In my previous post I suggested a few ways that we will try to ease the introduction of new rendering technology in v10: complete compatibility when the feature is off, close-as-possible compatibility when it’s on, and a simple path to migrate to fully using the new tech.
But: if you’re doing something that should be illegal, we can’t help you. And this can be tricky because X-Plane 9 doesn’t always complain about illegal content.
Propsman just hit a case of this: he ran one of his old plugins on an X-Plane 10 development build* and discovered that (unlike X-Plane 9) it accidentally disabled most of X-Plane 10’s drawing.
It turns out that his plugin wasn’t quite adhering to the OpenGL guidelines for X-Plane plugins. But the particular state he was leaving altered had no visible effect on X-Plane 9. That’s not the case for X-Plane 10. So he’ll have to fix his plugin; the fixed plugin will work correctly with both X-Plane 9 and 10.
Unfortunately, it can be hard to find these kinds of problems without a build of X-Plane that actually has problems when you violate a rule. So if you make a third party add-on, when we finally do have beta builds available, I encourage you to check your add-ons for possible plugin or authoring mistakes that might actually cause problems in X-Plane 10.
*Let me nip this one in the bud before it gets out of control: Propsman is one of five authors who are working on the new art content for X-Plane 10. These five authors have development builds of X-Plane 10. No other authors have X-Plane 10. We are not giving out copies of X-Plane 10 right now. We are not loking for testers. Do not ask me for a copy of X-Plane 10. Do not ask me to test X-Plane 10 early. If you send me an email angling for early access, I am going to mark your email as spam in Thunderbird.
An “old plugin” using OpenGL? I didn’t think there were too many of them. But I’m hoping Alex will add some missing sauce in 9 to 10.
>Do not ask me for a copy of X-Plane 10
How about a beta of the plugin then? Heheh…
This will raise the quality of plug-ins! I hope X-Plane 10 can discover more “illegal” written plug-ins and refuse to start until the plug-in is moved out of the plug-in folder. That behavior will push their plug-in developer to release correctly written plug-ins. This behavior will also increase the stability of the X-Plane itself.