It’s been a slow week – I’m sick, Alex was sick, Chris is sick, Chris’s wife is sick, my wife is sick, Chris’s daughter is sick, my son is sick…basically all of New England has bubonic plague.  Skype meetings sound like a 19th century sanitarium for TB patients. But we are making progress on 10.20 betas.  What’s still left?

  • There are a handful of new 10.20 bugs that I still hope to resolve before we go final: sound problems, Intel GPU compatibility, etc.
  • The installer needs to be made 64-bit aware.
  • There are a handful of authoring bugs that were present in 10.11.  I may push these off to a 10.21 bug fix patch, so that we can get 10.20 out the door sooner.

Users: please stop asking your favorite third party developers when they will release a 64-bit version of their add-ons.  The devs are really stuck until we finalize 10.20.  If they release an add-on before 10.20 goes final and then something comes up during beta, the dev is stuck fire-drilling a quick fix of the add-on.

Thanks to everyone who offered help WRT Intel GPUs.  I have been in contact with the Intel driver team and we have a potential work-around for the HD4000 GPUs crashing.  We do not yet have a fix or work-around for Gen-4 (GS45 chipset) GPUs crashing.

We also do not have a work-around for black sky with Intel HD GPUs and HDR mode, but honestly if you have an Intel GPU, I recommend keeping HDR off for frame-rate reasons.  (I only have the HD3000 though – it’s possible that the GPUs on the new Ivy Bridge chipsets are faster.  We’ll know once the shader-compiler issue is fixed.)

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.

34 comments on “What’s Left in the 10.20 Betas”

  1. Just asking – what about the night lit autogen that’s still missing. Will that be dropped in before 10.20 goes RC?

    1. Probably not. We are definitely not going to hold up 10.20 rc for autogen drops – rather we’ll release autogen in coherent packs as it comes in. If we don’t have new code ready but do have AG, it’s easy to cut a 10.21 or 10.22 that adds more autogen.

  2. Definitely, looking forward to lit autogens in a not so distant future, would add much realism to the sim and enhance the good work Alex has done making the new buildings. 10.20 final will be a great foundation for the new year for x-plane.

    Hope you guys all get well soon, everyone is sick around the midwest also, 10 days later feeling better.

  4. The whole country is or was sick. I was in bed for 5 days. The last time I had the flu was 10 years prior. Makes me we wonder if its man made, lol…

    What are you thinking for 10.30 ?

    The clouds need some work. I would love to see some towering cumulus clouds !

    Regards….

    1. We’re not sure for 10.30, but I think we’ll keep the feature list pretty tight. We still have some high priority fixes and a lot of irons in the fire relative to the size of the company, so I’m going to keep pushing for ‘tight’ releases.

    1. I don’t know; I am in contact with the Windows driver team. I think there is very little hope; the combination of Intel + Linux adds up to a platform point that we really don’t care about. (Linux is only a few percent of the total user base, and Intel GPUs represent users who haven’t invested in a discrete GPU.) Basically:
      – If it ever ‘just works’ we’re not going to add code to stop things from working.
      – I don’t have any developer time to support or debug a Linux+Intel platform.
      – My general experience with the open source GL stack (e.g. anything running under Mesa or Gallium) is that enough things act differently inside the shader compiler that the app won’t run.

      In THEORY if a Linux user got me a bug report that was too clean to ignore (e.g. “you guys declare GLSL 120 and then tack ARB at the end of the XX API, which is wrong”) we might fix it if the fix wasn’t going to break Windows NV/ATI. But in practice, the GL tends to be write-once, debug everywhere, and we’re not looking to make “everywhere” a bigger place.

      1. Of course Linux + Intel is just a very small platform point, and Linux in general is very small too, but you are still going to support Linux in future, aren’t you ?
        I still changed my main OS to Linux and it would be very sad if you would drop Linux support in further X-Plane versions .
        So may you tell me if Linux support is planed for further X-Plane versions, althought you’re not earning so much mony as with Windows and Mac ?

          1. I am hoping (fingers crossed bigtime) that Linux support might go beyond 10.x, Linux is also starting to gain some momentum in the gaming area (recent developments with steam etc). I am sure every linux user such as myself is equally grateful that the linux port exists. I wont hold you to this Ben, but is there even a glimmer of hope that Linux support may go beyond 10.x or has it’s fate already been decided? Linux is such a good operating system (AMD and NVidia obviously believe this too).

          2. Having Steam on Linux is a real change of events, but Linux users have been telling me that Linux is “making progress” since we had the port, and the market share number keeps going down.

            We are making no statements any time soon about system and OS requirements for X-Plane 11 or any other future major upgrade.

          3. Thanks, but what is about further Versions, for example X-Plane 11 ? Are there any plans for it ?

    1. The current fog is what it is. I have a pile of bug reports and complaints about it. I have todo items in the bug base. I am not going to touch it for 10.20. Please do not post anything more on fog; we’ll look at it later when we’re not trying to finalize 10.20.

  9. Sorry if OT but Ben, what’s the thought about a OSM refresh? Any hint at all if we are talking ~1/~6/~12 month(s)?

      1. Appreciate the response, Ben. If you get any new dates on this it would be great if you had the time to do a post about it. As said, I know you want to be careful with setting release dates, I’m just interested to get a loose estimate – like if we are 2 or 12 months away. I’m currently doing some heavy osm mapping and it would be nice to have some kind of schedule so I know what I will manage to fit.

        Really hope you all get better soon! Drink lots of tea and eat a ton of kiwis!

  10. I’m curious about this bullet point “The installer needs to be made 64-bit aware.” Is the installer going to install a different set of files depending on the architecture, or? Can you elaborate on this? Thanks.

    1. No the file set is just ‘augmented’ for 1020 – to have two sets of EXEs. Everyone gets everything, as we have now.

      The installer, however, when launched by the app, needs to relaunch the same app that launched it. Right now if you run the 32-bit app and auto-update, you get the 64-bit app when you’re done. If you have a 32-bit app, you get a failed re-launch. The 10.20 installer will fix this.

  11. Hi,

    any update on the ‘crowd sourcing’ approach for airport buildings?
    I remember you had hope to get something up and running with Robin Peel last year.

    Would have loved to get my basic WED airports uploaded and published in the product.

    Regards,
    Heiko

    1. It’s been #2 on my list forever…it’s killing me that I haven’t had time to kick WED out the door, because so much of the work is already done.

      1. can wed 2 make sid and star information? like “taxi network” but “dep/app network”?

      2. i thought a submission & governance process with robin would be a good first step. full integration into WED could follow later on…

        1. At this point WED export is tied to submission to Robin – we need to either develop an exporter in WED, an importer for Robin, or a mix of both; having WED spit out Robin-ready data lowers the cost of developing Robin’s tool chain more than it increases the cost of development in WED…basically we think a specialized “ready-for-Robin” format makes sense.

          1. Speaking of Robin: Any estimate when we’ll see a new release of apt.dat? It has been a while and many changes/fixes have been submitted. Would be nice to see an update so that everyone can take that as a base for further improvements 🙂

          2. I don’t know – I had dinner with him a few weeks ago when he was in town for business and he hinted that it would be ‘real soon’…but that was not ‘real soon ago’.

  12. Looking into ways head tracking can be supported on Linux. Are there any plugins with SYSVSHM support already?

    I’m a FaceTrackNoIR committer and working to port the whole codebase with some platform-specific code, but unless only Wine games (and maybe fgfs) can work, there’s little point in doing it.

    sthalik@misaki.pl <- you can reach me here, I get enough spam already so no harm in posting the address.

    If this is the wrong place to talk about it, I'm sorry.

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