So…beta 1 is buggy as a bed in New York. I’m going to list these here in the hope of stemming the tide of bug reports:

These are broken in beta 1 and will be fixed in beta 2 – I’ve already fixed the code.

  • The new autogen is missing! 🙁  There was a bug in the code that makes the installation; 10.50b1 diligently installs the old autogen.
  • Crashes with some custom scenery.
  • Missing taxi lines – they’ll be back.
  • Floating objects – I did see this one during pre-beta; it’s now fixed.

The static aircraft are also not working; I am investigating this now, but I expect to have it fixed for 10.50 beta 2.

Finally, users are reporting crashes on startup with plugins; if you have this on OS X, please include the Apple crash report and not just Log.txt.  I’m not sure what’s going on here, but it’s almost certainly a bug in 10.50b1 – we’re not changing any plugin compatibility rules, and the set of plugins affected is quite wide. (This bug is also not easily reproduced; I haven’t seen it with any plugins, it was not reported in private beta, and in one case the developer of a crashing add-on can’t crash his own add-on.)

Beta 2 will be out some time in the next few days.

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.

22 comments on “Some Bugs in X-Plane 10.50 beta 1”

  1. In the new features for 10.5b1 you state ” New U.S. city autogen” Does that mean U.S. i.e. North American type buildings or does it mean ONLY in the USA will there be new autogen buildings?
    I live in Canada and I am not getting any better/more autogen buildings then I did before 10.5b1 and I have objects set to extreme.

    1. You’re not getting better autogen cuz it’s borked – installer problem. But also, I don’t know if we had vertical data in the DSFs outside of the US.

      1. Yes, your openstreets data at the time Ver. 10 was released was outdated. AlpilotX mesh release was with the latest Openstreets data and improved it greatly. I hope 10.5 will work with Alpilotx mesh.
        Do you have any plans to update the Openstreets data for the world in X-Plane?

  3. Ben,

    Thank you for all your hard work and only respond if you have time or feel like it.

    – Has “AI flies my plane” changed behavior so generate more short flights? I had that running last night and it had an a350 take off and land at a bunch of airports near KSEA. That was more interesting than being randomly vectored over vast swaths of nothing. 🙂

    – The taxi lines are missing as you say, but the lights aren’t, so quick work around is to take off around dawn/dusk

    – The following is an opposite of a bug report – I had no crashes in OS X 10.11.5 with Radeon 5870 in ~ 2 hours of the AI flying around and me changing views/settings (i didn’t run any of the melt your gpu settings, so it wasn’t a full test.)

    1. You are right on that first point. Austin requested that when AI flies your plane it fly short trips to
      1. Make a more interesting set of visuals when we leave AI flying on a machine e.g. at a trade show and
      2. To let him see more takeoffs and landings when watching how the AI flies from the cockpit for development purposes.

      So its range is clipped. The actual other AI planes still fly long trips based on their aircraft type (and when they get out of range, they get nuked and respawned.)

      1. Is this a 1050-change really? Because a couple of months ago I left “AI flies your plane” on for about a day, and I was positively surprised when it took off from Helsinki, flew around Finland a couple of times, then headed to Sweden, Denmark, Germany … and finally crashed at some point over southern Germany after probably running out of fuel (taking by the amount of miles it managed to fly until that, I believe it was properly refilled at each stop).

        But watching it fly on its own was actually a nice thing to have … quite unlike the “I’m a C172 taking off from Helsinki to Tokyo non-stop” – like if that is ever going to work out 😀

  4. Hey Ben,

    If this helps (for the static aircraft), I first had none, but after playing around found they appear depending on what the “number of objects” level is set at.

    Cheers,

  5. Hmm, think I’ll stick to 10.45 for now until things are looking brighter. Good work though!

    On a completely unrelated note, have you ever considered an X-Plane user becoming an air traffic controller, such as ground, tower, etc.? Throw in some extra aircraft, and either manage traffic effectively, or force complications that are great fun to watch. I guess you could also have the real ATC system learn from human effectiveness to help speed up the system in the long haul.

    I mean this is not a bad idea, but I understand there is still a lot more important things to be done rather than upgrade the ATC system yet again.

    1. Briefly, in that we have also considered whether the ATC AI could control a multiplayer fly-in type situation. But it’s not on our road map, mostly because there’s so much else to do.

  6. You know what guys? It happens. You guys are doing a great job overall with all the improvements.

    I’m glad that the bugs are being addressed and I can’t wait to see the new autogen.

    Keep moving forward and keep up the great job.

    Andy | XPWorld.

  7. Glad to hear the specified bugs, as I was experiencing almost everything above. Looking forward to beta 2, as I am trying to work around some of these issues for now. 🙂 Good luck!

  8. Hi there Ben
    You mentioned
    “I don’t know if we had vertical data in the DSFs outside of the US.”
    Can you please explane how to add the verical data to the DSF

    Regards
    LAwrence

  9. Ben, how solid is the fuel use code change in the beta? Is this an area likely to see further changes?

  11. awesome things you showed in the flight conference video, are you able to say if the new user interface and or the lighting is for the next major X-plane “11”, or may it sneak into v10 run?

    based on first looks, that new interface is both visually more appealing, modern and looks to save a lot of time, great choice

  12. Thanks for the update, great work and the recent preview of XP11 looks amazing!

    In an effort to better understand the beta process and not wishing to criticise in any way at all, how can something as vital/crucial as taxi ways be missed out? A genuine question. Thanks for all your hard work Ben.

    1. If you are referring to taxi way lines, the answer is:
      1. Change the code late in the game and
      2. Have your Q/A person be out of the office and
      3. Announce the beta date to create a clamoring chorus of “where’s the beta, where’s the beta”.
      That is, the taxi lines were missing because we failed to follow our own process.
      If you are referring to the taxiway PAVEMENT itself, that bug is MUCH harder to reproduce – I have one reproduction case (which required installing a large number of third party scenery packs) and it still only happens sometimes – you have to run the sim a bunch of times to see it. The bug isn’t visible at all on the core sim.

      Overall I would say two things:
      1. We’ve made pretty huge improvements in our test process compared to 24 months ago, but we’ve hit a wall in terms of improvement; and what we’ll need to do next is build significantly better automation, so we can just test -more- stuff automatically. So there’s some expensive behind-the-scenes infrastructure building that has to happen.

      (This is one of those things that takes dev time, adds code change and risk to a release, and never makes the release notes. E.g. somewhere a while ago we built a complete interaction recorder/playback system into X-plane so that we could replay recorded tests of airplane flights as part of our regular test process.)

      2. We need to integrate third party add-ons more heavily into that test process, to get better coverage of what X-Plane can do. 10.50 was one of the biggest -scenery system- updates we’ve had in a while, and a lot of the bugs are in cases that are exercised by third parties but not the default scenery. We’ve known this was a gap for a while and we’ve already been collecting third party aircraft (for example) but we need to combine this with automation to really get thorough coverage.

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