I have seen this in the forums:

Tried X-Plane 11, ____ was wrong with it. Reinstalled and it [did/did not] fix it

You almost never need to reinstall X-Plane to fix these kinds of things. In particular, if you haven’t installed an add-on, you definitely never need to reinstall.

To get X-Plane back to its clean state, you can do this:

  1. Run the updater. If you’ve modified a file by accident it will ask if you want to replace it. Say yes.
  2. Delete all of the files in Output/preferences.

That’s all you have to do. Our installer just dumps files on your disk. It doesn’t set any registry settings or other hidden voodoo that can only be fixed by  reinstall. So you can just clean out your prefs, make sure the files are up to date and not modified, and you’re good to go.

In particular, in beta 1, if something is messed up, reinstalling isn’t going to fix it; beta 2 is going to fix it! (Or maybe beta 3. 😉

(I think everyone reading this blog knows this, but you also don’t have to reinstall to get another 15 minute demo.)

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 “You Don’t Need to Reinstall X-Plane to Fix It”

  1. Hi, Ben!
    Maybe I should report a bug, but I try to ask you here…
    When I installed full mesh coverage in XPL11 installer I found a non complete installation. Part of Alaska are not installed for example. this happened cause 11 still beta? Thanks

  2. I must say I don’t know if I am a lucky one or whether it is just my system but 11 has just worked straight out of the box for me and it is absolutely fabulous. My PFC HID plugins for by Cirrus Pro Console have no issues. The new Cessna is fabulous, Haven’t copied across my add-on aircraft yet from 10,51 yet so may find some glitches. The smoothness and lighting is just fabulous. I was getting a stutter every 30 seconds in 10.51 but this is like silk. Frame rates are good – 25/26 with three screens/ TIR and Matrox set up and fairly hi settings although I don’t have HDR on. About 25 miles vis with clear whether. Same set up as 10,51 basically but with shadows added whish would have killed the frame rate in 10.51. Load times are faster and that is before I have transferred it to my SSD. Ortho4XP looks stunning and all I has to do was copy the files across. Amazing. The lighting and reflections are just stunning. Bravo Ben, Austin and team – blown away. Whilst XP 10 was my sim of choice I did keep P3d on the side. It has now been removed. Will keep 10.51 for now as I enjoy VR using Flyinside XP. Can’t wait to try it in 11. Thanks so much, Peter

    System info: i7 4930K OC4.5GHz, Corsair H100i Liquid Cooler, 64GB Corsair DDR3, NVIDIA GTX Titan 6GB , 256GB Samsung SSD, 1000GB Samsung 840 EVO SSD, 4TB HD, PFC C2 Professional Flight Console, PFC Cirrus Rudder Pedals, nVidia driver 375.63

  3. Hey guys,
    only kind of related but:
    earlier this day i submitted two bug reports through the bug reporter, but failed to notice there was text above the text fields (shame on me 🙁 ).
    Right now i discovered and read it, and noticed i failed to append the Log.txt in both cases.
    As it says in the don’ts to not report a bug multiple times, i’m left wondering,
    if i should re-report those bugs with the Log.txt , or leave it at that.

    Also: sorry if i should not ask something like this here, feel free to remove my comment in that case.

    regards, byte

  4. Hi Ben,

    As I am on a low end laptop (Toshiba L755 – i5 2430m 8GB RAM 1GB VRAM GT525m) and can run XP10 almost maxed out with World2xplane in Europe / India except HDR / shadows and 10% clouds , the thing i noticed in XP11 was setting all rendering even to it’s lowest is not changing the performance so it is always around 8-10 fps with different settings, even looking up at the sky has no effect . well this i guess will be optimized.

    The other issue is my pitch / roll / throttle except the YAW are not working for which a bug report has been filed.

    I feel the load is more on the CPU but you know better its just my feeling.

    Rgds.

  5. Hi Ben, just a short question for ya, wasnt sure if was a bug or not, so I did not file it
    But is X-Plane 11 supposed to ask for language on every install? Running payed full version

  6. Can you confirm that the beta 1 contains all the tiles for global scenery or are some parts of the world missing and still in development?

    1. Some parts may be simply broken. Also, the scenery is cut at 60N – this isn’t a final decision, but we need to do something to save space in the install. We’ve been anywhere from 60N to 72N in the past, and I realize that there are some interesting places above 60N, but also I can’t make more bytes on a DVD. So we’ll see.

      1. 60N leaves two thirds of my country (Sweden) out of the picture. Not good 🙁 Would excluding 60N+ from the DVD also exclude it from download?

        1. That’s something we’ve considered. We’ve also considered using a ‘loose’ border that takes Sweden and Alaska and not all of Siberia, for example.

          4. I agree with Tom Knudsen, Laminar should state that possibility on the product’s page. I fly a lot in Iceland and now I bought XP11 to discover there’s a chance I’m not allowed to do it.

            Worst of all, is not because of a technical difficulty, but because of space constraints.

            We’re in 2016, space constraints shouldn’t be an issue anymore.

          6. The download now seems to include some of the “missing” areas up to 70N. Will disk users be able to download these areas?

  7. Hello,

    XP 11 demo runs superbly on my current rig, much better than XP10 did, which makes me very happy!

    The only negative critics I have so far is that the night lighting radius doesn’t seem to be increased in the current build versus what we had in XP10.

    I remember in one of the previous comments to these articles, one of the developers has commented that it waqs a limitation of the 32 bit iteration of XP and can be removed in the future.

    Do you guys think it can happen for the release of XP11 or unlikely?

    Thanks for any info on this!

  9. What is the recommended behaviour for me as an XP user if I find a bug in the XP11 beta that I already found in XP10 and for which the response was “you’re right but we are not going to fix it in this major release”? Should I assume it is in the fix backlog for XP11 or am I supposed to re-submit it (of course, in the case it is still reproducible)?

  10. Hi,

    I liked a lot the new rendering, and on my system, I think that it is working very well to a beta. I am only with the demo version at the moment.
    I have one question, the global scenery of are with the last OSM data or it is the same of xp10?

  11. Hi Ben,

    I’m loving the demo, especially the new rendering model. However, I’m noticing that gamma seems to be set a little too much to the bright side and in daylight things look very washed out. In fact, the tinted windows on my Velocity, which are almost limo tint in v9 & v10 are virtually without any tint at all in v11. I’ve tried adding “_screen_gamma 2.200000” as in v10 to x-plane.txt but it has no effect and gets removed. Will we at some point have at least a little control over gamma, even if it requires manual manipulation of settings.txt or x-plane.prf?

    1. If your windows look washed out it is almost certainly because of the change from sRGB to linear-space blending in the lighting model…authors will need to redo their tinting to make sense.

      Gamma control is –not– coming back; X-Plane runs in the sRGB color space, full stop. The gamma control changed the color space, which is not a good idea.

  12. I noticed that there are nowhere near as many rendering options in v11 as there was in 10.50 can you please make an advanced options tab for people like me who like to play with all the little options to get a better framerate? Right now X-Plane is trying to put a lot of detail into a small draw distance but I perfer less detail in a large draw distance and can’t change that with the current options.

    1. Totally second that!

      Shadows, water reflections AI aircraft and vehicle traffic just kill my decent oc’ed I7 4770K at 4.3GHz. With these options turned down I can increase objects, trees and clouds to very high settings and still get 30+ fps. However, in XP11 most of these options are tied together and cannot be individually adjusted. This is really a step back for any serious simmer. I mean we’re willing to learn how to operate multiple, quite complex FMS and are not allowed to change water reflections or vehicle traffic? Come on guys!
      Also the AI Aircraft traffic isn’t that good that I cannot live without it, yet 😉

      Please, please, please include an additional slider position named “Custom” and unlock all those settings from XP-10 (as far as they made it to XP-11). Every “game/simulator” has this feature and people would probably tear apart any explanation of the devs for not including it. And rightly so!

      We should probably start a petition for this, lol!

      1. I second that too, “Advanced” options for power/old time users. Or in case you won’t implement it, at least the possibility to touch some .prf which won’t be overwritten with the changes from the UI.

    2. I would like to have more option (like in XP10) to.
      I prefer high settings for clouds, but not for car traffic. With the reduced options I have no choice.

  13. Dear Ben Supnik, I have been having trouble, I tried to make the WORST Weather Conditions Possibly, I tried to use the updater to see if it would fix the weather, Here is what my weather does: It BREAKS X-Plane 10, I see space, It is a loud Sound that repeats, And X-Plane 10 Freezes unrespondant Please Help!!!

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