙂
            Resources/plugins/DataRefs.txt is the only officiel and durable once.

            See U
            Cheers
            Stef

  23. Hello Ben, please include an option on X-Plane 11 so we can control fog level.
    Thank you.

    João Alfredo

  24. Question..

    Have the default clouds ALWAYS been horribly pixelated? Or is this just my sim?

  25. Regarding feature requests, where does one go with that.

    I find the “Pitch trim”, up or down to be too coarse making it difficult to stabilize the default 172 during cruise. Is it possible to add a “finer grain” tuning to the “pitch trim(up/down).

    Kind regards

    ps XP11 is great 🙂

  26. Would it be possible to give an update on where you think you are with the 11.02 update as from reading these postings and postings on other forums the comments range from fantastic to what have you done it’s broken i can see from Ben Supnik’s post on 22nd June that there are some bugs in the RC1 release so due to this is there any consensus on when the 11.02 update may be on general release.

    1. Hi Ray if you do away with interpunction as I think we all should do because it is just such a thing of the past and it really speeds up reading and writing if you do don´t you think yourself and it would also save on keys on the keyboard which already looks pretty cluttered to me and I could use the space much better for maybe a warming pad where I can put my coffee but I disgress I would just like to ask you to keep with it and refrain from putting any point to the end of your sentence because that just seems inconsequent to me and welcome to the club of interpunction haters ;-))))

      Jan

    2. I think the name of the current release is the answer to the last two questions here. And this is not specific to X-plane, but to any software release:
      A release candidate it out.
      This means all changes planned for this release are done and believed to be beta tested enough in the field to work. Unless *significant* enough *brand new* bugs are encountered, this is already the general/final/last release for this version.

      If you are hoping for any fixes to already a bit longer known bugs or even new features – don’t expect it in any future release candidates of this version. If any such plans would exist, the current release would have been called another beta instead.

    3. The next RC should come out this coming week, probably in the second half since the 4th of July scatters our US staff. RC2 will fix the bugs introduced accidentally in RC1.

  27. Ben,
    I beg of you. We need surface signage on WED. Just like taxiway signage, but on the ground. So we are able to mark parking stands and taxiway directions, just like in the real world.
    I understand that you guys favor GA, and naturally, smaller aerodromes, where this is unimportant, but please, for us “airliner captains” flying online, it’s SUPER important.

    Thanks a lot.

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