The next X-Plane update will focus primarily on flight-model and systems, plus external-visual networking and some ATC features. While that update is in beta, we can work in parallel on real weather and graphics.
But there are two graphics bugs we already have fixed in-house which should relieve some 12.06/12.07 pain:
- Running out of memory mid-frame. Turns out if you got into a fairly tight situation VRAM wise (and we try to do that to max out the texture res you can have) then X-Plane might run out of memory trying to draw trees and…melt down like a toddler who can’t have any more candy.
We have an interim fix: allocate memory statically so we always have it. In a future update we’ll reuse memory from other parts of rendering to be more efficient.
- Popping out a window causes a big slow-down. When the arrangements of windows changes, we might need to allocate more VRAM for rendering. This is not a fast process – we have to halt all rendering, throw out the old memory, compact things, allocate new memory, and if a DSF is loading while this happens, the DSF loader is using up memory as we are trying to reallocate the windows, which can mean compacting memory again, paging down textures…you get the idea.
The fix is pretty simple: don’t do this if the popped out window doesn’t require more VRAM. Most of the time, this is the case, so this is an easy fix for a silly bug.
Integration work for the next update is going on now and I’m hoping it will be done next week. More details soon!
Editor’s note: what follows is very, very, very, very, very silly.
Last week we shipped X-Plane 12.06; since then we have found a few straggler bugs; like typical lARRge patches from the days of X-Plane 11, a few bugs escaped us until after final, including some crashes we could see in the auto reportARR.
While it’s not great to be shipping a “hot patch” to our release, it is pretty fantastic to announce X-Plane 12.07 ARRsea 1 on International Talk Like a Pirate Day (the 19th of septembARR). The rest of this blog post only gets worse; you’ve been wARRned.
12.08 Is The New 12.07
Internally, nobody is happy about this, but the hot patch bumped all of our version numbers. So the new road map looks something like this:
- 12.07: hot patch of 12.06.
- 12.08: coming soon. Flight model and systems, ATC and Networking
- 12.09: more graphics and real weathARR fixes.
12.08 (né 12.07) is almost completely integrated and should be ready for private testing as soon as 12.07 is settled.
Why Wasn’t I Notified
Since 12.07 is a new version, you won’t be auto-updated to upgrade from 12.06 while 12.07 is in testing; run the installer, update with “get betas” checked and you can get 12.07.
Crash Fixes
12.06 shipped with more sensitive internal detection for numeric problems. This is how we run the sim internally all the time – the goal is to find and squash bugs fast.
Unfortuntately there are sections of X-Plane’s simulation that are:
- Not present in an aircraft (e.g. the real aircraft doesn’t have X)
- Not expensive to run, CPU-wise
- Not visible to the user (since the aircraft has e.g. no gauges to show these systems.
As it turns out, these systems are often happily running away in the background producing absolutely bonkers values; with sensitive numeric checking, the sim can crash due to problems in a system that nobody cares about.
For 12.07, I solved the problem by muting the alarm. My expectation is that we’ll have sensitive numerics in most betas, turn them off in the releases, and work through the systems code over time. (The priority on this isn’t super high because the systems aren’t consuming framerate – if they were we’d see them in our profiling.)
The other area where we saw increased crashes was with TCAS plugins. 12.07r1 has better logging and shouldn’t crash as much – the goal here is to not brick third party add-ons.
Other Bug Fixes
Multi-monitorARR: data output was not working in full screen configurations, fixed now, and manipulators work for multi-monitor systems.
OpenXARR: HP Reverb fixed, and we finally figured out why the white board would sometimes disappear. (It wasn’t gone, it was just 20 km from the hangARR.)
GARRmin Bezels
X-Plane does not have a built-in way to remove the bezels from the pop-out avionics. To solve this, some of our user and some add-ons edit the ARRtwork inside X-Plane’s “resources” folder, setting the bezels to clear.
X-Plane 12.06 introduced new bezel variants for the G1000 to cover all of the real-world panel button configurations. This fixed the bug “the real aircraft does not have these buttons, but when you pop the panel out, the buttons appear and do nothing.”
A side effect of this is: those aircraft using the new bezels use new art files, so the hacked up no-bezel art files on longer work.
This is not a bug for us to fix; if your add-on works by modifying the internals of X-Plane, we cannot guarantee that it will keep working even when we change the sim. (The only way to make that work would be to never change the sim.) You can work around this by modifying the new bezel files.
In the future, our plan for this is to provide a real way to hide bezels in the sim as a built-in part of the UI, which should make hacking unnecessary.
What Comes Next
Hopefully 12.07r1 will be “one and done”; if so, we’ll move on to private testing of 12.08 almost immediately.
If you are a third pARRty and your add-on has problems with 12.06, please tell us four weeks agoas soon as possible!
A few quick notes on 12.06-related chaos – it’s been a weekend.
Global Airport Errors
“Don’t rock the boat in a release candidate.” This is the lesson I should know, since I have cut at least 187 of them.
In 12.06rc1, we were missing HEKA (completely) and all of the airports at KLAS; the KLAS problem was due to a missing art asset. One of the multiple confounding factors in this bug is that the global airports don’t put up a “there was a problem with the scenery pack” pop-up message when art is missing. So, being the brainiac I am, I went “oh, that seems dumb, we’ll never know if the pack has problems, I’ll go fix that now”.
For 12.06rc2, I changed the policy so that the global airports would get a pop-up message like any other scenery pack that’s missing art.
As it turns out, the global airports are missing lots of objects – and probably have been for the entire X-Plane 12.0 run.
So coming soon to an installer you: X-Plane 12.06r3, which will be just like r2, but with the pop-up message turned off (just like the rest of the beta has been).
We have a more comprehensive plan to address these art asset issues for 12.07 – I’ll comment on why it’s important that missing scenery assets be errors in another post.
As a side note, it appears the most RCs we’ve had is X-Plane 9.40, which got up to release candidate 16 and took at least six weeks.
NVidia Users: No Zink For You (for a little bit)
In X-Plane 12.06r2 we have disabled Zink for NVidia users. We did this because there is an NVidia driver bug that interacts with Zink that will cause the sim to crash.
NVidia found the bug, is working on a fix, and they are quite responsive in pushing driver fixes. As soon as the fix is in non-beta drivers, we will change this from a “zink is banned” to a “you must have at least driver version x.y to run zink” message.
If you really really really want to run Zink on your NVidia card, you can still can, using these two steps:
- Raise your right hand and repeat after me: I, _____, solemnly swear that I want to crash my copy of X-Plane by running Zink with NVidia drivers before the driver fix is available. Let it be known to all of the X-Plane community that I do this of my own volition. I enjoy having my flight end abruptly with a crash report dialog box on short final, and I will not complain about this on r/flightsim.
- Run the sim with
--zink
AMD users: you are not affected by this, so Zink is still available. Enjoy this rare chance to make fun of your green team compatriots.
We Put the ‘No’ In NOAA
Over the weekend the real weather servers went down. While we usually blame NOAA for this kind of thing, this one was super embarrassing: the server ran out of disk space (and the disk space monitor didn’t notify our ops team). The ultimate cause, I suspect, was that it was labor day weekend in the US, e.g. “a really good weekend for infrastructure issues.”
This isn’t the first real weather outage we’ve had this year, and for this reason we have a replacement weather server in development. The replacement will be able to serve the least old weather correctly when NOAA has a maintenance outage (instead of just 404ing everyone) and will hopefully clean its cache out correctly.
(The caching problem is slightly harder than it sounds: we do want to retain some old real weather files for test cases and bug reproduction. But we need to purge most of it to keep the server from filling up.)
What’s Next
If 12.06 rc3 is final, we’ll let it sit a little bit and then start private testing of X-Plane 12.07. The X-Plane 1.206 beta has taken quite a bit longer than we wanted, so 12.07 is intentionally a smaller release – about half the size in terms of code change. That’s still a lot of new stuff (and a topic for yet another separate blog post).
If 12.06rc3 is not final, I will set myself on fire.
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by
Ben Supnik |
