REX is here for X-Plane. That’s really exciting to me because REX is a very successful add-on to FS X, and it’s been understandably difficult for us to convince companies that have a functioning and profitable business model on FS X to jump over to X-Plane, which requires building new capabilities in-house, starting at the bottom of the learning curve, and developing new processes. I hope these guys have a ton of success. Heck, I’d buy the product just because REXPlane is such an awesome name!
What surprises me is that we haven’t seen more ports of airport scenery. These packages can be partly converted mechanically using Jonathan Harris’ FS2XPlane tools, and in the case of an airport, the potential for recycling is huge – that is, the largest part of the development process is modeling, creating textures, and connecting the two. Since X-Plane can use these art assets with minimal mods, it seems like a very viable type of port.
With the latest updates to X-Plane for iPad, you can now purchase the Apollo lunar lander game inside X-Plane.
A quick note: if you lose your preferences (and thus X-Plane thinks you have not already bought Apollo) you will not be charged a second time if you click “buy it” again. When you go to repurchase Apollo, X-Plane will notice that you already have bought the upgrade and will simply re-enable the update.
Hopefully in our next patch we will make it clear in the UI that there is no double-purchase. The upgrade to Apollo is a “persistent” in-app purchase – once you buy it, you own it forever, as you would expect. (And because the iTunes store has a copy of your receipt, you don’t lose it even if your iPad or computer’s hard drive gets wiped out.)
Also, the latest update should fix crashes on iPads that were running for a while. X-Plane was very close to the memory limit so iPads that had been running for a while wouldn’t have enough free RAM for the sim. The new patch is a little bit leaner to work around this problem.
So all kidding aside, my iPad arrived today, and it is a pretty cool device. My normal attitude toward new gadgets is “great, more video driver bugs to fix”, but the iPad is exciting.
I’ll blog some other time about why I think the form factor is important and there is a spot for something bigger than a smart phone and smaller than a laptop.
For now I just want to point out that it flies X-Plane; X-Plane for iPad a bunch of new features, including 2-d panels while you fly, 3-d airports with full taxiway layouts, a completely rebuilt user interface, improved sky and water effects, and even some auto-gen buildings.
Also first impressions of the device itself: it’s really responsive. I have tried to surf the web with my iPod touch (which is based on first-gen iPhone technology) and it’s a tough experience – between the small screen, slow CPU and limited RAM. The iPad surfs the web like a desktop. A very light weight, portable desktop.
It goes without saying that this post was, um, inaccurate.
This, however, is real.
I wasn’t planning on discussing this until April 3rd, but some sites have already picked it up, so I might as well explain the why behind it. Simply put: X-Plane 10 will be for the iPad only. I figure that by letting you know now, you can make an informed decision about whether you want to buy an iPad. (Hint: you do!)
This wasn’t an easy decision to make, but here were some of the deciding factors:
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I spend a lot of my time debugging video drivers, and it makes me very grumpy. You guys seem to think that you can plug anything with copper and wires into your PCIe socket and call it a “video card”. By restricting version 10 to iPad only, we cut down development time by targeting only one GPU.
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We love everything Steve Jobs does and kiss the ground he walks on. Steve says the pad is magical.
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The biggest single feature request we get for X-Plane is “can I use X-Plane while operating a motor vehicle.” X-Plane 9’s requirement of 1 GB of RAM, a modern CPU, etc. means that most X-Plane 9 machines are not particularly portable. By making X-Plane 10 iPad only, we can provide X-Plane in a portable format that’s more compatible with flying a flight simulator while driving.
One fringe benefit to cockpit builders: because the iPad is so light and thin, creation of a realistic home cockpit with X-Plane 10 will be easier than ever. Simply take some super-glue, wipe it on the back of your iPad, and simply “stick” the iPad to whatever part of the cockpit you want. It’s so easy a four-year-old could do it!
A few days ago Austin made the recently cut X-Plane 9.45 “final” – that is, it is now the version you get when you update or grab a demo. This (hopefully) ends a sequence of 940 patches that represented a mix of fixing last-minute bugs and breaking and then fixing the throttles for a few add-on airplanes.
As always, if your add-on worked in an older version 9 but is broken in 945, please let us know. I believe the compatibility situation with 9.45 is pretty good though.
Will there be a 9.46? I don’t know, but I think the answer is: “probably”. I found a driver bug (occurs only on OS X) we can work around a few days after 9.45 was cut. We maintain a list of fixes, and when it starts to add up, we’ll cut a new patch to address them. Normally a driver bug would get a patch immediately, but from what we can tell, this one is very rare, so we’re not going to fire-drill and cut a new patch 1 day after 9.45 went final.
What kinds of bug fixes make it into these “bug fix patches”? To give an example, I received a report that the “clipping” checkbox on instruments is not preserved when you export an instrument as a text file. That’s the kind of thing we’ll fix in a patch, but we won’t cut a new patch immediately for.
A few quick notes on the various betas floating around:
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X-Plane: with the 9.4x series we are trying to fix small one-off bugs and improve stability. The BK-117’s throttles will be fixed in the next beta, and we fixed a crash with a third party orthophoto scenery pack.
This goes for any beta, but: if you have an add-on that used to work on an older build (especially 940) and it does not work, please report this immediately! There are no intentional add-on compatibility breaks in this patch.
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WorldEditor: apparently developer preview 2 doesn’t contain the latest texture coordinate editor (TCE) code, so I will try to cut a preview 3 soon. The texture coordinate editor is a new small editor that lets you specify the texture placement on draped polygons. This facility lets you create custom markings. (The current TCE in preview 2 apparently doesn’t have snap to grid and a few other useful features.)
What’s holding us back from a real beta? The problem is that the DSF export of draped polygons cannot split bezier curved polygons (especially with texture coordinates) across the boundaries of DSF tiles. Since I don’t have an algorithm implementation for this yet, I’m not sure how soon I will be able to fix it. For now, don’t try to export a DSF polygon that spans DSF tiles.
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MeshTool 2: beta 4 seems to be a keeper. I hope to cut an RC some time in the next week. (You can see the results of MeshTool 2.0 in these FranceVFR preview pics.)
This is my 500th post. I put off posting it all week because I wanted to post something lofty and clever. But in the end, the great is the enemy of the good – if I wait until I have a really good post, it could be weeks before I have time to write a 6000 word treatise on the relationship between quantum physics, shaders, and the price of crude oil.
The decision to publish less now or more later always comes up in software release planning – once the resource budget for a project is fixed* the only choice is ship sooner with less features or later with more features.
With both X-Plane and WorldEditor we often choose “ship now with less” for a simple reason: we are going to ship with more later, but if we ship now with less as well, people get some benefit in the meantime. WED is a perfect example: the first version could only edit airports, and shipped almost 18 months ago. Had we waited until we had overlay editing and airports, we would have had a more impressive release, but authors would have had no editing at all for 18 months. Why force the people who want to edit airports to wait 18 months for overlay features?
(An assumption in this is that the cost of actually doing a release is fairly low. Obviously we don’t want to do a new release every single week!)
There is a contrary force that might argue against frequent releases: once we change a feature to make it better, users are surprised if we don’t make it perfect. Users assume that if we fix some bugs in a feature but not all bugs, that it’s because we didn’t know about the bugs we didn’t fix. (The truth is usually that we had limited resources.) This produces a very strange situation where users are sometimes happier with a product that is less featureful/more deficient/more buggy because a small improvement in real functionality introduces an expectation of a large improvement.
A second behavioral phenomenon amplifies this: in my experience users consider new bugs to be significantly “buggier” (for lack of a term) than bugs that have been around for a while. This is perfectly understandable: humans are very adaptable and we get used to a bug over time to the point where we may not consider it as “bad” as when we first saw it. Trade the old bug for a new one, and we have to become re-acclimated.
These two behaviors argue (particularly when bugs and limited functionality are involved) to make a small number of large changes that move an aspect of the program from one ‘stable’ configuration to the next.
* If you think that more resources can break this trade-off between features and a quick release date, I strongly recommend “The Mythical Man Month“. The short version: 9 women can’t have a baby in 1 month – if you want a quicker release you have to do less.
I’ve been very busy with X-Plane feature development…when the blog is quiet, usually something interesting is getting coded. (Actually this weekend, I’ve just been sick in bed, so…hrm…when the blog gets quiet, perhaps I am infected.)
Just a quick note: if you see any kind of spam or vandalism on the wikis, please let me know immediately. The wiki engine we use (mediaWiki) has some fairly advanced anti-attack capabilities, but they need to be brought in when a problem occurs. Over the last two weeks I’ve cleaned out repeated attacks on the SDK site and one attack on the main site, and it appears that the software installed now is working.
But if more attacks come in, the next step is filting, e.g. programming the wiki to automatically reject posts based on typical off-topic keywords like certain ED drugs, etc. So if you see a post like this, please let me know – I’ll kill the post and set up the anti-spam filter.
Palm announced 3-d gaming for the Palm Pre! Some big names there…Need for Speed, Monopoly, the Sims 3, X-Plane — hey!! Laminar Research?!?! Who let those hacks in!??
I have the original Palm Pre (not the newly announced Palm Pre Plus) and flight is quite smooth! Thanks to the Palm team for letting us in on the roll-out.
