If there’s one thing I hear over and over from our users, it’s this:
Why are there so few farm animals in X-Plane? The deer on the runway are my favorite feature in the whole sim! Why aren’t there more animals in X-Plane? Please add more!!!
Now first, I’m going to let slip a little secret, because I know you guys are desperate for tidbits on X-Plane 10. The big feature in X-Plane 10 that is taking us so long to get right: moose! While the deer on the runway aren’t going to clock in at much more than 300 lbs, a fully loaded bull moose weighs about as much as a C152 at MTOW. (At least, according to Wikipedia…I’m not convinced a C152 that weighs as much as a moose can get off the ground.) Trust me, you don’t want to hit one of these things, even in a 747.
But that’s not the big news here. The big news here is a new simulator product we’ll be releasing this fall: X-Farm. X-Farm will be the first animal simulator to work entirely from first principles. X-Farm will use shoulder-blade-element-theory to calculate the forces on each part of each animal’s skeletal structure to simulate what the animal would do in the real world. Wanna put the head of an alpaca on a gorilla? Go for it! (Actually, that’s a terrible idea – Camelids spit.) Think Rover would look cute with 6 legs and a stinger? Our animal-modeling application Animal-Maker will let you fully customize your animals.
X-Farm will feature a completely rewritten Animal Traffic Control (ATC) module, with AI Animals that wander around the farm on their own, and herding dogs to chase after them. (The initial version will feature only 20 animals at a time, but we’ll be able to scale this number up over time; the animal AI is fully multi-core for great performance on your new Core i7.)
It’s too soon for me to give specific hardware guidelines, but I’m thinking a DirectX 11-class video card will be best for X-Farm; we’re putting a ton of new shader features into the core engine to support fur on the animals and grass for the fields. The facade system is greatly enhanced and can be used to build a variety of fences and paddocks to keep your animals where you want them.
Finally, I think we’ll eventually be able to get plugin support into X-Farm, so that you can customize the behavior of your animals and create custom animations. Hopefully Wade and I will have time to port XSquawkBox to X-Farm (new name: XSquawk), so that you can create flocks of birds and let them loose in your favorite VATSIM ARTCC. I hear ZBW loves that kind of thing.
*EDIT (By: Chris): I added some screenshots for all the impatient followers who just can’t wait another second to get some sneak previews of some farming. Obviously these are still rough drafts. I’m still working on getting the farmer to look as muscular and rugged as I really do. It’s close but not quite right just yet. Please do NOT ask for more screenshots. We have a pact here as developers that I’ll explain to you a bit since Ben already let the cat out of the bag about the product. Each time we get a request for more screenshots we do two things: 1) We drink from our glass of scotch 2) We go to our whiteboards and move the release date of the product out by one full week. We do this to be spiteful of course. We have so many products stocked up here just waiting for release but it’s more fun to watch the mania ensue. Coming Soon; Surgery Simulator “Demonstrate that steady hand as you remove the remote control that your dog swallowed from his upper intestinal tract”. We’re still working on the price of this one but let’s just say we’ll be doing a wallet-ectomy on you. Post Office Simulator “You get to live the life through Postal Employee Newman’s Eyes. ‘The mail never stops!’ Stack and sort bag after bag of mail trying to beat your best score.” and finally Department of Motor Vehicle simulator “Take a ticket and get back in line”. We’re hoping to release this one around fall of 2012 but that depends on how many screenshot requests we get. This one is very unique. You can play the worker at the counter handing out tickets. You also get to instruct people to get into the wrong line and then laugh at them as it takes them 45 mins to figure it out. There’s also a level where you have to put your “Next Agent Please” sign up as fast as you can. Beat your previous times. Play with your friends on multiplayer! Who gets to take their 4 hour break first?!
We’ve received a number of reports over the last month of X-Plane hanging on startup with NVidia graphics cards on Windows. Most users don’t see this, but some do. We fixed one use of off-screen rendering in X-Plane 9.67 and this fixed some of the users with hung video cards but not all.
I am working with the remaining users now; my hope is that we’ll find something we can change in X-Plane to work around the problem. I don’t believe that the code in X-Plane 9.62 was actually incorrect, but it was simple enough to change.
I have also read some posts regarding poor performance on the GeForce 400 series (Fermi cards) vs. the older 200 series. I have no hard data on this, and frankly, a lot of the discussion on the net strikes me as completely speculative.
Fortunately alpilotx has a GeForce 500 series card on order, and he is working with me on next-generation DSF renders for X-Plane 10. From my perspective, the big question about the GeForce 400-500 series (Fermi and beyond) is: how well do they implement the DirectX 11/OpenGL 4.0 feature set? In particular, X-Plane 10 is going to make heavy use of full hardware instancing, and while this has been available on ATI cards since their HD2000 series, the implementation has been partly in software on NVidia DirectX 10 cards.
The question our users want to know is: if I have a preference for NVidia, can I get a DX11-class NV card for X-Plane, or should I move to ATI. By looking at instancing performance, perhaps we can determine if these cards are contenders.
(I am not worried about overall “how many fps” do you get because y’all can measure that now with X-Plane 9.)
Edit: since a number of you have jumped in with performance reports: please post the following performance info in your replies:
- Precise graphics card
- CPU with clock speed
- Results of –fps_test=3 (3 phases) with X-Plane 9.67.
For the last few weeks we’ve been working behind the scenes to modernize our web infrastructure. Now that we have the new web server running, I (and by me I really mean Chris, because he did all the work, which makes this the best transition ever) am merging the X-Plane Scenery blog into the new development blog.
All of the old posts have been transferred to the new blog. The old blog is still in place; the main page will redirect here but the individual articles will “stay” in your browser for convenience – there are plenty of links to the old blog on various forum posts, etc.
If you have the scenery blog bookmarked, please update it to //www.x-plane.com/blog/.
Posted in News
by
Ben Supnik |
A quick update on a few X-Plane 9 bug fixes we have in the works. We will hopefully cut a new beta of X-Plane 96x in the next few days.
- Linux DVD recognition was unreliable and required work-arounds; my attempt to fix this in X-Plane 964 made this work, but we have a real fix.
- We have a handful of hang-on-startup problems with NVidia cards and Windows 7. I am working directly with a few users to figure out what’s going on, but I hope to have a work-around in a patch as soon as we ID it.
- We have new installers that I need to roll into beta; they will address DVD location issues on Linux and also improve net performance.
The numbering scheme for v9 is a little bit odd at this point. Since we are putting so few changes into each build, Austin has been numbering them as “release candidates” – that is, 962 was final, then he cut a 964 and 965. 964 and 965 were both only available by checking “get betas”, and both turned out to have defects. When 966 is ready, it will be available via “get betas”, and we will promote it to a “real” release if it turns out our bug fixes actually fix things.
So: egg on my face for being 0 for 2 with 964 (in that both my QuickTime fix and Linux DVD fix actually made things worse).
A few days ago Tyler posted some pictures of the “auto-gen”* for X-Plane 10’s global scenery.
First, a few notes on hardware and performance: Propsman took these pictures on a new iMac, so that’s a core i5 and a Radeon HD 5000 series GPU – that is, a pretty decent system. Hardware technology continues to advance rapidly (especially on the GPU front), so there’s a big difference between a ‘decent’ system bought today and even a hard core system from two years ago.
I don’t know what your performance will be like. I do know that the system is performing well enough so far in its not-really-all-that-optimized form that we think we can ship it, and more importantly I know that we can turn the level of detail down in a number of ways to lighten the load as needed.
The most expensive feature you see here is the real-time 3-d global shadows. Heavy shadowing combined with heavy 3-d does add up and hit the system hard, but I think we’ll be able to have intermediate shadow settings that should be more affordable.
X-Plane 10 will use hardware instancing if your GPU is capable of it, and it makes a big difference in the amount of 3-d you can show.
X-Plane 10 is also quite a bit more fill-rate intensive than X-Plane 9; if your GPU is having fill-rate problems with version 9, some version 10 features will be out of reach. In the past, X-Plane has been light on fill-rate, so we’ve had users running with cut down cards (like a GeForce 8400) without realizing that their card isn’t that fast.
Some users have asked about architecture and localization. I expect we will not ship out of the box with multiple local regions; however, the library system allows us (or any third party) to provide new artwork sets for local, architecturally reasonable buildings.
Finally, it might be a bit difficult to see in these pictures (because they are focused in on the detail), but the 3-d buildings you see here work with the real-world roads. In the past, we’ve had a clash between the buildings and roads vs. the terrain texture. This is a problem we are solving for X-Plane 10.
* Auto-gen, meaning bulk buildings that populate the world in urban areas…whether it’s really auto or gen or anything like autogen in the past is a complex discussion that will have to wait.
This summer Tyler migrated the X-Plane scenery SDK documentation to X-Plane’s main wiki. I just put in a series of redirects, so that the old URLs for the top level pages will point to the various wiki sub-categories. The wiki contains the most recent information now, as well as up-to-date download links, etc.
At some point I will try to replace the individual scenery documents (part of the library.php script) with redirects to the appropriate wiki pages; until then I will leave the old site in place.
Just an FYI: when it rains it pours. Normally betas increase load on our set of update servers. To compound this, one of them is suffering a midlife crisis^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hhard drive failure.* We’re working on it now; hopefully it will be resolved in the next 24 hours.
EDIT: the update server is back up – our host not only swapped out the drive, but the whole box. We’ll have to take it down one more time in the future, but for the most part I think we’re out of the woods.
Another note on servers: Chris has restructured X-Plane for Android to separately download the art assets from our servers, rather than contain all art assets in the actual download. What he found after several painful weeks was that the Android store is not yet reliable for large apps. While the official app size limit is 50 MB, many phones have problems with their configuration that cause downloads to fail. When the user buys our app and the download fails, they get angry at us. (X-Plane may have been, until it was restructured, one of the largest Android game APKs. The other games with large amounts of 3-d content were already doing separate downloads.)
We originally wanted to build a monolithic app (everything in the APK) because we thought that this would provide the simplest, easiest configuration to maintain, and thus hassle-free installation for our users. You get the APK, you install it, you fly! Unfortunately, the Android Market isn’t reliable for such a large download, so we had to re-evaluate.
The new system downloads only the core app from the Android Market and then pulls the art assets from one of our servers. So far this appears to be an improvement. If/when Google provides an integrated solution, we will probably switch back to it to simplify the process again (right now we have two points of failure: the Android Market and our server farm, which, per the above notes, sometimes does fail). But for now, we’ll host the apps and try to give people the best download experience we can.
Finally, I will try to roll out at least a beta of new installers some time this week. The new installer simultaneously downloads from multiple servers, with a more efficient HTTP implementation; this should hopefully result in better download times and also lower server load per demo.
* Chris pointed out: most normal humans don’t know what this ^H^H^H^H is about…it’s nerd-speak for the delete key, e.g. to undo a text. ^H is control-H, which you may find works just like the delete key. Yes, I’m a huge nerd.
It shipped! X-Plane Mobile is now available for Android phones – look in the Android market under “X-Plane 9”.
Edit: Chris sent me this QR Code – scan it to go to the store listing.
Edit: if you either cannot see X-Plane in the Android market or you cannot download it, please first look here for trouble-shooting tips, then contact customer support (info at x-plane dot com). Please do not use the comments section of this blog for customer support; if you need help we will need to contact you one-to-one.
As some have noticed on the org and on FaceBook, Randy mentioned that we may be able to ship X-Plane Mobile for Android. Some users were quite befuddled to learn that we were aiming to ship X-Plane Mobile for Android so soon when X-Plane 10 is delayed. Here’s the full story.
Chris, the third and most recent addition to the X-Plane programming team, began a port of X-Plane Mobile to Android a while ago; this was the second port of X-Plane Mobile after our port to Palm WebOS. He was able to accomplish most of the port fairly quickly; hence the video floating around the web of X-Plane on a Nexus One back in May.
Unfortunately we ran into some issues that stopped ship; it looks like Google may have them fixed shortly, hence our hope of finally shipping the app. So while Chris has spent a little bit of time recently working on the last few Android issues, our hope is to release a product that we already put development time into a while ago.
At this point I can say with 99% confidence that X-Plane 10 will feature bezier curved roads. In X-Plane 9, a road is a line segment; you can simulate curved roads by using a lot of line segments, but the global scenery roads are pretty chunky.
X-Plane 10 allows for a road to be a bezier curve, allowing the specification of smooth curves with a small amount of data. This sets us up to trade off visual quality and performance using a rendering setting.
A few notes for authors:
- Like all of the new v10 road features (and pretty much all of the new v10 scenery features), you don’t have to use bezier curves in your roads. They are there as an option if you want them.
- X-Plane 10 will not make curves for you; road data that is defined as line segments in the DSF will be rendered as line segments. (This follows the principle that DSFs contain pre-processed scenery data, and the sim shows DSFs exactly as they are written.)
Pay No Attention to the Documentation
The DSF specification alludes to bezier curved roads; this “old way” of encoding curves was never supported in the sim – all versions of X-Plane ignore this data. The “old way” was how we thought we might do curves some day.
The version 10 curve encoding is different; the “old way” will continue to be ignored in version 10. So: do not use the DSF spec to try to make curved roads now. I will post detailed documentation on curved roads once version 10 is available to authors.
But that’s not the big news here. The big news here is a new simulator product we’ll be releasing this fall: X-Farm. X-Farm will be the first animal simulator to work entirely from first principles. X-Farm will use shoulder-blade-element-theory to calculate the forces on each part of each animal’s skeletal structure to simulate what the animal would do in the real world. Wanna put the head of an alpaca on a gorilla? Go for it! (Actually, that’s a terrible idea – Camelids spit.) Think Rover would look cute with 6 legs and a stinger? Our animal-modeling application Animal-Maker will let you fully customize your animals.
X-Farm will feature a completely rewritten Animal Traffic Control (ATC) module, with AI Animals that wander around the farm on their own, and herding dogs to chase after them. (The initial version will feature only 20 animals at a time, but we’ll be able to scale this number up over time; the animal AI is fully multi-core for great performance on your new Core i7.)