I hate to put time estimates on anything. The reason: timing is subject to change and always has a ton of uncertainty. What we internally is not a schedule. A railway has a schedule; we have a plan, a roadmap, or some goals. Betas are full of uncertainty. We don’t know what bugs are in the sim – if we did, beta would be over a lot faster.
So: this is my current thinking on the timing of the rest of the 10.20 beta, as of now. It will be obsolete within five minutes. Since most of the time schedules get screwed up by things being late (if we were ahead of schedule we could just choose to not release to be on schedule 🙂 this is post may be useful for third party developers trying to plan releases.
If things go well, I believe we will be able to build a 10.20 release candidate this year. (That’s a tighter goal than it sounds – there are only two weeks left.) I think we will not finalize that release candidate this year; more likely we’ll sit on the release candidate into a little bit of January. The release candidate will hopefully be settled enough that there are not any engineering surprises for third parties if we have to recut the release candidate.
If things go badly, we won’t be RC this year – there’s always the chance that someone could have a sick kid, a power outage, new bugs could be found, you name it. Life is full of uncertainty!
I do not know what autogen will get dropped into the beta or when. If we have autogen that is almost ready for 10.20 but misses the release deadline, we’ll drop new art assets into a 10.21 or 10.22 – it’s very easy for us to do a bug fix patch with more “stuff” in it.
If I was gambling, I’d bet that there will be a 10.21 anyway – what we found with 10.10 is that a lot of users didn’t participate in the beta, and thus we got a flood of bug reports right after 10.10 went final. This can be frustrating for us (in that it means that our beta coverage isn’t as good as we’d like in terms of hardware configurations) but it’s also good in that it means that the entire community isn’t in on the beta (something we don’t want – we don’t want to expose every X-Plane user to beta bugs!).
Good news!
I didn’t think a RC of 10.20 would be out for months to come. This is really good news if it is weeks, and not months away. Really looking forward to try out the 3rd party aircraft in 10.20. Keep up the good work!
Well, we can always slip. 🙁 We’ve been beta almost exactly 4 weeks now, so if we make it out quick we’ll have a 6 week beta plus some time in RC. In an _ideal_ world we’d only run 4 weeks on each beta. I’d say 10.20 represents a leisurely pace of beta with a very tightly controlled feature set. By comparison, 10.10 was a long and crazy beta with a ton of stuff in the sim.
The catch is Lit textures for city autogen and skyscrapers. More so Lits to not be delayed past 10.20
Hi
Will there be any new Lego pieces in 10.20?
We could really use a few more pieces. Eg. A hangar Facade that is not so tall, two story office facade, metal building facade etc,etc.
Thanks for a great product guys!
Regarding your comments on beta users, would it not be beneficial for you to maintain a database or registry of beta users with their associated system inventory so if you needed to target a particular system to get data you could directly email the person with the hardware in question? I’m guessing not everyone will visit this blog every day but most people do read email every day. It may be a quicker, more targeted way of getting any hardware testing done for you. just my two penneth….