X-Plane 12.06 beta 4 is out – we pushed for a second beta this week because I’ll be out of the office next week and the installer-making machine lives in my basement, so beta five will hopefully be in about ten days. Here’s some release notes.

The team has fixed a bunch of big bugs this week, including water flashing, clicking problems with mouse-flies and a bunch of crash bugs.

The Crash Reporter…Crashed?!?

XPD-14312 was a meta-bug: the bug was that on Mac, when the sim crashed, it would hang instead of showing the auto-crash-reporting box. I’d like to use this bug as an excuse for a public service announcement:

Please always auto-report your crashes.

Our crash reporting system automatically de-duplicates crash reports but also counts the number of crashes and can tell us the number of unique users affected; we count on repeated reporting of the same crash to get a picture of the most severe crash bugs affecting the entire community. By always reporting auto-reporting the crash, you’re up-voting the importance of fixing the crash and giving us valuable insights into what’s hurting our users the most.

Do I Need to Also File A Bug?

The short answer is: no. If you auto-report a crash you do not need to file a bug.

Filing a bug can be useful if you have exact reliable steps to reproduce the bug. In this case, please file the bug, include the clear steps to reproduce, and include a Log.txt from after the crash was auto-reported. These crash logs will have a “crash UUID” at the end that lets us locate your crash inside our system.

Please do not file a bug for a crash if you do not know how to reproduce it. “I was flying and the sim just crashed, I don’t know why” provides us with no useful clues; everything we can act on is already in the auto-crash report.

What’s Next

We’re trying to wrap 12.06 up; the rest of the beta will focus on a few more rendering bugs, weather bugs, and VR bugs. While we are not going to do a massive real weather overhaul, I do have to fix the bug where it rains for no reason.

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.

7 comments on “Please Auto-Report Your Crashes”

  1. Broken link on the ‘ATC Release Notes’ page on line that reads ‘See the ATC appendix for more details!’

  3. I don’t know if it should be classified as a weather/rendering bug, but the fact that when you look at the moon it is totally white (just like the sun) when high in the sky is wrong, in reality even with a naked eye it never becomes totally white. I believe it has something to do with the auto exposure. Also, the moon colour should be reddish when rising at sea level, then it should become yellow and finally white as it rises, and should also become smaller to the eye.

  5. Hello Ben! I love the progress you guys make. It looks like some bugs have priorities for fix. I remember reporting shadows bugs. Since X-Plane 11 the interior shadows disappear during sunset, and in X-Plane 12 interior shadows have low resolution even when quality slider is set to max, plus shadows get worse when zooming on aircraft during circle and chase exterior cameras, is it any near time to expect major fixes for shadows?

  6. Have a strange isiue with the latest release of ver. 12.06 with Openxr in cope with my HP Reverb headset.
    Start xplane with ”—open_xr” on the commandline. On my mainscreen I see what I’m supposed to see in my VR Headset when xplane is turning to VR-mode (as usual) but inside the headset itself it’s all black, no images at all.
    If I switch over to SteamVR everything works fine (with much lover framerate and noticible impact on the smoothness of the sim though) but as soon as I activate OpenXR the headset stay dark.
    Any thoughts on this one…

  7. X-Plane 12 crashes regularly on my Intel MacBook Pro 16” with eGPU. The whole computer freezes and nothing helps except a forced shutdown. The log.txt does not contain anything useful as the crash is not recorded there (the logging stops some time before the crash). Also, no automatic crash report is ever generated…
    The crash happens randomly, sometimes after minutes, sometimes after hours. It is thus not reproducible, but very annoying.
    X-Plane 11 did not exhibit this problem. It also has to do with the eGPU as it hasn’t yet happened when I open the sim without it. No other game has this problem..

    Is there any way to report this problem/help fix it? I would suspect a ”metal device loss”, whatever that means..

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