I’m a little slow at blogging this, but 10.30 beta 2 is out – beta 1 users received an auto-update notice.

Please report bugs here.  Starting now I am going to delete comments that are bug reports.  I really can’t be any more clear about this: please report bugs in the bug report form and not on the blog post.*

The release notes are here.  I broke up the bug fix section by beta so you can see what is new in beta 2.

I have already received reports that the “fix” to the slow local map is not actually a fix at all. Unfortunately my C drive lost sectors (again) so I am behind in investigating both this and general performance complaints.  I’ll need to rebuild the machine before I can get to these things.

* Why am I being such a jerk about this?  Two reasons:

  1. I don’t want bug reports to get lost.  Sending me a private email, posting on a blog, etc. — these are all recipes for bugs to get lost.
  2. Efficiency.  I just spent an hour triaging X-Plane 10.30 bug reports and that was only bugs that actually went into the bug reporter.  Those are the fastest bugs to triage because we have an efficient system to deal with them.  Every bug that is in the wrong place takes twice as long for me to deal with.

So bugs posted to forums, blogs, email, these are at best slowing down the beta process and at worst getting lost.  (Especially forums – since I don’t read them, they are by definition lost.)

And as a final rant: emailing with “should I file a bug about X” is inefficient for everyone. It takes as long for you to write the email as to file the bug.  It takes us time to read the email, answer, then get the bug.  Just file the bug!

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.

24 comments on “X-Plane 10.30 Beta 2 is out

  1. As a person that has done QA a good part of their life, I fully support and applaud Ben’s policy on reporting bugs. For a developer to sift through emails and comments, respond to them, then translate them into their bug reporting system takes a tremendous amount of time and effort.

    For those who do not know or understand: Any decent developer of any significant application creates and maintains a bug report database which has tools to categorize, track, and provide the status of current and past bugs. It is only through this paradigm that bugs can be processed in an accurate and timely manner. Each reported bug must be entered into the system,verified, investigated, assigned a priority, then tested when fixed. It is a very time consuming process. Having reported issues in the proper bug report format substantially reduces the this process and frees time for developer to actually work on correcting issues.

    In summary: requiring reports to be entered in a proper format frees time for development and insures that issues get fixed and a proper and timely manner. It is one of the key things that makes a difference between success or failure of a product.

    1. Right – and this is why the bug form does _not_ go _directly_ into our bug base. A fair amount of junk comes over the public report form, so we have a moderation step where one of us ‘forwards’ the bug to the real bug base (or nukes it or forwards it to tech support or just discusses with the user).

      With that in mind, everything Jim says is correct…if a bug is well formed, putting it in our bug base is three key strokes…but if it is vague or missing pieces, at best it’s an email thread to try to recover the information, and then the email thread has to be gathered up and filed by hand. This is why I am so grumpy. 🙂 🙂

      1. With this in mind, what’s the best way to submit feature requests? It feels a bit like they should go through the same sort of process, but they’re not bugs.

        In my case, I’ve got a hydraulic system that X-Plane can’t really model and a read-only dataref I’d like to write into instead (but can’t). So I’m slowly writing the best email I can for Austin and thinking of cc-ing Sandy Barbour, but still half-wondering if there’s a feature request form that, over the years, I’ve never noticed.

  2. So I’m running at 1600p and really want to enjoy high settings *and* the beautiful new clouds while flying around Seattle (and other urban areas).

    Is it a matter of getting a Titan Black (to go with my i7 4930k)?
    AMD R9 295×2?
    Titan Z? Will anything help?

    Or are the new clouds something that’s simply so resource intensive, there won’t be hardware at this time that can run high rez in urban areas with lots of weather enabled?

  3. Hi Ben,

    Great work on 10.30 so far! How long is it typically between betas on a major update like this one (I haven’t followed betas before this one)? Out of curiosity-why is it that you say that you never read the forums? You apparently have an account on the .org, 1800+ posts, the title of community leader, and were last active about an hour ago. These two things do seem to contradict…

    1. Hi Alex,

      Typically 2 betas a week at the beginning, 1 a week once things stabilize.

      I have 1800 posts at the org because (1) I’ve been around X-Plane since v6 and (2) I used to post a lot more at the org, particularly before I worked for LR.

      However, that recent one post is the exception, not the rule. And the org is not the only X-Plane forum. So I am not out there lurking in the forums picking up bugs – the forum topics I have read are almost entirely sent to me by users who say “Go look at this.”

      cheers
      ben

      1. Fair enough. That’s what I thought. If I reply to an email sent by bugreports@x-plane.com, will it be read by someone? I sent a follow up message about a follow up message about a bug report, and I’m wondering if it is going to be read by someone or if there is a different way that I should send the reply.

        1. 1. Yes it will, but
          2. The email from bugreports was a mistake – Philipp’s mail client wasn’t quite set up right – usually replies come from the engineer actually there.

  4. Are you still using the beta wiki? as the beta update page… or are they now only listed on the new “V10.30 Release Notes” page?

    No issues with the “local map” in b2, but it was sluggishly poor in b1… Cloud rates are very good, and certainly far better than 10.25, however the denser the clouds the higher fall off the cliff of the framerate you get. overall I can now use the clouds were as before I could not. If the clouds could be refined in the denser loading (what you don’t see you don’t need)… it would be simply perfect.

    1. All 10.30 notes are on the 1030 release notes page, and I think in the future the beta wiki will simply lead to release note docs. In the long term I want to phase out the wiki since it’s a maintenance PITA.

  5. First sorry for the digress I am about to ask about.

    But this question came up in my forum and it got me thinking.
    Could you subdivide textures in order to maximize resolution and will it be performance friendly?

    Not sure how the member will go about doing this, but I could not remember what the texture limit in x-plane 64bit is? Is it 8k or 4k per texture per model?

    Again, sorry for the digress Ben, hope that is ok!

    1. The current texture size limit is 4k per PNG/DDS-based texture, 2k for the panel texture.

      “Could you subdivide textures in order to maximize resolution and will it be performance friendly?”

      This isn’t really specific enough for me to comment on.

    2. If by that you mean dividing an object like a fuselage into two parts so you can use two textures of higher resolution, then some payware authors have been doing that for a while. Is it performance friendly? There is a cost of doing so, of course, and its unfriendliness depends on the user’s VRAM.

  6. Have there ever been plans for an “Update DVD?” Because I for one would pay that. I recently had to re install and the download from 10.0 to current took quite a while. Of course my shoddy internet doesn’t help much…

    1. We actually have an in-lab prototype – there was some discussion with our distributors about being able to put a “patch to the latest sim” on an add-on’s DVD so that users without net access could run an add-on that requires > 10.0. I’m not sure if/when we’ll ever productizer it – you’re the first person to ask for such a thing as an end user in 2.5 years of v10.

        1. The dongle we use for pro versions of X-Plane is _not_ a storage device! It is strictly a DRM device. (People thought it was a flash drive, which caused a ton of confusion when Austin offered to sell them at cost. People assumed it was a multi-GB flash drive but it’s not.)

      1. It could be an Upgrade/Downgrade special addition! Maybe include one of the first versions of XPlane as a bonus to see how far things have come!

        Honestly though I’ll probably just pick up a new set at a later date, when the production DVD’s catch up a bit. Thanks for replying,

  7. The demo newletter request is misleading.

    It said that if email address is entered, will reveal how to dogfight with AI/friends.

    But no such thing happened. Following form submission, showed some page that mentioned how to do stuff, but nothing about dogfighting!

    Hi Ben! Looking forward to dogfighting in X-Plane 10.

    -sh

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