You Do Not Need to Resave Airplanes – Really!

Let me set the record straight on this: you should not need to re-save an airplane to have it work in a newer version of X-Plane. If you have to do this, X-Plane is broken … please report a bug!

(In the case of 940 – there is a big fat bug – see the end of the post.)

Here’s a little bit more about what’s going on under the hood.

When Austin creates a new revision of the acf format (which happens in virtually every major patch), he handles backward compatibility with old aircrafts in one of two ways:

1. He sets the default value of a setting to match the “unused” value in the old ACF file and sets this default value to match the legacy behavior. This naturally initializes all newly introduced functionality to its “backward compatible default” for old airplanes.
2. Where this is not possible, he writes some conversion code that maps old ACF values to new ACF values. This mapping tries to re-create the old systems functionality as closely as possible.

This forward conversion code runs in two cases:

• When you open the airplane in Plane-Maker.
• When you open the airplane in X-Plane.

Plane-Maker will resave the plane in the newest format, with the automatic system updates in place. But this should not be necessary because X-Plane applies the same automatic process on airplane load. This is why you should not need to resave – X-Plane will do the upgrade “on the fly”.

Now about that bug…it turns out that 940 incorrectly updates 930 airplanes – the generator amperage is not correctly initialized. This is why 930 planes will run their batteries down in 940. (This bug was fixed in 941 beta 2, btw.)

What was strange was that, because of the way Plane-Maker’s code was structured, this code was failing in X-Plane but succeeding in Plane-Maker. This doesn’t happen very often (usually the code fails everywhere) but the result was authors noticing that their planes would start working if resaved in PM.

And that brings me back to the beginning of the post. If Plane-Maker can update the airplane but X-Plane cannot, that’s a bug! Please report it as such.

I want to make sure people realize that auto-update should work, and that resaving in Plane-Maker should not be necessary. Otherwise authors will start silently resaving their airplane instead of reporting the bugs, and we’ll never find them.

(Systems bugs sometimes only show up with a particular combination of systems settings. So while I do hope that we can catch all such bugs in beta, it is always possible that one peculiar model will induce a bug once the sim is released.)

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.

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