It’s out the door! (Steam should go “final” tomorrow morning, but you can get the final now – it’s still marked as a “beta”.) Here’s everything that happened.
I expect we’ll do an 11.31 bug fix patch in the next week or two – 11.30 release candidate three was just critical fixes, e.g. fixing crashes on startup for Nvidia users with Windows 10 and the moon and stars aligned just right. Some less super-critical bugs are fixed and waiting for the bug fix patch.
Can you share the roadmap for 11.40 & beyond? Or will that come in an upcoming conference?
Yes, would also love to hear about what’s planned for 2019 despite Vulkan (I really look forward to that)
Okay not to beat a dead horse, I love all these new fixes and improvements. But you know the question I’m going to ask , “where is the networking”? The online multiplayer code that we need. I’ve asked this question now of you guys repeatedly and have been all but ignored. I even posted in your support form under “questions” and not a peep. I know you working on it but we need to see what’s going on. There should be a separate category for networking. And we should see some kind of movement or a “here’s what’s going on.” Come on guys, I love you guys, but this stuff is holding you back. More importantly is holding us in the virtual aerobatics and air racing community back From moving to Xplane 11 or 12 or whatever version supports us. If you have to email me please do so. You have my email. If you need clarification of what were looking for. I’ll be more than happy to share with you. I’m not speaking for myself, I am speaking for a very large community who just happened to look to me as the “Xplane guy” . In the meantime, keep up the good work love to see all the improvements. I love the direction the Sim is taking.
11.30 shipped with Raknet being used for x-plane-to-x-plane connectivity. This builds on past changes to the interpolation/extrapolation and latency calculations that we already shipped. This represents one more incremental step in the process of rebuilding the entire networking layer.
This is fantastic news! Thanks so much to Austin, Ben, and the whole team at Laminar Research for continuing to make X-Plane the best flight simulator available. The community appreciates all that you do!
Hello Ben and all member of Laminar team. I would like to thank you for your constant effort on making X-plane better. I switched to X-plane from different simulator platform not an year ago and I am already impressed by work you done from so far.
There is one thing I would like to bring to your attention.
I was active with 11.30beta testing as well as previous beta and we discussed and shared our experience at x-plane.org forum. We did our best to report bugs as early as possible so we can together make X-plane better. But there seems to be disconnection in many areas, where we simply miss informations back from Laminar development team and such cooperation is vastly inefficient. At the start it would be great to know status of our tickets and expect fixes roadmaps. But there is more.
I would suppose, that you would like to also get early feedback from community, not just obvious bug reports. There are plenty of people doing beta testing, many being add-on developers, simulator builders or just IT professionals or fans. It is pitty, that there is no way, how we can share our ideas and proposals openly with you. We would also like to hear more about X-plane plans and roadmaps, there is lot of things community awaits and it is not just Vulkan thing, but also many longer standing topics.
We understand, that Laminar is small team with limited resources and we do not expect you to read each and every topic on every forum around. On the other hand, we see other developer teams around actively engaged in discussion with theirs communities working together to improve their software. Your blog, even very good from information point of view, is not very convenient for broad discussion. Not speaking about comment being disabled automatically after few days from post date.
Maybe you have already some solution in your mind, but if you do not have resources to build and maintain some place for this discussion, maybe we can give a try to some existing forum, where we can ask to be given moderated space for this purpose. There are experience moderators who can filter discussion and keep it more easy and convinient for you.
I really hope, that even with Laminar team being fully loaded with development tasks, you will find some time for community engagement. I strongly believe, that it will help to make X-plane better.
Thank you.
Kind regards
Dominik
Hi Dominik,
if you come from “another simulator” you can probably compare how that development team communicated with their user base? I remember the communication for MS Flight Simulator which was: Zero (except for the corporate BS-speak that came printed on the box with every new version).
The level of discussion on public forums is not very suitable to steer development of X-Plane, in my view. There are some (a few) knowledgable people there, but the majority is “waaaaa, waaaa, waaaa my framerate, I found a bug: the plane is turning left on takeoff!!” 😉
I think the developer´s time is better spent working on and improving X-Plane than dealing with the masses on a public forum. And if you read some of the discussions on there, it is also very obvious that everyone disagrees on which direction X-Plane should take 😉
I also believe that the developers have a very clear view of what is lacking in X-Plane, how they will go about improving the simulator and that all **** would break loose if they communicated their roadmap ideas and then those wouldn´t materialize. Developers in general have become careful, because users can´t deal with the realities of software development. ESPECIALLY those that are very vocal about demanding more information – they are usually also very vocal if a “promised” feature doesn´t happen…
Cheers, Jan
Hello Jan,
I would preffer answer from Laminar, themselves and I feel bad about steeling this blog for community discussions (You can join me on x-plane.org forum.) But let me please reply with one short story.
Once upon a time there was country, where government officials knew what is the best for theirs people. There didn’t ask what people really want and there was no way of voices of people to be heard. And when people start to complain, the answers given were very similar to yours. They said: give us time to govern. We do not have time for discussion with you. And you do not understand topic either, so you would not be even able to ask proper questions. And if by luck you do, you will not understand the answers. And what if we promiss something you? Then you would ask us to delivers the promises? No, sorry, just enjoy our ruling.
Do you want to know how this story ended? These people don’t govern anymore, because they hugely underestimated people, like you do.
And please do not compare X-plane with Microsoft product developed 20years ago, Laminar doesn’t deserve it. Time has past, most of developers now knows, that even it is not for free (no candy is) engagement with community of theirs users is the only way to go to create successful products.
I think developers hate discussions, especially when controversial. I believe that’s the reason why Laminar does not have a bug tracker (like bugzilla) that gives users a chance to see what happened to their bug report, or to add a comment.
However (developing software myself) sometimes users can improve the quality of a product by finding errors that were overlooked in testing.
In the past (I’m on X-Plane since version 5) X-Plane was much like Austin’s one-man-show, but he seems to do much less these days.
What I found a little disappointing was that after a long silence (in this blog) after RC1, there was the final version without announcing a second release candidate.
Another thought of min is that recent development put too many resources in graphics effects, while features announced for v10 (improved ATC) really weren’t delivered until 11.26 (haven’t checked 11.30 yet). That’s especially true if you compare it to what other simulators had 15 years ago already.
Please decide: Do you want to have a “game” for the masses where glossy graphics and 7.1 surround sound is most important, or do you want a simulator where you really can practice real life? Just one more example: If you taxi on an airfield without talking to ground, or you taxi like crazy (crossing taxiways), ATC in X-Plane does not care at all. In contrast the very old “Flight Unlimited III” announced: “Attention to all aircraft, the is a taxiing one the aerodrome not talking to me” (AFAIR). (And more humorous, if you cross the grass between taxiways (probably with a propeller plane): “We appreciate you mowing the grass, but please stay on the concrete”)
Jan is dead on the money about promised features and incentives. As a _business_ of making a flight simulator:
– If we pre-announce feature A and then do that feature, the benefit is almost always of very little benefit to us compared to saying nothing until close to when the feature ships. There are exceptions in specific business scenarios, but they’re not the norm.
– If we pre-announce afeature A and then do NOT do the feature, but we DO do some other feature B, that’s a big negative for us. The community attention that should have gone to discussing feature B (hopefully in a positive light) instead goes to talking about how awful the absence of A is and how disappointing the lack of A is.
This is a very asymmetric situation, and one that keeps us from just showing pictures of our planning road maps when they are created.
This gets into Dominik’s (and many user’s) frustration about not having direct access to the bug base. (We feel this ourselves when we can’t see the status of bugs we file with platform providers.)
A user files a bug, and it relates to a feature we are planning to ship. It’s very likely that the internal bug thread discusses the relationship between the new tech and the bug, and the bug will have some info about the target fix date (which changes all the time, so it’s mostly misleading).
Given how heated this whole thread got, even without a bug history to misunderstand and be angry at, my feeling is that direct bug access would be really problematic.
I do think some kind of partial solution might someday be possible. For example, right now if we close a bug, we have to inform the user separately. I’d like to see that automated, and it might give us a way to communicate bug status with a lot more users a lot more efficiently.
Hi Dominik,
You’re not wrong to be frustrated with the lack of bandwidth and access to the dev team when working on a beta. This is something that we feel when working with our platform providers (GPU driver writers, OS developers, etc) – a pinhole for you is a flood for us. This has gotten worse as X-Plane’s user base has grown. I’d say we’re not at a point where we’re not listening; we’re at a point where we’re overloaded by the shear quantity of input coming in, and our responses are thus scattershot and inconsistent.
We recently started a formal third party developer relations program – the goal there was to provide some process so that taking care of third party dev needs wouldn’t get lost in the chaos of a growing product and beta. This doesn’t address the user community, but I think it’s a similar problem of “a lot of you, a few of us.”
I am not sure what to do about user feedback – the big problem with having the LR dev team just be out there in the community is that we don’t have time. The X-Plane community is too big and is on too many platforms talking about too many things to just have us monitor everything.*
Every few years, someone comes to us and proposes to restore a semblance of how it used to be (back in X-plane 5 when the community was so small that Austin was the whole dev team, was on the one x-plane portal, and that was it) by having an exclusive forum where us devs could hang out and only ‘the right’ users are let in. This never works out — we (the LR) team still don’t have time to peruse the special forum and if we did, most users would be annoyed that they weren’t in on the forum.
I don’t know how we will change thing in the future. But I do want to emphasize that we do actually, like, read stuff. If your blog comment made it onto this blog, _someone_ at LR (probably me) read it, because the blog comments are moderated.
* This is also one reason why I don’t just ask Jennifer to go sniff for bug reports on X-Plane.org. It would be impossible to find them all, but once people get the idea that we’ll find their bug reports in the forum, people will report even less to us and the information will truly be lost. It’s not real friendly for us (LR) to make you (users) _push_ the bug data to us on our turf, but I think it’s the only option that is scalable.
Hey LR team,
I feel like this should be posted somewhere more accessible or more frequently visited. This debate is sort of never ending.
Speaking for myself (coming from a users perspective) I would obviously love more transparency and a full on detailed road map. I am constantly looking for releases by LR. I am using flight sims since MS FS 2002 and seeing where we are now with XP 11… it is exciting to see the progress.
But on the flipside, to me, it is also apparent why devs wouldnt want to publish this and open themselves up to judgment and thus create a negative discussion (as Mr. Supnik already described). There is always gonna be people that reach for the whole arm when being offered a hand and think their problems are the most important (Maybe relating to Mr. Ulrichs post).
Sincerely,
Kai
P.s.: X-plane is f***** great!
> I feel like this should be posted somewhere more accessible or more frequently visited.
Amen. This should be its own blog post, so we could direct people to wherever this question/complain is presented.
Yes!
Hello Ben for your long and fair answer.
I understand a lot of your points as these are non uncommon to any other growing SW company/business. But you probably know, that things will go even worse in future, as (hopefully) XPL user base will grows and most of the new users will be more and more customers, than community users. It happens to me once, that we completely lost touch with the community and when thinks get tricky for us we realized, that we have just paying customers. (I hope you understand my point)
Let’s me propose two concrete things I have in minds, which should even save a lot of time of you developers team:
– use some standard bug tracker, which will have public interface showing only: bug report, status, expected resolve and selected Laminar comments. By this way you can especially during beta testing same a lot of time. Most of the beta testers first validate theirs finding at forums (i.e. am I alone seeing this or that behaviour?) If we will have list of bugs we can point to existing ones instead of creating caste number of same/similar reports which poor Jennifer has to dig through.
– engage existing experienced users – these are very often moderators on any other well know persons at forums. I think they will be glad and honored to prepare for you periodically community polls or just evaluate what see to troubling users most. If they prepare for you condensed feature request list time to time, it shall be feasible to handle it from dev point of view.
Please feel free to ask if I can personnaly help you with any of these. Thank you.
So I have one practical feature request especially for 11.30+, when shaders are being compiled.
Please make installer to delete shader cache on upgrade. Please make installer to merge/purge prefferences on upgrade (sure with backup)
We see number of people complaing now about different issues after upgrade, which are often solvable by this simple autation.
Kind regards
Dominik
The installer doesn’t need to wipe the shadercache because X-Plane will do it for you! The shadercache uses the filesystem itself as a lookup table, it’s something like (and mind you, this is subject to change!):
Output/shadercache/{fingerprint}/{device}/{shader lookup}
The first {fingerprint} is the version of X-Plane + some other high level options hashed together. So when you update X-Plane, it’ll start computing a different fingerprint on startup and when looking into the shadercache it will find completely different entries (or on first startup, create all new ones).
As part of this, X-Plane will also actively prune older versions so we don’t leave you with a bunch of cached shaders from five versions ago.
Thank you for your background info, Sidney. Still we users see people on the forums who have really strange things going on and after a manual delete of the shader cache are happy.
I had this once myself, Win10 and Nvidia.
Is there any place were we can see the non super critical bugs (the 11.31 ones)?
Thank you and good job
Steam overlay when? People are tired of using reshade to enable overlay, not everyone wants to use reshade. If there are people who for some unknown reason don’t want an overlay they could turn it off in the options menu on steam, but please let those 99.99% use the feature they’ve paid for.
What is the todo here exactly? Are you seeing corruption on screen when the overlay is active? Do you want to activate the overlay from your joystick? Do you want it to be on by default? Please be very specific. Since I do _not_ use the Steam overlay I cannot guess what you’d like to see here.
Steam overlay is the default steam feature which works with any game. This feature is disabled by LR and cannot be enabled without third party software. It would be nice if LR enable it so we could use it when flying on steam. And those who don’t want it could just turn it off in the steam options menu.
We haven’t disabled the overlay. If it doesn’t work using default Steam functionality, it’s due to some kind of weird app compatibility issue. Please file a bug.
touch down smoke in replays is one of those non critical bugs that will be fixed in 11.31? 🙂
After the update to X-Plane 11.30, it won’t start anymore on Linux (DVD-Version).
He didn’t find the files on DVD like on the original Version of 11.30 before using the fixed files (they don’t work also anymore) :’-(
Please file a bug!
Dear Laminar Research Team,
first, thanks for the constant development of X-Plane 11!
I am a bit disappointed that many obvious and (for the most of the part)
easy to fix issues still haven’t been adressed.
– Like I can’t find a simple shortcut command that would change the selected
course in the King Air C90, wich makes the handling of this (otherwise great) plane awfull. And those textures on the seat…
– What about an option to end the current flight without having to quit X-Plane.
– How about a simple shortcut to “readback last transmission” or “set local QnH”
– I can listen to an ADF in the G1000 but can’t tune it in…
– Being able to freely resize the G1000 windows is nice but why isn’t
the aspect ration of the window always kept the same? Who would want a distorted window?
– The indication of the main (not the sub-) pages is still missing on the right display of the G1000.
– The Arrow-Buttons on the range knob (G1000) don’t move the view on the map up,
they move it north (!) which is pretty nasty when not facing north while in map “track up” mode… Is this really the case in Reality?
– How about a native Baron with the G1000
I hope that some issues, if only the missing shortcuts will be added in the near future…
Hi Guys
Please ask the guys at Highwinds what is happening or to open more ports for coping with the download of the new update (10kB left)
I want to see the new update. really excited about getting it (sometime).
Has been going on for 6 hours already 🙁
Can’t wait to get it..
Hello Laminar Research,
the new ATC makes a huge difference, at least that’s my first impression.
But please,
could you at least give us a shortcut to “readback the last transmission”
if not an option for auto-readback, or the possibility to “arm” the readback button.
It is hard not to crash the plane when having to coap with the ATC window…
I guess the main problem is that most keys are assigned already. (In Flight Unlimited III, the ATC was mostly key-driven. The ATC messages were played and written to the screen, and the default keys were: 1: Please repeat…, 2: Readback (confirm)
The keys were hard-wired, however, and more complicated ATC requests used more numbers, but still, you could handle all the ATC requests with number keys only (no mouse moving or clicking))
Unfortunately these keys are already assigned in X-Plane…
You can reassign the keys for your like, so the “main” problem is in real “no” problem.
I use 124thatc, and I assigned “num -” to the readback functionality.
And there is no problem with this setting.
Hey,
sorry but can you help me out? I can’t follow you.
I was looking for a short cut command to
“readback last transmission” but only one ATC related shortcut command exists…
Yeah, but what I mean is, that there is not even an existing “shortcut command” to which a key cut be assigned to.
Can anyone confirm if one of the fixes to come in the 11.31 update is the autogen, LOD, draw distance, pop-in issue. Probably doesn’t happen to all users but does to many. Seems like it’s a Windows and autogen issue as others using Mac say it isn’t an issue. I have several instances of Xplane running and 11.26 upto 11.30b6 were ok and the same, since beta6 the LOD has been drastically reduced. I should not have to run a simple Lua LOD script to fix the LOD, Laminar should fix this. Others have posted about this with videos and screen shots. Don’t understand how this problem seems to be ignored.
We do not have an open bug for this. You should file a bug and write something specific enough that we can verify whatever is being alleged and fix it if necessary.
Hi Ben,
I have submitted a bug report but please read the following as it may help. I installed a new copy of xplane11.30rc3 vanilla with nothing else and the problem is still the same and really shows in VR. A simple test is to go to CYOW and go a few hundred feet in the air facing north and look for the city skyline. In 11.26 upto 11.30b6 it is visible in the distance, but as of 11.30b7 the skyline is not there until you fly closer. It is even more obvious in VR. Reading another post somewhere it was mentioned that if you increase the world objects setting to maximum it will give same result as earlier version but this kills the fps. Did some tests and this is true. But world objects setting needs to stay at high as setting it to maximum causes the sim to stutter and lowers fps too much (especially in VR). Regardless there is a difference in view distance of the city skyline and many other scenery objects like houses and cars. Not sure how not many others have noticed this. Thanks for all the hard work!
Hi Mario,
We have _not_ been able to reproduce this in 11.30r3, despite spending significant time trying to do so. If you want us to continue to investigate this, we need a _new_ bug report that compares 11.26 to 11.30r3, with the _exact_ same view and the _exact_ same settings. A good way to get the view to be the same is to set up a 3 or 10 mile final and then pause the sim. You can also pause the sim in forward-no-HUD and save a situation in 11.26, then use it in 11.30.
If you’re not sure how to do this, please contact Jennifer – she can help you with the details on a better bug report, but at this point we just don’t see a rendering difference between 11.30 and 11.26.
Thank you for the update and for being responsive to community feedback! It was fun to join the beta crowd for the first time, submitting bugs (and homemade cockups, sorry!) and seeing them being fixed right away! 🙂
Dear LR
Loading dsf sometimes caused hug fps drops.Can you fix this please
^^^ +1!!
I’ve already plunged headfirst into the 4K panel.png club. A critical need arose for a project just as RC3 was being released.
I know it’s still an uphill climb, but I’m optimistic for 2019.
Thanks for the update! Happy with the Joystick curves and smoother rendering. Reading about some of the issues people have on the forums you might consider your installer kills the shader cache during inststalls… That might reduce some confusion.
Thanks a lot for this update which has brought a number of improvements over the board. Others have reported, and I’ve observed that for some high end nVidia GPUs (1070,1080,2080,2080Ti… I haven’t tested for other models but findings could still be true) on windows and with the latest nVidia drivers, turning “threaded optimization” to “On” had a rather dramatic effect for FPS in 11.30. I’ve got a from 10 to 20% increase on the lower standard FPS tests. Improvements were also quite noticeable (5-20%?) running X Plane without plugins in native scenery with LR’s plane models. Is there any substance and/or theory behind this observation ?
Wait – is the theory that:
1. Threading optimization sometimes makes things faster? or
2. Threaded optimization sometimes makes things faster IF add-ons are removed? or
3. In general, things are faster with add-ons removed? or
4. In general, things are faster, comparing the ‘unmodified’ sim to the old version?
It would be mostly N° 4. My theory, at least my observations, are about the “unmodified” sim. I’ve done some measurements in the past weeks, which led me to question if an old paradigm is invalidated. Some of us told people who had performance issues prior to 11.30, to turn threaded optimization (TO) off if they had a nVidia GPU. My own observations were always pretty neutral for this setting prior to 11.30. For the sake of this reply I made 2 measurements with the FPS test– 1. i9 9900K/2080Ti with XP 11.26 “TO” On FPS 183, “TO” Off FPS 182. Same hardware, XP 11.30, “TO” On FPS 186, “TO” Off FPS 151. On the higher tests there is also some increase but not as spectacular (also see here ). I see about the same magnitude of change on my other i7 7700K/1080 system or still another i5/1070 system in 11.30, while in 11.26 TO had no effect on any of those PCs.
So I would like to know, before asking for a sticky post on the .org , is this effect for real ? What could have changed in the code that makes rendering in terms of 11.30 so affected by TO compared to 11.26 and before ?
Just to be precise, performance wise, 11.30 is on my system a real improvement, be it with TO on or off because rendering is now far smoother especially in “heavy” scenery.
Right – we (mainly meaning Sidney in this case) did actual things to make 11.30 specifically faster, and on Windows NV hardware, this helped.
I don’t know why TO is improving things, but I can say I’m not surprised. Our experience is that when TO helps, it helps a bit (e.g maybe a user sees a 15-20% improvemnet) but when things go bad, it _kills_ framerate (e.g. think 5 fps). This is why we recommend it be off…if you turn it on and you win, great, but if it was on by default, some users would start the sim and see an unusably bad experience right out of the box.
It’s going to be a non-issue with Vulkan, which is threaded strictly by the app.
I can confirm that a tremendous amount of people are reporting significant gains now with TO on, throughout several x-plane facebook groups.
My version of the theory is just 1., and I could measure* the improvement already in 11.26 and IIRC even earlier, with nvidia drivers as old as 333 or whatever came with my 1080ti a year ago. It’s also a very persistent improvement, particularly in high load situations.
*(In a “controlled” (well, as controlled as it gets without forgetting stuff) test at my very scenery-saturated home town, with very high CPU/CPU and VRAM load)
Unfortunately, I can’t start the X-Plan simulator after the update 11.30. In the charging perozess of the scenery data, the game permanently crashes.
Even the problem of deleting the joystick settings in the forum could not solve the problem.
What can be the problem now?
Please file a bug!!
Hey Ben: If i need to file a bug report in the future,Your website shows a max of 10 mb. My log text shows 12 mb. What do i do? There are questions regarding the sim, but i will wait for your next blog. Thanks.
Maybe try zipping it – it’s text so it’ll get a lot smaller.
What’s in there that blew it up to 12 MB?
Nothing special. Just a few third party aircraft.
A question on the new ATC system: What’s in a “.voc” file? 😉 I.e.: Is the system ready for user-supplied sound recordings?
The .voc file is the config file that maps ATC talking directives from the sim to sound files. It’s not new but it’s not documented yet. You could make a third party one but I’ll talk to Jennifer and Chris about getting some proper 3rd party docs. We do have a draft of a .atc file spec – not sure if it’s live yet or waiting for some editing.
I understand that the blog is not the space for tech issues and bug reporting. I watch it to see what the developments are and to help me with my own personal projects. I have been using X-Plane for only about a year and a half, but I use it heavily and have watched the evolution from XP11 to now. I have to say, there is a feeling that some people involved with X-Plane see the user as a nuisance and as simply an annoying source of complaints. I am simply cautioning folks, obviously it’s the users that are paying for this whole thing to continue. And if someone’s payware is not functioning as advertised or out of spec or simply broken, or the Sim runs poorly for whatever reason, they need help. I have seen multiple instances where customers are basically called dumb whiners. Many of those customers may be smarter and more capable than you know. And sometimes, developers, your stuff is broken. And often the outside developers blame LR and say when they do whatever we will fix it. Then LR says “we don’t see it” or “it’s not filed” but there are obviously rampant reports of some of these things. I know I have been pretty surprised at some of the comments and attitudes toward the user base. It is felt, and honestly doesn’t help LR or the outside developers. Users will and should complain and encourage and promote ideas. If I walked into a corner store and heard the employees talking poorly about customers, I’d find another store to give my money to. XP has an odd elitist attitude going about. I’ve been using flight Sims my whole life and just now moving to XP, which I like mostly, but it has problems. Many. That’s ok. Listen to folks, fix issues as best you can, stop trashing the steam users and whiners and all the others that pay for and use the software in their many varied computer environments. Plus, I often spend significantly more time maintaining and troubleshooting add ons than I spend enjoyably, trouble free flying and using them. And, I was one of the Steam “beta” “whiners” early on in XP11….I purchased a second copy straight from LR. I have spent many hundreds of dollars in payware. So I’ve paid to play already, and I’m watching and listening and occasionally commenting to both LR and outside developers. I don’t think the overall user base would see themselves as unable to deal with the realities of software development. Just my annoyed complainer words of caution. Great product, but treat users as important and valuable, not as ignorant underlings you are gifting with your special powers.
And if you can’t stand the heat…..
I just want to comment on a few of the practical aspects of this.
1. You’d be amazed how many times we get a single bug report _late_ in the beta process for an issue and the person reporting it is shocked that we didn’t know, because the issue was heavily discussed in a forum somewhere on the internet. One way to know if something has been filed is to have an XPD bug number. If you hear back from LR that there’s an XPD number, then you know it’s filed and tracked. Jennifer takes a lot of care to make sure that the release notes mention the bugs by XPD number when they are fixed, so that people can close the loop. So if 20 people in a forum are all going “hey it’s so awful that X is broken” and NO ONE has a bug number….that probably means everyone is in on the joke but us.
(We’d rather hear about a bug twice and not zero times. Sometimes two different people report a bug, but only one has a key detail that helps us sort it out.)
2. If a third party add-on is broken by an update, we (LR) consider this to be our bug unless the add-on is hacking X-Plane; we really need to hear from the add-on maker themselves to sort these things out. This is frustrating as a user, e.g. I see this a lot:
User: Hey LR, I’m filing this bug, the AeroCrusher X500 is all green in the new beta.
LR: please report this to Aerocrusher. We can work with them directly to resolve this!
User: Hey Aerocrusher, the X500 is all green in the new X-Plane beta.
Aerocrusher: sorry, we don’t support X-Plane betas. Use the X500 with the previous release.
User: (questions life choices)
(2 months pass.)
Aerocrusher: hey LR, the X500 is all green in the recently shipped new update to X-Plane.
LR: (questions life choices)
The truth though is that I really can’t blame third parties for this – their business model is to make add-ons, not test our software. We (LR) don’t aggressively test beta OSes, because I want my dev team to be adding things to X-Plane, not getting weird blue screens and SWODs because they’re on a beta operating system. But then if an OS upgrade knocks us over, we didn’t really tell anyone, did we? This business dynamic is present in all platforms.
There is something we (LR) are working on to make this a little bit better: we’re looking to test at least some capabilities of third party add-ons as part of our _internal_ testing program. But this is designed to be in addition to, not instead of early access to third parties, which we try to do for every major beta. If you’re developing a third party add-on and you wish you’d had 11.30 earlier, please ping me.
Threaded Optimization was turned on this morning and it fixed my FPS for the most part. The community is still telling people that this setting should be off. When did threaded Optimization “On” become effective in increaseing XP performance? 11.26 seemed to benefit this morning as well as 11.30.
It was always okay for _some_ users for _some_ situations. The danger is that when TO fails, it fails catastrophically.
If you’re comfortable using the fps test command line facilities, please send us a matched pair of verbose fps tests for 11.30, with threaded optimization off vs on.
GTX 1050 TI | RYZEN 3 1300X 3.9GHZ | 12GB RAM
– TO OFF
–fps_test=3 –load_smo=Output/replays/test_flight_c4.fdr
FRAMERATE TEST: time=92.6, frames=5170, fps=55.81
–fps_test=4 –load_smo=Output/replays/test_flight_c4.fdr
FRAMERATE TEST: time=92.7, frames=2852, fps=30.78
–fps_test=5 –load_smo=Output/replays/test_flight_c4.fdr
FPS_TEST 5 – FRAMERATE TEST: time=93.8, frames=2221, fps=23.69
–fps_test=54 –load_smo=Output/replays/test_flight_c4.fdr
FPS_TEST54 – FRAMERATE TEST: time=92.8, frames=2672, fps=28.78
– TO ON
–fps_test=3 –load_smo=Output/replays/test_flight_c4.fdr
FRAMERATE TEST: time=92.7, frames=6302, fps=68.01
–fps_test=4 –load_smo=Output/replays/test_flight_c4.fdr
FRAMERATE TEST: time=92.6, frames=3243, fps=35.01
–fps_test=5 –load_smo=Output/replays/test_flight_c4.fdr
FRAMERATE TEST: time=93.4, frames=2482, fps=26.56
–fps_test=54 –load_smo=Output/replays/test_flight_c4.fdr
FPS_TEST54 – FRAMERATE TEST: time=92.8, frames=3292, fps=35.48
I got a boost with threaded optimization as well! Ryzen 1800X, GTX 1080.
I noticed that for several planes saved quick looks do no longer work (filed bug report): It seems there is a significant shift in position. Maybe Ben can explain!
(Please try to avoid to make saved quick looks invalid. I created at least 10 quick looks per plane…)
Oooooooh. Yyyyeah. @#$@.
The center of gravity changed for two LR aircraft, and as a result, the QL are now offset. We actually have no “compatibility” code for this because it’s not a change of file format.
I found another problem: If you crash the King Air, the black smoke _completely_ kills the frame rate, and the CPU or graphics fan (I guess it’s the GFX fan) spins up to maximum (AMD RX560)…
A question on ATC and AI:
If the AI pilot gets instruction to enter the runway and “line up”, the plane enters the runway, but does not line up. Is that intentional?
If an AI plane lands, tower instructs the plane to taxi, while the plane is still fast and on the runway. Doesn’t the plane announce that it left the runway to tower before it’s handed over to ground (and receives detailed taxi instructions from there)?
If the AI pilot is instructed to line up and does not, that sounds like a bug. You can use the developer traffic menu to see what the aircraft _thinks_ it is doing.
The aircraft does not announce that it has left the runway, as the tower controller can see this. However, IRL the pilot might be given significantly less instructions while exiting the runway; that’s a design issue with the system that Chris is looking at.
A question on 3D sound (I feel something is wrong):
I took off at KSEA north direction with the Cessna (as per ATC, so I guess the wind is not coming from the south). Then switching to external view (Shift+6) and using the cursor key to rotate horizontally around the plane, I observed this:
The noise was loudest in front of the plane, and less loud behind the plane.
I would guess the opposite, because 1) the propeller should push the air (and thus the sound) behind the plane, and the wind should also blow the noise to the tail of the plane…
So is the influence of wind modeled for external views?
Likewise inside the cockpit: If I glace left or right, the sound does not change in the way I’d expect (Looking right, I guessed the engine’s noise would be mostly in the left ear).
Your default MD 80. Thanks for the improvements to the plane. The wing texture is wonderful!!!. Speedbrake: I am now able to add drag to the plane without pulling the lever all the way down on the throttle hardware.I asked a hardware company about making a tillerwheel that is compatible to XP. I was told no.Thanks for fixing Lady Liberty in New York.
Thanks devs and a Happy New Year @ll. 😉
Still waiting here for improvements and sadly your 11.3x has killed my airport in frames. With 11.2x it was tolerable. Start on Runway 08.
My scenery: //forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/46047-fun-bay-of-kiel-edhk-helo-bay/
My sys: i5 4670k @ 4.7 & 1080ti
Ben are the new legobricks in now for scenery?
Trying to send a bug report and this is what I am getting.
Failed to send bug report
Message could not be sent. Mailer error: SMTP Error: data not accepted.SMTP server error: DATA END command failed Detail: This message was blocked because its content presents a potential security issue. Please visit //support.google.com/mail/?p=BlockedMessage to review our message content and attachment content guidelines. c12sm64567342qka.42 – gsmtp SMTP code: 552 Additional SMTP info: 5.7.0
Thanks Bill
I can only comment and say: Release 11.30 is a Holy Effort.
Keep the dreams soaring.
Any way to map Rift touch controllers “Middle grip” to act like rudder pedals? Left controls left rudder axis and right controls right rudder axis? Tried playing around with different options but doesn’t seem to work.
Thank you for 11.3
You have previously stated that additional scenery, Including NY bridges, will come shortly after its release – can you give any kind of time-frame?
Hi Ben & co,
Saw a lot of issues on bug reports and information not getting through to laminar. Perhaps it would be more productive if the bug reporter was actually built into X-Plane. I drew a mockup of it and posted on imgur.
//imgur.com/a/TKo4G6A
In theory, it would more likely catch bugs “as they occur” and it would be easier to upload information (since version number, OS and log files would be automatically posted,) and it would be easier for the end user to attach recordings/images to bug reports.
On the rolling topic of UI improvements, could we also see an option for the X-Plane installer to output the overriding changes to keep/discard as a list… rather than as a sequential checkbox?
Cheers
Good idea Dellanie!!! I have an idea close to this which i will bring up in the next blog. It has to do with functions.
Mind blown.
Apu exhaust: Since the main effect has improved, any chance of of it for the stock aircraft? Thanks.