This week we’ve seen an increase in questions from new users, potential customers (both in the consumer and professional spaces) and third party developers. So before I start blogging about the guts of 930 and all of the new features and changes, here is some background.
I am the lead scenery developer for X-Plane; my main work area is the default scenery, the scenery tools and file formats, and the rendering engine. I also work on modeling issues because the same rendering code draws airplane models and scenery models. I don’t work on the flight model or physics – that and about a billion other things are all Austin – heck, I don’t even know what makes an airplane fly.*
My professional background is programming; I came very close to becoming an Air Traffic Controller – I went through a CTI program in California, but by the time the FAA called me for the next step of the process, over a year had gone by; I was deep in X-Plane already and the FAA was experiencing personnel turbulence. I think I really would have really enjoyed being an ATC, but my personality is definitely better suited for a small company like Laminar Research than for a big government agency.
This blog is primarily targeted at authors who create scenery and airplanes for X-Plane, and also for users who want to know more about the “guts” of the sim. It is not tech support; I will not answer tech support questions posted in the comments sectio — sorry. Please contact
X-Plane tech support – they are there to help!
There are a few website resources for third parties that provide reference:
- The X-Plane scenery website – contains all the file format specs and LR’s tools and code.
- The X-Plane Wiki – contains information on authoring planes, scenery and modeling.
- The X-Plane Plugin System has its own wiki.
- Robin manages our airport data – see his web page for downloads and file format specs.
- The X-Plane user’s manual is available on the contact page, just in case the version you have from your DVDs is not as recent, or you are trying to use Plane-Maker in the demo.
There are also a number of mailing lists – the scenery and plugin pages list the appropriate mailing lists for those audiences. I definitely recommend the mailing lists for developers and authors – traffic isn’t too bad and there are a lot of knowledgeable users!
I can be reached by email via bsupnik at xsquawkbox dot net, but I must warn you: my in-box is on the verge of complete structural failure! I try to answer everybody, but if your message gets lost, you may need to try again.
* This is actually not true – when I was in ground school, our instructor told us the real force that keeps an airplane in the air: money!
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Ben Supnik |
By now everyone has heard the news: Microsoft is closing down ACES.
This is not a happy day; there is no joy in people losing their jobs in this economy. And having your product canceled really hurts. I have worked on programs that have been killed after I left the team, and I have worked on programs that have been killed while I was working on them, and either way, it really, really sucks.
What does this mean for X-Plane? That is something we are trying to figure out now. Halting development on MSFS is an earthquake within the flight simulation world; it was not a scenario we were planning for last week. In some ways, it changes everything, but in others it does not.
In particular, a lot of things have become high priority that were always important, but are now on a much shorter time table. Improving our documentation, simplifying the user experience, etc. Our current users have already learned the quirks of X-Plane, but we now have more people trying X-Plane for the first time and tripping over those stumbling blocks.
We are only a few days away from going beta with X-Plane 930. 930 was a huge patch for us already, with lots of new features “saved up” over several months, but now it is even more stuffed, since there are also last minute features to make the sim easier for new users, and to add in new capabilities that we are being asked about.
So to current X-Plane users, I ask two things:
* Please be patient with us, and with new users – this is a very busy time and a lot is changing very quickly.
* As always, don’t panic. The first beta always has a few problems with certain video cards, and one or two really gross bugs. The quality of the betas will improve very quickly in the first week or so. Squeamish users should simply wait a few weeks, or skip beta entirely. Third party authors: please test your add-ons as soon as you can! The sooner you report the bug, the sooner we can fix it!
Our mission with X-Plane has not changed: it always was, and still is, to make the best flight simulator we possibly can!
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Ben Supnik |
I really like what he’s done with the new page – see it for yourself here!
Thanks to those who replied to my previous post…and my decision is: to wiki. It’s relatively easy to make the Wiki look as good (and I use the term good loosely) as the non-Wiki scenery website. By comparison, it would be very complex to make the scenery web-site interactive and faster to update. (And update ease is very important – one of the reasons why there is so little documentation on the scenery website is that it is so hard to document.)
So…as a beginning, I have reskinned the wiki. (If you want the old look, create an account and pick the old skin, called “monobook” in your preferences.) If you don’t like the new look, you can send me a new style sheet or even an existing MediaWiki 1.9-compatible skin…I can install it and can select it in your preferences.
I have also installed some extensions that should help add additional flexibility (for example, the Wiki can now have image-based links). Over the next few days I will try to clean up the front page a bit to provide a clearer navigation structure.
One thing we will need on the Wiki is…
WikiGnomes – that is, users who help to organize and polish the content for readability.
In the long term, I would like to migrate scenery.x-plane.com to the Wiki. But for now that is lower priority than creating new documentation.
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Ben Supnik |
If you run X-Plane 9.21 (or 9.22) on a Macintosh with an old ATI or nVidia graphics card (with no pixel shaders), you somehow squeeze 25 fps out of X-Plane*, and you can try a test build, please email me.
Those cards include:
- Radeon 7000-9200, inclusive.
- GeForce 2, 3, or 4 series.
I have a change in the panel code that I need to performance test against older hardware!
* Basically you would have to really crank the settings down – but I think under some really baseline settings these machines might be able to run X-Plane 9 without fogging.
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Ben Supnik |
Besides X-Plane for iPhone (which I now call “X-Plane general aviation” to avoid confusion) there are now two new apps: X-Plane Airliner and X-Plane Helicopter. The helicopter version uses part of the Grand Canyon and the airliner version uses part of Southern California.
All three apps (the general aviation version has a free update) have a fix in the DSF lower that should help avoid crashes.
Basically while X-Plane used to run under memory limits for the phone, it would temporarily go quite a bit over memory the limit during the DSF load, as the DSF loader would use some temporary memory. The new code very carefully purges temporary memory as it runs, and thus never exceeds its final memory footprint. Before 9.04 there was always a risk that your phone was in a tight memory situation to begin with, such that X-Plane going “over budget” would cause the OS to kill it off. (Rebooting the phone apparently purges memory or something.)
So…this is a long-winded way of saying: if you update X-Plane iPhone to 9.04 and still have the app quit at launch (or right after launch), please send us a crash report!
A few things are in the works:
- The X-Plane messaging system, which checks for updates, can hang up if DNS isn’t available. I should have fixed this a lot sooner, but this will be addressed in a very small 9.22 patch, in the process of being built now.
- 9.22 will also include Robin’s latest apt and nav data.
- For Linux users: 9.22 should work with threaded OpenGL on newer distros – thanks to Jan for sending me the code snippet to fix this!
And on the iphone front: the next X-Plane iphone free update should improve memory use during DSF load. This in turn will hopefully address the application suddenly quitting on “loaded” iphones (that is, iphones with a lot of email accounts or other background tasks that use memory). Memory was temporarily spiking as we optimized the DSF during load. I am not sure when this will make it to the iTunes store.
I am looking at OpenAL on Linux, but this will have to wait for 930 and a longer beta program. 922 will also not have a FADEC – 922 is a quick bug fix patch, not a feature release!
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Ben Supnik |
User Rs2Play is now the first user to be banned from the X-Plane Wiki. WikiMedia has some automatic features, like banning all associated IP addresses with a banned user, so if you find yourself kicked from the Wiki in error, email me and I will fix it. (This would only happen if you were in the same shared IP pool as the user in question.) Thanks to the users who immediately removed the spam while I was out of the office.
(If we have more spam, I can promote a few users to admin status to ban spammers faster, but so far we have had only one case.)
Unfortunately the situation with the X-Plane SDK Wiki is not as good. The problem is that the SDK Wiki does not use MediaWiki – it uses phpwiki, so we do not have the rich set of user admin tools that MediaWiki comes with out of the box. There is currently a user who is (for some reason) attacking the user database by registering fake email addresses over and over. I do not know what the user hopes to accomplish, other than wasting my time.
The unfortunate side effect is to leave the SDK Wiki user database in a state of chaos. When I have time, I will be adding some new features to the user signup code and trying to clean out the user base.
Why are we not using MediaWiki for the SDK? Well, besides history (we used what we found at the time), the SDK Wiki’s code is customized to integrate the SDK development tools with the Wiki itself. This is how you get the latest documentation and user generated content on one page when you look up an XPLM
function.
There is no scenery system Wiki – something I have debated a bit. At this point though I am more concerned with getting the scenery tools out than with updating the documentation; once we have a more complete tool set, then I can ask the question “can users figure out how to use these tools.”
I am back from India — I seem to have done a particularly lousy job of telling anyone I was going off the grid this time, so if you were wondering where I was, well, now you know. I am sorting through about 700 emails now, so it’ll be a few days before I can respond to even just the “really time critical” stuff.
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Ben Supnik |
Lines are a bit long here in Maryland, and we’re not even a swing state. Doesn’t matter! Go vote!
