X-Plane 10.03 is now final; here’s a little bit of what’s coming up:

  • For a while we were “pushing” betas to all users via the auto-update system.  We did this because we had critical crash fixes we wanted to get out quickly.  Fortunately, that phase of the release is now over and 10.04 betas will only be available if you opt in and check the “beta” box in the updater.
  • For 10.04 we are continuing to tune performance, fix bugs, improve the look of the sim, etc.  In other words, it’s more stabilization and polish.
  • Aerosoft has built a few custom and lego brick European airports for X-Plane 10; these will be available as part of the update for users who have scenery installed.  This might be in 10.05 depending on how quickly I can get the installer/updater work done.
  • Tom is working more with the airport lego brick library using WED 1.2; I fixed some WED bugs last week and will try to get some releases out soon.

I’ll post more on framerate in the next few days.

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.

51 comments on “What’s Next After 10.03

  1. Thanks for the update Ben! The big fps improvements we saw on 10.03, already include fixes to some of the AMD issues or that’s an unrelated matter?

    1. They do not. 10.03 addresses 2-d fill rate; 10.04 will address 3-d fill rate. I have the AMD Windows driver speed issues highly isolated after getting to work on an AMD machine – I’ll write that up some other time. (My mobo doesn’t like AMD cards – Mike is swapping it for me this week, which should hopefully unjam things a bit.)

      1. Excellent news!!! I assume that by AMD driver, you are referring to ATI cards ?

        if that is the case: HURRAY!

  2. Hi,

    Thanks for the info Ben, but what does this mean? “…update for users who have scenery installed…”

    Does it mean its not for everybody or ?

    Cheers
    Mark

    1. The updated airports will only be installed for users who have the base scenery for that area installed. This means only customers with a full DVD set and interest in the area. You can always add/remove scenery, then run the updater again. By not pushing the scenery to users who are not interested in the area (and thus don’t have global scenery) we keep the update servers responsive.

  3. So did you take care of that very ‘bad alex’ or are you still looking at options of discipline? 😛

    1. Bad Alex (bad alloc) is a problem that only goes away when there is sufficient access to system memory or a reduced object count. Simply: this is something for the eventual 64bit build.

      Ben….will we see 64bit work in 10.05 or so…or is the addition of a 64 bit version of X-Plane going to be several more months in the future?

        1. That’s great to have a handle on, Ben. I’ve got some magic to learn to accommodate the change, not that it’s critical. Big “patch?” Heh, I have a feeling it’s going to be epic. I feel your pain. Thanks for all the hard effort and coffee drinkin’!

          1. “Patch” to LR means “change to the code” – no implication about size. Back in the good old days, Austin implemented the round world as a patch. 😉

      1. Yeah but has the temporary measure of detecting low memory and warning of an impending bad alloc been implemented yet? I should have been more specific sorry…

  4. So framerate has been getting improved? Had downloaded the demo and was a little disappointed with what I was experiencing with my current set up.
    X990 stock, GTX580 with 12GB RAM.

  5. Oh ok, i figured we were getting a patch now for all the work that you guys did for the past weeks since updates went silent, the rc2 that came weeks ago surely isnt the same one now? Guess well have to wait more weeks for updates and nitty bug fixes for 10.04

    🙁

  6. Hi,
    i think the hdr mode still needs more tweaking. With an i5k and nvidia 570 i get less then 20 frames with fxaa in the air. and the antialiasing with hdr on is very poor. the flickering on the horizon and the water shadows are very ugly. please improve that…

  7. Ok… so what you guys have been working on for weeks with no updates can’t come until 10.04 beta later, maybe weeks away is that correct?

    looking forward 10.04 with bug fixes and polishing of how stuff looks
    i.e. MAJOR ONES- clouds, in flight of clouds being gray, water shaders!

    thanks

    1. You’re getting unnecessarily tangled up in the numbering. Forget what versions are being called. If you want what we’ve been working on for the past few weeks, you’ll check the box that says you want betas in the updater application and you’ll get it.

      Also, you were asked numerous times to stop filing repeated bugs and to stop passive-aggressively hinting/nudging/complaining about them on our official channels. You were banned from Facebook yesterday for this and you’re about to be banned here on the blog if it happens again. I already have an Italian mother and mother-in-law, I don’t need yet another voice in my ear reminding me about things that I’m well aware of. 😀 Like all changes in X-Plane, they will get taken care of in an order that’s determined by US based on severity, complexity, priority etc.

  8. I deleted fb anyway for other reasons, so that isnt a issue

    Look forward to next patch.

    Rc2 is fully updated,said 3mb only.

    It would help if you guys interacted better with customers in regards to listing what bugs will be fixe and a ETA of when. vs us being in an indefinit wondering state

  9. * Will the new version of WED be functional within the demo environment? (In order to see its capabilities before purchasing the whole of XP1o)

    * Are there any ways of knowing what scenery elements (textures, models, etc) have been added from update-to-update without “discovering” them in the sim? Bugfixes seem to get documented, but I haven’t seen anything on the unfinished scenery side yet.

    * Has there been any priority placed on the glitchy roads and bridges found in metropolitan areas (such as NYC)?

    As a non-owner, I don’t feel that I have the right to submit any actual bug reports, but as a prospective customer I do want to touch base on some of the significant issues which have held back a purchase.

    Thanks!
    -Greg

    1. – Yes, because WED makes scenery, and we don’t disallow “scenery SDK” features in the demo.
      – We don’t have release notes on art changes, and I think it is unlikely that we will have that kind of detail.
      – I don’t like to get into specific bugs, because inevitably everyone who has filed a bug then emails me to go “how about MY bug.” I can tell you that the fubar roads are high on my todo list.

  10. “I don’t like to get into specific bugs, because inevitably everyone who has filed a bug then emails me to go “how about MY bug.””- Guess that answers my idea/ hope

    owell, makes sense in time

  11. per your crash fixes is done comment, why would xplane that worked this afternoon all of a sudden decide to find some nonsense error / force quit on initial loads. i ran the updater a few times and everything is updated, & this file was never touched by me

    x-plane crash “could not find fscade/forest beach

    polygons.fence.fac
    (io_dsf.cpp:797)

    1. id really love to have a working sim / for no reason find crap to quit on, issues of this sort have occurred in the past often enough to be quite a hassle

      i really do not want to uninstall xplane & start ALL OVER with each dvd , then dropping my scenery & planes in, then the updater, this is an all day + process in which I do not have. Fact , xplane was fine , working well this afternoon. come home, load it up & some joystick inputs did not work, then I re launch & bam. this does not make sense

      1. you never need to do a complete reinstall with x-plane. When problems occur deleting the preferences will suffice!

  12. Ben, Chris,
    UPDATE TO ABOVE- NEVER MIND

    disregard my comment about the issue crashing & the bug report filed earlier. I think you’ll be proud that not only is it fixed, but not because of luck. I spent some time digging and testing & looking at the log.txt myself since your busy & bam. narrowed it to nurengburg scenery overlay dsf & EDDN airport

    thanks

    1. Chris, I’m not even a LR employee and your tone and attitude while reading through these comments has frustrated me.

      Ben, Chris, Austin etc are a small team. They’re producing an incredibly complex piece of software with a vast scope and scale. They’ve released in excess of 10 incremental versions since early December, each one squashing bugs and moving the simulation forward. Give them a frigging break!

      If you want out of the box perfection, either buy a console and a pre-packaged game or find a flight sim that models very little, very poorly. As mentioned before X-Plane has countless variables and endless scope. There will be bugs! There will be scenarios the end user experiences that cause crashes. Often, as you have discovered yourself up above, through no fault of the base program.

      We’re all eager to see a quality product, but have a little patience, they’re doing a great job.

      —-

      Ben/Chris – I’ve heard it discussed elsewhere but was wondering what the official take was on the following. Using the same visual settings at the same locations with the same weather conditions, I found myself getting significantly higher frame rates (10fps+) during the 10.03 beta 7/8 timeframe than I am now.

      I skipped a couple of releases after that, but RC2 is undoubtedly slower. Is this something you expected? I am guessing it may well be one of those one step backwards to take two step forwards kind of situations, but just wanted to ask.

      Loving your work and looking forward to it maturing!

      1. Hi Tony,

        Since the calibration of the settings changed during the beta, particularly for clouds, my nerdy response would be “by definition the settings are not the same.”

        Now I realize this does you no good…my guess is that at least some of the fps differences are caused by:
        – Users who had tweaked the clouds to be particularly fill-rate light not being able to duplicate the settings using the newer, simpler cloud controls and
        – Changes to the actual clouds generated (they are random) and
        – Changes to the meaning of the cloud sliders themselves.

        In the medium term, Chris wants to get the framerate test in widespread use so that when someone like yourself wants to investigate a fps loss, you can do so in a completely precise manner. You may very well be seeing a real fps difference, but we also get a _ton_ of noise from users claiming fps changes in builds where there are no changes to the rendering settings. Test-case specific elements (camera position, AI activity, cloud formations) dominate fps time, so without a completely controlled experiment it is nearly impossible to tell how engine efficiency has changed.

        1. Totally understand your point Ben, I’d forgotten that some of the rendering options had changed. When I first installed RC2 I basically tried to replicate everything I had under Beta 8 as closely as possible using the new rendering settings. Obviously some things will have changed somewhat, but I’m big on trying to be methodical.

          I guess the real perceptual issue I’m having is that I feel like under Beta 8 I was able to get a world that looked awesome and ran well. I’m struggling to achieve that in RC2. Still, that’s part of the fun so I’m not really complaining. It helps to be a tinkerer when you’re into X-Plane!

          Looking forward to more extensive deployment of the frame rate test, I’m sure that’ll generate some useful data to help the optimisation process.

          Cheers for all your work,

          Tony

      2. i’d like to get a console & all the games i want again but that is a $ pit, i was always on xp more , fair enough

        1. Hi Chris, Having a number of interests is a good idea. There is a danger of becoming an obsessed fan if anyone only thinks about 1 idea all day long, whether it is a sport, religion, fashion, Assassins Creed, or X-Plane.

  13. Looking forward to the release of WED 1.2!

    Are you going to diversify the look of the auto generated objects like houses and so on? At the moment it makes no difference if you look at a suburb or a downtown of a big city. And it doesn´t matter if you are in Europe or in the US. Everything looks the same.

    Also I have the impression that the roads are mostly too wide. When I fly over my hometown almost every road is way to big. Are you going to change that in future releases?

    Best regards from Germany and keep up the good work

    Kai

    PS: Hopefully everything what I wrote is understandable. English is not my first language.

    1. Kai, your English is very good! 🙂

      We are looking to get more autogen art assets from our artists!

      Re: road width, we’ll see in the long term what we can extract from OSM and whether we can do better with the default scenery or this must be in custom scenery.

  14. “Are you going to diversify the look of the auto generated objects like houses and so on? At the moment it makes no difference if you look at a suburb or a downtown of a big city.”

    Ben, you answered on above:”We are looking to get more autogen art assets from our artists!”

    Does it mean that when the time goes by, we can expect auto generated city with tall buildings showing them?

    I am sorry for trivial question but this is what bothers me the most.
    I fly in Philadelphia and New York are and it is just so empty there…

    I also want to thank all LR for it was improved so far.

    Cheers, Andrzej

  15. -Proper cloud textures used even if you have both cumulus and cirrus layers at the same time.

    cool, can’t wait, thats one of the big 3 I’m craving to be fixed.

  16. The autogen of highways seems to have issues with terrain, IE highways digging into hills etc. Any plans on fixing it ?

      1. Good to hear, look forward to the next betas.
        One other thing, not sure if it’s in there already but is there a way to define a default adjusted view? IE if I go into command mode, translate the cockpit view left/right etc is there any way to bind the resulting position so I can switch back to it easily? Also binding it to the planes themselves would be useful.

  17. Great to see the cumulus / cirrus issue fixed, i have yet to update

    Any plans to tackle water shader issues over lakes oceans / and or in cloud coloring (ie grayness bug) soon?
    Thanks. Thats all. Good work

    1. This is the last warning we’re going to extend to you. You’ve been asked politely numerous times not to use our official channels as a method to make inquiries, hints or complaints about bugs.

      Frankly I’m beside myself that you don’t understand or care enough to honor our requests. From this point forward, we’ll begin doing the easiest and fastest thing for us which is to just delete your correspondence.

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