X-Plane 11.10b4 is out. The release notes have complete bug fixes (we try to list everything; Jennifer works off the bug base and the GIT  commit log), but two big fixes:

  1. Austin fixed a crash for aircraft with zero stall speed. If your aircraft was crashing 100% of the time in b3, please re-test in b4 and file a new bug if you still see a crash.
  2. Plugins using widgets were being subject to the new scaling/multi-monitor capabilities even if not re-compiled against the new SDK. We think this caused a ton of plugins to stop working.

Widget-based plugins now do not scale. The widget drawing code path, as it turns out, is totally not ready for UI scaling or multi-monitor.

If you found any problems using plugins (mouse clicks not working, double drawing, things disappearing) and you still see them in beta 4, please re-report a new bug based on whatever you now see!

Plugin authors: our intent is to not scale widget-based plugins – the widget drawing path is full of assumptions about the drawing environment, and the code is split between plugins, public libraries, and the DLLs in X-Plane itself.

Our long term intention is not to upgrade XPWidgets, but rather to offer some kind of modern replacement that leverages our UI, is easier to use, and is compatible with all of the modern facilities in X-Plane.

Unfortunately that doesn’t leave widget-based plugins with a lot of good options in the short term. As a plugin author you’ll need to look at the scope of your UI and decide whether you’d rather recode it in straight XPLMDisplay APIs or wait until an XPWidgets replacement is available.

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.

60 comments on “X-Plane 11.10b4 – Let’s Not Scale Your Plugins”

  1. Hi Ben,

    Maybe offtopic, but I have a request. With the 11.10 betas came the inflight warning of ‘which is as fast as your PC can run with these rendering options’ creeping in sometimes, and I guess this warning is going to be standard now from XP 11.10… I totally understand the need for it, but can you please make a tickbox, or a dataref to turn the warning off? I’m a scenery developer with a 3+ year old hardware, and when I make screenshots, I of course like to make them with full settings. And this message which pops up many times at full settings, messing great shots up for me. I know why it’s there, and that you want to stop people complaining from their 1 hour flights taking 1:30 minutes, and that you want to force people to select proper settings for their hardware. This is great, but can you at least make a dataref to disable this warning, so that people who know what they are doing can turn it off ‘at their own risk’? I’m sure there are many other scenarios where this could be useful. Thanks, Peter

    1. Have to agree, Ben. No reason something like this needs to be a permanent fixture on someone’s screen. After five to ten seconds, they will have gotten the message. No need to nanny. Sometimes plugin testing demands testing on less than robust systems as well, so while dealing with an already challenging situation, I see no need to be told what I already know by X-Plane.

      Should we file this as a bug in order to get it into the system?

      1. I agree as well. with something like this, once you know it…you know it. No need to leave a nag screen to distract from everything else that needs attention during a flight. Even a temporary (5-10 seconds) pop-up notice for each tick down (.9x, .8x, and etc) would be fine and then a notice when you are back to 1.0. You could write it to the log file so that when someone complains and sends you the log file you can send it back with the notices highlighted.

        Otherwise, great work as usual. Loving 11.10.

  3. Any news on the “right rolling” tendencies on pretty much all prop aircraft that have CW rotating props ?

  4. There are good and bad thing with new flight model improvements. Clockwise rotating does not push/roll aircraft to the right. It seems P-factor, torque and slipstream action is reversed during the flight.

  5. Framerate no longer acceptable
    Under 11.05 I reached with my R9-280x between 20 and 35 pictures. It was always good to fly. With 11.10 beta never 20. Always annoying the text “<0.8x time-speed …". If this does not change, I'm forced to go back to 11.05. No matter how many dreams you try to realize, they burst like soap bubbles.

  7. Thank you Ben for the good work.
    As well the best wishes to Sidney who got the Linux rendering work great again.

    Best Regards,
    Christof

  8. Any thoughts about what kind of timing we are talking about for a XPWidgets replacement.

    Before or after 11.10 goes final?

    Thanks Bill

      1. I always knew your initial versions are perfectly correct and then you start your internal competition to place the coolest bugs for user entertainment!

        Regards,
        Marc

        1. That’s not a bad approximation for the internal dev process. 🙂 Sidney and I definitely have a contest going to see who can produce the most borked screen shot.

          4. I like that one too, Sidney. Reminds me of the northern island continent on Tau Ceti IV in the springtime. 😉

  10. The depth of the sim with regards to the lighting, reflections, effect, etc. are looking good! I’ve pumped up my graphics more than I normally do and have been testing London City so I can see all the new objects, muhahaha. Flight model will be great once the p-factor/roll right is tweaked. I’m trying to figure out what’s triggering it in hopes of filing a useful bug report. I know everyone talks about FPS / performance. But for me I could have 25-45 FPS and performance varies. I go by how smooth the aircraft responds to my control inputs. So some areas I see performance improvements when comparing it to 11.05 using apples to apples settings others are about the same. It will be interesting to see what stays and what goes for this beta run.

    System: Window 10 Pro, 64 bit, ASUS NOTEBOOK, G752VS, i7-6820HK – 2.70GHz, 64GB RAM, GeForce GTX 1070 8GB VRAM – Driver Version 385.41, OpenGL 4.5.0

    Hats off to everyone on your team. May your bug breeding and bug hunting be successful.

  11. So many comments on this site are subjective or just plain simplistic, so let me add mine. Crude research indicates that the last three betas may have improved my FPS, but who cares? I don’t. The thing just runs better. I have spotted a hardware-related bug, and reported it. I’ve also made some personal tweaks which might also have helped prior-beta 11.10. I just hadn’t figured out how to do that until yesterday.

    Nobody knows anything about my rig and life is too short to tell you all about its immense complexity. I guarantee that it is not the same as anyone else’s.

    I do wish people would confine their comments on this blog to offering positive suggestions and posing serious questions. There is another place at LR to easily report bugs or complaints about frame rate losses, but it is not here.

    There are other many other avenues where the frustrated or bewildered can unload about what’s bothering them with XP. Dumping knee-jerk complaints on Ben Supnik only fogs up the discussion, and probably irks his equally courteous colleagues at LR.

    I do, however, agree with some commentators who suggest that LR must create a better way to acknowledge and report back to bug reporters. I’ve sent only a couple of minor ones, and discovered that the only way of finding out if they were resolved was by running an update. Sadly, my reported bug has not been fixed yet, but hope springs eternal in the troubled breast.

    1. I for one would love to see a better bug reporting system. As far as I know there is no way to get back to the original bug to add information, answer questions about it, and get status updates. If I’m missing something please let me know.

      Don’t get me wrong, I love having email exchanges with my friends at Laminar but that is not going to scale as we get more and more people on this wonderful sim platform. Maybe consider Jira or Bugzilla…

  12. Hello. Not sure if this is a bug to report. All of the aircraft that use GIZMO state reinstall Gizmo. Looks like the aircraft dont work.

    1. This needs to go to X-Aviation – I’m happy to work with them to sort out any Gizmo issues, but when a very complex third party add-on has an issue, we need to hear from the author that “the interface to control the froblinator” is broken and not from the user that “I can’t do anything” – there’s just too much code between where stuff I can fix stops and where stuff you can see starts.

      1. Thanks Ben. The current fix if anyone comes across this is that marker.1 file has to be deleted, sim restarted, and X-Aviation credentials re-entered!!!

  13. I seriously love you Laminar guys. You keep pumping out new and neat updates before breakfast. I am so glad I spent my money on this sim. With VR and performance coming up, and being in focus, I feel I’m in safe hands now.

    1. I´m not reporting a Bug (wrong place anyways).
      Just a user wanting to get something positive of his chest.
      Love the (at times maybe frustrated) LR Team that is working with heart and soul to give us users the damm best flightsimulator on the planet. More than glad that I spent my money on X-Plane. (Prepar3d V4 erverybody screamed and whorshipped it like a coming god… was also personally expecting mighty things…well…it´s 64 bit…thats all? No fantastic lighting like XP?…It´s 64 Bit! no fantastic graphics?…It´s 64bit!! No realistic flight model?…It´s 64bit god damm it!!!…fantastic god to wait for… :-), DWS… rebrew of FSX…Yawn, Aerofly FS2 – Good start, but still way off in system deepness and flight model).
      Patiently awaiting the Arrival of Native VR suport (Flying in VR is just out of this world fantastic with the beta demo of flyinside, but native would be 100x better) and whatever other Goodies/Optimizations that are on the way to us x-plane 11 users. Keep up the fantastic work to make the fantastic even more fantastic!
      Per chance any hint as to when VR is on its way? Certainly not 11.10…

  14. I’ll open a bug for this so it’s tracked, but more a ‘feature request’. Can we get a button ‘save/cancel’ when exiting graphic settings? Failing workflow is:

    – 3x screen setup. A lot of customization on the screen offset/position pages.
    – For whatever reason, (cable disconnected, projector didn’t start), you start x-plane with one screen disconnected.
    – At that point, if you enter the settings page, you’re screwed – No matter what you do, your screen settings will be destroyed, since they will be overwritten with a 2x screen version. No way not to save the changes.

    1. Please DO file a bug, but describe the PROBLEM, not the “solution” – it’s quite possible that Tyler intended to have the third monitor auto-restore its settings and it’s just broken.

  15. Came back from a 3-wk holiday to a fried Mac Pro; promptly fried my Hackintosh OS; then got another Mac Pro with a geriatric GPU to test 11.10b4 at close to minimal settings: no issues on a complete flight! (No froblinators, I guess.) I’ll be six weeks down by the time my GPU gets in from Berlin or my Hackintosh is back up, looking forward to exploring the changes, like exploiting ten more custom views via click-zones, seeing if I can get GPSS and auto-OBS to LOC to work in a custom fms, and testing some of the 124 new datarefs.

  16. I am preparing to file a bug report, but want to throw this out there and see if others are having the same problem. In the default 172 in 10 b4, the GPS is not tracking properly. It runs off to the right and drags the line along with it. I thought maybe I had messed something up as I first noticed it with the REP version, but rolled my BETA COPY back to 11.05 and it worked fine. When it came back to B4, I had the problem again. I can’t say positively, but I don’t believe the problem showed itself through B3. Anyway, I’m filing a bug report just so I can say I’ve done my duty. BTW – Nothing shows in log.txt and I am at another computer anyway.

  17. Can you give us an update on the next WED release (1.6.1 / 1.7) ? Release notes were posted on the .Org that said 1.6.1 would be released last month, but it never came.

  18. It seems to be a true that you guys produce 100% more Bugs with every beta and fix the half of them each on the next…joking! All is good. The latest issue for me (Beta4) is that the mixture does not work anymore in the Airfoil Labs C172, but in the default one. I took this as a Chance to better my relation with the default C172…i am pretty surprised what a good plane it is. So, all is fine for me.

  20. Off topic. Can whoever designed the default 737-800 design the 777? 3rd party 777 is not that impressive. That would be great to have that level of quality as a default T7 Plane.

  21. Hi guys,

    Unrelated to this beta but want to get Ben’s input on this,

    Currently I’m running 3x 1080 projectors out of a single nvidia 1080. In order to keep reasonable framerate I have to put the graphic settings in a lower-than-I’d-like level.

    In the past I used to run 3x computers, but now with a curved screen, it’s a nightmare to blend in 3x computers (not to count the additional cost of licenses, etc.).

    Would I benefit from adding another 1080 to the system (not SLI), so one is driving 2 screens and the other is driving one? Or is that an unsupported configuration?

    Thanks!

      2. I have similar FPS situation for three monitors. I had separated one monitors to another computer and link it by Ethernet. This computer can get over 30 FPS. But In such layout, its external visual is not smooth.

  22. Hello X-Plane Team,

    First of all, thank you for all your hard work! This might be a bit off-topic, not sure where to post. Ever since X-Plane 11 I have been experiencing extremely high stuttering in Multiplayer Mode (on the machine whose view is independent). No stuttering on the Master Machine, only on the External View Machine. This was almost flawless in XP10 and I was wondering if this is a known issue as well as if you guys had any thoughts/recommendations.

    1. We did just discover a bug where, if the livery on your master machine is not available on the slaves, it’ll stutter like hell. Try our 737 on default livery and see if it goes away?

      IF your external view stutters in slave mode but NOT when it is used _on its own_ with the same flight and settings, and the livery isn’ the problem, ping me.

  23. You are making a great sim but your ATC is the worst among all other sims, repeated orders, weird decisions and almost impossible to use in complete flight. I tried this beta just to know if you finally did any improvements to your ATC system. and I found it still awful. I never recommend X-Plane because of the ATC.
    This is not what I payed my money for, and everyone is complaining about it. so please respect us and improve it.

    1. ATC is the weak point of X-Plane – but honestly, all the other sims having “better” ATC still have no realistic ATC. If ATC is that important to you – I really understand this because it is very important to me too – try flying online!

      //www.vatsim.net/
      //ivao.aero/
      //www.pilotedge.net/

      This is the most realistic ATC you can get: Real human controllers following real world ICAO procedures, talking to your headset and using latest AIRAC data! VATSIM and IVAO are free services without any fees or obligation (beside following real world procedures to detail). The required client plug-ins for X-Plane come for free as well. VATSIM users now also benefit from high quality OBJ8 AI models with HDR light and aircraft animation (flaps, gear, etc.) and virtually no limitation in numbers of traffic that can be displayed!

      You’ll be able to immediatly train your pilot skills with the most realistic flight dynamics available on market, slopy runways and realistic ATC!

      There’s no need to wait for a better artificial ATC – which anyway never will be close to reality, no matter which simulator you look at.

      Regards,
      Marc

      1. Thanks for your reply, I use Vatsim but sometimes I don’t have the energy to deal with real human controllers, so I need a simple working artificial ATC, for just a quick simple flight. using Vatsim requires a lot of preparation and getting ready to deal with real humans.
        The ATC of FSX was not as perfect as real human but it was just working. I can do a full flight depending on it without leaving me missed on the sky, and without announce “Clear to land” while another plane on the runway. this happens daily on X-Plane.

  24. Hello. I’m running parallel versions: stable 11.05 and the 11.10b4. Can you say if you’ve done something to tweak ground friction / handling in 11.10?

    I use a 3rd party B738 (the Zibo mod) and there’s been plenty of tweaking of that flight model to try to lower the %N1 thrust needed to taxi to realistic levels while maintaining realistic steering control. It’s not been an easy ride… between us users/testers and the devs we’d got it somewhere close in 11.05

    I tried it in 11.10b4 yesterday in UK real weather conditions (25kt crosswinds) and as soon as I released the park brake, with engines on idle, the plane swung round into the wind like a weathervane…as if the nosewheel didn’t exist.

    If you’ve tweaked the general model for ground friction then that’s great news!

    Can you let us know?

      1. Thanks Ben. Have just tried with the default B738 from Laminar and got exactly the same result..so it’s not our Mod.

        I’ve just filed a bug through the online form.

        I know the community has been grumbling about the ground friction model…unrealistic power needed to break away/taxi in the big jets…but when we’ve diddled solely with the gear friction in plane maker it’s always resulted in weathervaning.

  25. When will 11.10 b4 be available on Steam? Some aircraft are crashing the sim with b3 and people say b4 fixed it. Please upload it to Steam asap.

    1. I am waiting for it too. Yes, I downloaded beta to support the development of X-Plane and I am ready for any bug or crash while using the Beta, but I like to get fixes as soon as possible too, so I can use the Simulator while helping you. Please upload it to Steam ASAP. Thanks.

  26. I am a Linux user and was aware of the need to use udev to make joysticks work, thanks to copious internet search. For a big part I’m posting to let you know how much I appreciate your support of Linux. Yay!

    But – since I am a (sort of longtime) Linux user I knew that I had to do some internet research and also where and how to do that to get my hardware working. Apparently not everybody does. I’d like for Linux to proliferate, so …

    wouldn’t this kind of post be better off in some kind of general Linux FAQ section? As you said earlier, non-Linux users will only be bored. And I understand, your Linux customers make up only about 3%, mobile excluded. We do know that we’re lucky to get your support and MOST know that not everything will work out of the box. If you had a separate Linux section in you Support , however crappily maintained, I am sure that the majority of web searches for Linux problems would end up exactly there, as it should. And you did list everything that needs to be know pertaining to this problem in the initial post!

    I’d like to see a search for “x-plane linux joystick problem” land on your website. I’m not a “Search Optimization” specialist, but I think it would not hurt.

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