X-Plane 10.04 is out for beta.  A few notes:

To get 10.04, you must run the updater and check “get new betas as well as updates”.  The updater will not get you a beta unless you specifically ask for it, and X-Plane won’t nag you to update if the patch is only in beta.  (This is our preferred method of running betas, and all future betas will be like this.)  There are some pretty major fixes to ATC and AI aircraft behavior, so it could be a beta worth getting.

We are starting to transition more of our various websites to WordPress; this is an on-going process.  The eventual goal is to have all of our various web info into WordPress (on either the main site or the “developer”* site, which will grow out of this blog) and drop the wiki.  MediaWiki makes everything possible when it comes to content management, but it makes nothing easy, and controlling spam has been a real problem.  Eventually all of the knowledge-base articles that the sim can link to now will be browsable from those sites, but for now we’re still working on building up the infrastructure in our few free moments.

And speaking of developer resources: I am working on a release of scenery docs and updated tools; it’ll take a little bit to get everything together.  I am getting hammered with requests; a complete release should get most people where they need to go, so I am trying not to jump in and write one-off emails answering questions; better to focus on permanent docs I think.

Finally, please don’t email to ask me “did you fix my bug yet.”  If it’s not listed as fixed in the release notes, it’s not fixed.  We’re trying to be accurate in the release notes so that you don’t have to ping us every single release, which burns your time and ours.  Not all bugs will be fixed this beta; we have enough high priority ones that we’re going to get fixes out as quick as we can.

* The developer site will include aircraft, scenery, and ATC authoring info; the SDK website will remain separate, as LR doesn’t own the SDK IP.  (It’s more like FSUIPC that way.)

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.

12 comments on “X-Plane 10.04 Is Here

  1. I noticed in the release notes it says “the AI should only turn on their transponder for flight, not taxi”. But don’t airliners use their transponder during taxi? Especially during low visibility ops? I’ve heard several times on Channel 9 (love UAL 🙂 ) the tower telling a taxing aircraft that their transponder isn’t being received.

    1. Sometimes ATC does want the transponders on when they’re using ground radar but it’s the exception, not the rule…The ATC system in X-Plane doesn’t need radar to know where the system’s planes are so it’s fine that they’re always off so TCAS doesn’t pick them up.

    2. The memory phrase I’ve always heard for the take-off check-list is “lights, camera, action” – as in: landing lights, transponder, then throttle. The transponder I guess is supposed to be like “camera” because it lets ATC see you.

  2. I’ve played a bit with the AI planes and, I do recon that using multithreading to get exact aircraft performance is nice, I do feel that it might be a bit overkill. Having AI does chunk a bit of my FPS, and I’ve seen AI abort so many landings for some reason… I guess that maybe it would be more than enough for the AI to simply follow basic flying pattern, going from airport to airport, without using the full physic engine. This would allow 2 things:
    – Way more AI in the sky for less CPU time.
    – Having simpler aircraft models in the air, by this I mean that we could make the exterior model of an aircraft with basic flight parameters.

    SuperFeature: This CPU save could help make some sort of schedule files. So you could have a file describing the flight schedule (or even downloaded from the net), so you could see the 20 Porter Q400 per day between CYTZ and CYUL, for instance.

    Other than that XP10 rocks.

    1. There are already stripped down aircraft on the Org that are AI only (V10 only) that do not suck up a lot of CPU or FPS. A user named Morten modded a bunch of XPFW birds so we could have traffic without the performance hit.

  3. The download was rather big. Lots of pol and dds files not mentioned in the notes. What got updated?

  4. Good to hear the Scenery docs and tools are coming Ben. I’ve deliberately not bugged you coz I know you mean to do it, when u CAN!

    I hear wordpress is pretty good too 🙂

  5. As far as I know texture bitmap size right now is limited to 2048 x 2048 pixels.

    Are there any plans to increase that limit? My impression is that a lot of stuff could look much better if it had higher resolution textures.

  6. Running XP10 demo on mid-2009 MacBook Pro 17″; low settings (eg no HDR, no cloud) – getting circa 20 fps with the Baron / Cessna 172.

    Good job! Fantastic evolution from the initial release. I’m upgrading my hardware in a few months – when Ivy Bridge hits the shelves – and will buy the full version then!

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