X-Plane 10.20 went final last night – we are now officially 64-bit (as well as 32-bit).

We have a number of small bug fixes that we will put into 10.2x bug fix releases – the name of the game here is small, unintrusive fixes that make a big difference to the sim without risking more problems.  We’ll get to bigger fixes in 10.30.

Small things may include:

  • A new apt.dat/nav.dat drop from Robin.
  • Fixing the King-Air wipers – it looks like our exporter script went nuts.
  • Fixing the command key on Mac – the control key works as expected.

Fog is invasive – that’ll have to wait until 10.30.

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.

32 comments on “X-Plane 10.20 and Bug Fixes”

  1. Congratulation on 64 bit !

    Now time for 10.21 so Carenado can release thier 64bit patches !

  2. Congratulations on beeing the first 64bit flight simulator in the world (as far as i know)

    I am estatic that we have such excellent developers who aim to provide such a realistic flight simulator. Hope It will continue to advance and implement new features like seasons and working doors in default aircraft in the upcoming releases, that might just be the only thing missing to complete this awsome flight simulator. (Im Norwegian, so I love snow)

    Anyway, cudos to you all..

  3. Congratulations guys!

    What a superb effort – fully 64 bit in less than 3 months of betas, that is some achievement.

    The future is bright, and full of objects.

    Kind regards,

    James

  4. That good news, I personally, only need the xSquackbox 64 to fully migrate to x64.

    Congratulations to all for your great work!

  5. Great! Now, waiting for plugins authors to end their 64-bit plugins… shortly, I hope to use only 64-bit version 🙂

    When you said “Fog is invasive – that’ll have to wait until 10.30.” do you talk about fog that appears crossing clouds BEFORE arrive to clouds?

    1. We have collected a number of bug reports, features and to-do items regarding fog; I want to look at them all together, and at least some of them require invasive code changes.

  6. Hi Ben!

    Is vertical fog on the to-do list?
    Would be nice to have some thin fog layers to fly above (even for ILS approach), especially in valleys…

    Congrats for XP10-64!
    Cheers.

  7. Congratulations to all involved in this effort. I run the betas along side the stable version. Throughout the 64 bit development I have been impressed with the stability of the beta releases. I can only remember one instance where I needed to fly 10.11 instead of the current beta and I can’t even remember why! This is a huge milestone and I’m sure poises X-Plane for many great enhancements for the future.

  8. For carrier landings using 10.20, the aircraft penetrate the landing deck and crash on
    the hanger deck. Beautiful scenery on the way

    1. We have an open bug on this, but no way to repro it – we’ve seen it reported enough times (including videos) to think that y’all aren’t lying about the bug, but on a developer’s machine, it seems to never happen. 🙁 So if anyone has a trick to _force_ this to happen, please file a bug with whatever the magic step is.

  9. “It’s a Laminar issue. Even Philipp (the FMS Guru of the B777 and CRJ) confirmed this issue in one of the support posts for the B777. It’s about the wheel friction coefficient not being applied in y-axis direction, if the x-axis is set along the A/C. You can observe this behaviour in moderate cross wind.Your A/C will turn into the wind excessively, even when standing still.”

    Is this a bug ? If it is, is it being addressed ?

  10. Hi there.

    Congrats on a stupendous work, you all truly deserve some holidays in Florida, floating on a pool seeping a stiff drink.

    Just one thing : the end user that I am is a bit confused : some aircraft developpers have already started shipping 64bits plugins after the release of 10.20rc1. However, rc2 had to deal to some apparently pretty fundamental changes in some plugin interaction architecture. But what does that mean to me : if I try using those 64bits ready planes, will XP crash ? Do I have to wait for new releases from those developpers before I can officially start ranting on their forums 😉 ?
    Also, was it such a fundamental change that said developpers will need to take months to rewrite their plugins ? What happens if I stick to rc1 for now ?

    I know, I ask too many questions. The thing is that developpers are strangely quiet about all this, and when it is quiet I’m worried.

    Thanks in advance for shining your HDR lights on my anxiety issues.
    T.

    1. My guess is that they’re quiet because Philipp and Nick are off skiing with Roman (I only know this because the bastards tried to Skype me from their lodge to rub it in).

      A plugin cut against RC1 needs modification ONLY if it:
      1. Uses LuaJIT AND
      2. Is for Windows or Linux AND
      3. Is 64-bits.

      Such a plugin will work with RC2 but fail with a future X-Plane patch, so we want people to update. My understanding is that the code mods have ALREADY been done for SASL, and are in the works for FlyLua and Gizmo. IF a plugin author’s plugin supported rc1 and supported OS X, the mod for RC2 will be about 5 minutes plus the time to make a new release.

      cheers
      ben

  12. Congrats.
    I hope the major city autogen gets even better (it IS better than it was a couple of months ago) and finally major world landmarks find their place IN THE DEFAULT scenery (like every other FS I know for the last 20 years).

  13. Two comments. I’ve sent several bug reports and asked for replies so I know the issue. No one has replied.

    First one involves 10.20 64 bit crashing after selecting the fly button. 32 bit still works.

    Secondly, my PFC yoke no longer works after the 10.20 update. Chris fixed a similar issue last year. Worked ok until the 10.20 update.

    Have the two reports been logged in?

    1. Hi Richard,

      This will be the _only_ reply to this kind of thing I make on this blog. I am going to delete future comments like this. First, re replies: the bug report form is VERY clear on this – it says:

      “Do not submit requests for help. This is not a tech support page. Contact support here.”

      and

      “It is unlikely that you will be contacted directly regarding your submission but it will be reviewed and handled if possible.”

      This blog is not a tech support form, and neither is the bug report. Please contact tech support via one of the two methods: phone or email.

      //www.x-plane.com/support/contact/

      Please do not bring up bug reports on this blog – as we have said numerous times in the past on this blog, this is not a bug report form, and bug report comments will be nuked.

      cheers
      Ben

  14. First, I do not see my comments as any different than those posted above. Example: Is the flashlight function disabled? Your “help” said, I don’t think so.

    I only asked if the bug reports had been logged. I did not ask for help here in fixing the problems.

    1. The above comments are off topic too…generally the comments on the blog have gotten way off topic and turned into people trying to fish for bug status information. I am considering how to change moderation policies.

      But my main point is that you asked for replies in the bug reports, but we specifically don’t provide this service. Bug reports go directly to engineering, and we don’t guarantee that you can ‘talk to an engineer’. We do guarantee that you can talk to tech support to try to get problems specific to your machine solved.

  15. Alright Ben… I get you on the blog vrs bug report issue.
    Please understand though how frustrating it can be.
    I am attempting to develop a package and want to avail myself of the standard, “been there forever” process of Open Textfile or Open Checklist feature.
    New polling process means a good 60 seconds for this to open.
    Bug reports filed by several.
    No indication or changes in almost a half year.
    So here I am, wondering whether to just toss the idea and use custom plugins.
    Seems a shame.

    So I feel for all who are just trying to find their way forward when illumination comes only in a reactive way – after beta release. Darn hard to plan anything for sure.

    Just wanted you to see this. Delete it if you please… it does nothing to assist in your blog or the latest release.

    Many Regards,
    Joel

    1. I don’t disagree — the current process _is_ frustrating — for everyone involved – third parties, users, and LR. We’ve discussed this internally, but we don’t have any better ideas yet. A lot of ideas that have been suggested that would provide a better user experience would unfortunately also be too expensive for us in terms of engineering time. 🙁 We’re up against a “lots of you, only a few of us” problem, and time spent talking to users about bugs is time not spent actually fixing them.

      1. Thank you kindly for the response sir.
        It is an answer in itself and I truly am sorry to take your time.

        I leave you to your toils and wish you the very best.

        Cheers,
        Joel

        1. No worries – I actually think having a real discussion about the bug reporting problem is not a bad thing to have on the blog (albeit this post has gotten off topic :-). Mostly what I want to avoid is lots of users asking about their specific bugs in a big comment thread – the result is a ton of time for me answering ‘are we there yet’, resulting in a thread that most people will mostly not care about.

  16. 64 bit question. Im not a computer guy per say. I am using the same renderings in 10.20 as 10.11 seems the performance is worse. I thought 64 would make use of some of the 24gig of memory i have but when the sim is running my computer as a whole is only using 4.86. Vs the 5.8 or so in 10.11. I know that frames were not to improve on 64 bit. Seems to be running my 2gig GPU twice as hard and only 11% activity on my CPU and barely using RAM. Is anyone else having this trouble or just me?

    1. The scenery and rendering settings changed in 10.20. SO “for the same settings as 10.11” doesn’t really exist. Retune your settings!

  17. 10.20 is grat and i love the new Autogen.
    I’m curious on upcoming autogen drops for Industries and maybe Harbour-Areas (e.g. in Seattle and Tacoma).
    Earlier in 2011 you mentioned the Lego-Brick-System for Airports. Will this be a step after finalizing WED 1.2? Would be great to have some simple Buildings on the Airports. And maybe this will be more realistic by crowdsourcing.

    Great work. Keep on.

  18. Hi Ben,
    Does Dataref-Driven Texture Selection feature have high priority on your to-do lists? Will implementing it require major rework of scenery rendering system? Any guesses?

    Regarding (numerous) XP users requests & complains: have you guys considered to (at least temporarily) employ some more resources to help with the XP development?(please excuse me if it is only silly idea)

    1. Hi Rob,

      Dataref-driven textures is sadly not at the highest priority, but it is on the map, and it’s really straightforward to code – it doesn’t require recoding anything.

      Re: staff size, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to comment publicly about hiring policies and hiring decisions.

      cheers
      Ben

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