X-Plane 10.50 beta 1 is live! You can download it by running the X-Plane installer and clicking “get betas”, but you will not be auto-updated for it. As is normal with our betas, there is not a Steam beta of it, nor will there be until we are at release candidates.  (But Steam users can install a second copy of the free demo and update that to beta.)

Before continuing, I would like you to assume the lotus position and repeat the following mantra over and over until inner peace floods your body:

The comments section of the developer blog is not a bug reporter.

The comments section of the developer blog is not a bug reporter.

The comments section of the developer blog is not a bug reporter.

The comments section of the developer blog is not a bug reporter.

Ah…don’t you feel more calm already? I certainly do! Seriously though, the bug reporter is here; please use it! I cannot emphasize how much easier it is for us to triage bugs when they all show up in the same place. Random threads in forums about bugs get lost and don’t get fixed.

Release notes are here, but they are not necessarily complete yet. X-Plane 10.50 contained a huge amount of code change, so the notes probably need a few editing passes; something that Austin wouldn’t let meI didn’t want to hold up the beta for.

With any early beta of a major patch, I suggest that early adopters install it on a copy of their X-PLane folder and not the one they use to fly. This goes double for 10.50 because Jennifer, our Q/A head, is out of the office on a road trip. She was able to do a little bit of checking and we’ve tried to spot check it, but this release is more like the beta process from two years ago and not like 10.40 or 10.45. I suspect we’ll have the early stuff knocked out in a week.

There are already a few dumb bugs that have popped up: for some reason taxi lines are totally missing. I’m not sure when that happened because they were around for most of the beta. I’m also looking at a crash that JAR Designs sent me that looks like it could be pretty destabilizing (e.g. I broke the rendering engine). So…consider yourself warned.

Finally, our plan is to do one more airport collection from the gateway toward the end of the beta before we call 10.50 final. In the past we’ve done one airport collection per release, but for a long patch (e.g. 10.30, 10.40, 10.50) by the time we go final, hundreds of gateway submission are ready to go. We’re planning to take another batch in a few weeks, which will let people get fixes in to airports where the problems were revealed in 10.50 (e.g. even with the fixed 10.50 ATC the airport doesn’t work right).

 

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.

33 comments on “X-Plane 10.50 Beta 1 Is Here (And Only Slightly On Fire)”

      1. Would love the opportunity to update my airports to 10.50 standards prior the the 10.50 release. Is there a chance that will be possible?

      2. Sounds nice, Ben, thanks! Is there some change log for WED 1.5? Also can we expect a better handling of exclusions in new WED? Because actual way is a bit 80’s of last century, doing an exclusions limited only to rectangles can be sometime pain “you_know_where” ;), i wish those rectangles are rotatable, at least (but i can imagine a freehand polygon for making exclusion). Or i can imagine full visual editor inside XP engine so we can see everything from perspective and with lighting. Anyway, thanks for your awesome work, yours and whole LR!

      3. Hi, Ben!
        So now I can`t remove new static aircrafts from their random spam stands in 10.50?

          1. Sorry. I mean
            appearance library airplanes on parking. I`m install 10.50 today and don`t see it. But I`m asking like developer.

  2. The release notes seem to not mention the static aircraft placement nor can I find an airport where this seems to work for me (after checking the new rendering menu item).
    Can you name an airport where auto-placed static aircraft should be visible & obvious ?

    1. I’m looking into this – they’re at KATL but they won’t seem to go away. Here is what is -supposed- to happen:

      1. Static aircraft show up when (1) the check box is enabled and (2) the object settings are set beyond ‘none’.
      2. As you increase object settings, you get more aircraft.
      3. Static aircraft appear at ramp starts. So if an airport doesn’t have a lot of ramp starts, you don’t get a lot of aircraft.
      4. Static aircraft require a 10.50 version airport. Note that EVERY airport exported from the gateway has been auto-converted to 10.50 during export, so if the airport comes with X-Plane, it will have static airports.

      IF you have custom scenery you installed yourself, it won’t have static aircraft. My suggestion is that if you have a bunch of copies of gateway airports installed in custom scenery, remove them.

      But: something went wrong with the gateway export; please wait for beta 2.

      1. It now seems to work in beta 2 an many airports.
        But the way the new ramp start data (1301 code) is derived seems to create suprising results. It would be nice to have a bit more info on how the old & new ramp start entries work.

        E.g. in case of ramp start “Boeing Ramp 3” at KBFI (Start Type “Tie-down” and Equipment Type “Jets” (only)).
        The new 1301 data entry derived for this ramp is size C, “general aviation”, which apparently results in props to be placed. Which looks non-plausible.

        Another start “Boeing Ramp Heavy 1” , also of type “Tie-Down”, but allowing equipment “Heavy” and “Jets” gets converted to size E and “airline” and it seems to never get populated with props. Thats what I wanted.

        Next, should we manually update gateway airports by removing static aircraft and put ramp-starts instead ? So to free these positions for users/auto placed & AI plus allow more variety ?

        I know, the new data fields can only be edited once WED 1.5 is out, but I wonder if I even properly use the old data fields …

        1. I looked at KBFI and what I see is the Cirrus Jet being placed, as the sim tries to find a “jet” for “General Aviation” that is no larger than class C. I did not see props being placed in jet-only spots; if you see this, please file a bug report with pics.

          I agree the upgrade logic could be less stupid.

          In terms of your own airports, once WED 1.5 comes out, you can then specify the correct ramp starts. There’s no harm in starting the task of replacing statics with ramp starts in WED 1.4.1 but you might find it faster to do all of the ramp starts in 1.5, since you can pre-configure the ramp start tool with the new operations-type data.

  3. Thanks for 10.50 update, working great so far.

    For clarification, is the new city building autogen working for cities in the U.S. only ? If so, are there plans to expand it ooutside the U.S. ?

    1. Steam users get their product authenticated by Steam’s servers, the same ones that download them. It’s a fully separate process; the product keys X-Plane requests when you aren’t using the Steam version come from Laminar Research’s servers. They’re totally separate. Valve can’t issue our product keys, and we can’t give you Steam games.

  6. Pretty smooth release from here. Must try to dig deeper into those cryptic release notes.

  7. “ATC will not vector a go-around aircraft until it clears 400 feet AGL…this prevents it from encouraging the AI to make dangerous steep low turns (XPD-6115).”

    Man, nothing beat watching the 747 go skidding across the ground on go-around.

    1. Probably – the release notes aren’t complete. The mouse wheel stuff is in there – if you use the new manipulators from, say, the 2.7 Blender export scripts, they’ll work in 10.50. They work on the Kingair and Baron.

  9. Hi everyone,

    I made the “hybrid airports” EGLL and EDDF – and at those airports the new static aircraft work. Just click the checkbox and they appear. Uncheck it, and they go away. These airports have the new “10.50” apt.dat format, so maybe for now the new static aircraft depend on that.

    The other airports (like KATL) in 10.50 do not have this new format, and therefore they will show the “old” static aircraft, that won´t be placed randomly or will react to the checkbox in rendering settings.

    Laminar Research worked with a special KATL version that you could see on the presentation video – it features the 10.50 apt.dat format and will therefore work with the new static aircraft.

    It is my understanding that the intention was to also enable the new static aircraft code for the “old” 10.45 apt.dat format… and something didn´t work out.

    So in conclusion – if you want to see the new static aircraft at work, go to EGLL or EDDF. Or wait for b2.

    If you are not sure if you see them or not – these are the telltales: If all the 747´s are “Uniteds” and if the aircraft still show with the “draw parked aircraft at airports” box unchecked, then you are likely NOT seeing the new static aircraft.

    Jan

    1. Right – to clarify, the intent was to “update” the gateway airports as they were poured into 1050. We have fixed this for beta 2, so previous submissions will get static aircraft under some circumstances.

      You will not get static aircraft EVEN in beta 2 in a few cases:
      – Custom scenery (not the gateway)
      – Airports posted to the gateway in 1050 with statics intentionally turned off (E.g. “operation type none” in WED)
      – Airports on the gateway with no ramp starts
      – Airports on the gateway whose ramp start type is the old v9 “misc” type, which doesn’t give us enough data to go on.

  10. DataRef “sim/private/controls/skyc/sky_imm_end” is missing in 10.50b1.
    Will it be gone permanently?

    Real Terra Haze plugin does not work with b1 for that reason, what is an issue for many users with the beta.

    No complaining, just a question, as we’re told all the time that undocumented DRs can change with every update… : )

      1. Would be great if you find the time. RTH is quite popular, but of course that’s not a major issue on early betas.
        Thx!

  11. That’s why I said no complaining, I was just asking… : )

    It’s clear that fiddling with these DRs is at own risk. But plugins like RTH do a huge improvement, so for me it’s worth it.

    It’s also clear that it’s kind of annoying for you developers, that some/many users – as they may not really understand what happend – misinterpret this as a bug by LR.
    What, again, definetly is not true, as you can of course change undocumented and “/private/” features as much as you like.
    (BTW, I’ve stated that a few times in the forums about RTH the last days.)

    Unfortunately, when using FlyWithLua, there seems to be no way right now, to check if a DataRef exist, without somehow spoiling FWL. If there was a way, we plugin developers could do the scripts more reliable.
    I’ve already started a thread in the FWL support forum about that, hoping for a response of the FWL developer. (Who might be a little annoyed too, as many users said “FWL does not work with 10.50b”, just because RTH crashed it.)

    However, X-Plane is great, lot of fun flying and a lot of fun creating content and extensions! So I hope, it will stay as open for the latter as it is now, which is awesome and extraordinary. : )

    1. Exactly right. The “this isn’t guaranteed” label on the private datarefs tends to get lost among end users who just don’t understand why their add-on broke.

      There are plenty of ways to determine if a dataref exists in the sim, so such issues are specific to FWL and layers on top of it.

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