Yesterday we received multiple reports that the Aerosoft X-Plane 11 DVD set does not work with Linux. It turns out that there’s something strange about how the DVDs are authored that makes the file names on Linux go all lower-case, which causes both the simulator and the installer to not be able to use the DVDs.
We have fixes for these problems that will be rolled into a new installer and the next update of X-Plane; in the meantime you can get them here for Linux now:
To install from the DVD, download this installer, run it, and insert your DVD, this installer from the net will install the contents of the DVDs normally.
Once you have installed X-Plane, replace your normal X-Plane-x86_64 app with the one attached here (placing the new app in your “X-Plane” folder) to run using the DVD to get out of demo mode.
You can use these two apps until we issue replacements; 11.01 should go beta early next week and contain “official” versions of these fixes, at which point you can just use the official version.
(Thanks to Daniel for his patience and helpfulness in trouble-shooting this remotely!)
Austin said the previous render was too DARRRRRRRRRRRK (probably because the only image was behind his eye patch) but this one is better.
(I’ll be over this pirate thing tomORRRRRRow. Maybe.)
As you can see from yesterday’s post and this picture…I blacked out the wrong eye.
It’s the plank for me for sure.
Normally we try not to pre-announce new features before they are complete, but it’s been kind of an open secret around the company that we are working on native VR capabilities for X-Plane. Austin mentioned it on a Facebook Live stream, and Chris posted pictures of un-boxing his OcRift and Vive.
So today I’m going to show you a sneak preview of something that I’m just too excited not to post: X-Plane 11’s new Pirate-VR™ mode*.
There are two major challenges to integrating VR with a general purpose flight simulator:
- Performance. X-Plane typically runs at 30-40 fps on a high-end system on a single monitor. How do we render a stereo image to two eyes without cutting frame-rate in half?
- Usability. How do users interact with the complex cockpit buttons and switches using 3-d “wand”-type controllers that ship with today’s VR head-mounted displays?
Pirate-VR™ mode solves both of these problems.
When rendering to the head-mounted display, we simulate an eye-patch over the left eye.
By blacking out the left eye, we are able to recover quite a bit of framerate and run a stereo render at over 40 fps; minor optimization should get us to something fluid for the HMD.
In Pirate-VR™ mode, both of your hands are replaced by large metal hooks. Since it is pretty much impossibly to safely operate the over-head panel of an MD-82 with hooks for hands, we can skip 3-d interaction testing on most of the cockpit, simplifying VR interaction quite a bit.
I can’t announce when Pirate-VR™ will ship, but for scallywags who will be joining us at FlightsimCon in Hartford** this year, I think we’ll have something you’ll really want to get your hooks into.
* Yes, it is, of coarse, pronounced “Vee-ARRRRRRRRRR!”
** Update: my wife points out that the correct pronunciation is HARRRRRRRRtford.
X-Plane 11.00 is out! Release candidate 1 is it. It’s out the door!
If you’ve been waiting for Steam – you can now get X-Plane 11 on Steam.
If you already own X-Plane 11 from our website and you had installed the release candidate 1 patch a day or two ago, there’s nothing new to download – you have the latest version of X-Plane, and it won’t auto-prompt you until we have a patch.
If you’re waiting on DVDs, the materials have been sent off to the duplicator, so my totally-uninformed-guess is maybe a week or two.
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Ben Supnik |
…is available to test. May the good lord have mercy on our souls.
The rate of comments on this blog sky-rocketed when I mentioned that beta 16 was the last beta. (As it turned out, beta 17 is the last beta, because I had to fix a stupid bug I introduced in beta 16.) I would describe this as “fear of missing the train” as it leaves the station.
What will be the impact of actually shipping 11.0? The short summary:
- We will keep fixing bugs.
- We will be able to fix some bugs that we were not able to fix late in beta because the changes are complicated and need more testing time.
- X-Plane 11.0 users who don’t want to deal with unstable betas can simply stick with 11.0 until a patch goes final. This should make the whole beta process more pleasant for everyone.
- We will have to write compatibility code for add-ons that depend on 11.0’s behavior.
- The set of major features of 11.0 won’t change – we’ve made our “big plays” for the version.
In other words, post 11.0 will probably be like now but less stressful for everyone. I expect we will do at least one bug fix patch – we’ve had to do one for every major patch we’ve done but we don’t have a specific plan. We’re waiting to see what gets reported after 11.0.
Will It Blend?
We’ve pushed hard to get compatibility and SDK bugs fixed for 11.0 so that third party developers can “get going”. There is one area of the sim where we’ve had a pile of bug reports that, realistically, aren’t going to be fixed in 11.0 and might have some impact.
X-Plane draws translucent, blended effects (lights, smoke, clouds) in a fixed order. Because these are translucent effects, they must be drawn from farthest to closest or they won’t look right, but X-Plane draws them in a fixed order. The results are not good – when the order that X-Plane picks is backward, you get rendering bugs.
X-Plane has been like this for a very long time, and a lot of these bugs are present in X-Plane 10, and only more noticeable in X-Pane 11 because of lighting changes.
My concern about these bugs is that they may affect third party plugin interfaces. My goal is to get this resolved as quickly as possible to avoid surprising people.
The good news is that this is a pretty narrow part of the sim – if you’re not using plugins to draw, or you’re making an aircraft, or non-plugin-enhanced scenery, this probably doesn’t affect you.
Philipp made a change to the Cessna’s autopilot that makes it more realistic, but also slightly trickier to use.
As of 11.30, the Cessna’s autopilot uses HDG + GPSS for nav course selection. Philipp wrote a developer article explaining what all five of X-Plane’s nav course source modes do, but here are a few notes.
Among autopilots that aren’t totally hopeless (e.g. the Sperry, “none” for its course source) there are two major divisions:
- Autopilots that get the heading for a VOR or ILS from the autopilot heading bug.
- Autopilots that get the heading for a VOR or ILS from an (E)HSI, leaving you to use the heading bug to pick your own heading.
This first category is less high tech and less useful to the pilot, and it’s the bucket the Cessna is in. If you want to fly a localizer, you have to set your AP heading bug to the localizer’s course, or the autopilot is going to lose its mind.
What this means is: if ATC gives you a heading to intercept the localizer, you cannot just engage heading mode, arm localizer mode, and fly the course to intercept – when you intercept the localizer, you won’t track it properly. You will have to adjust your heading bug onto the localizer front course once you start intercepting it.
The GPS is a special case: It works like a VOR/LOC when you are in NAV mode (affected by the heading bug) and like you’d expect when you are in GPSS mode (not affected by the HDG bug). So if you want to fly a GPS flight plan with twists and turns fully automated, you must press the NAV button twice in order to turn the autopilot to GPSS.
Something that can trip people up is that you cannot use GPSS and APR/GS at the same time – if you want to fly a WAAS approach with vertical guidance, you have to step down from NAV GPSS to NAV APR, which means you’re dependent on the pesky heading bug again. Confusing? Yes. Annoying? Certainly. Realistic? Definitely! This is exactly as annoying as the real thing.
The second category gets the localizer heading from either magic (GPS/LOC) or the OBS knob “OBS”) and always gets the VOR radial from the OBS course (which make sense). These setups let you fly a “dual mode” approach – engage HDG, arm LOC, and fly the intercept heading – when the localizer comes alive, the AP can switch modes and know which way to turn to intercept without you having to mess with the HDG dial.
You’ll find GPS/LOC-based systems in our Kingair (which has an EHSI) and Baron (which has a HSI).
And so should you if you use beta 16. X-Plane 11 public beta 16 is out now and fixes a whole pile of bugs. It also introduces one new big one: in HDR mode the overhead panel of the cockpit is totally lit up. Alex reported this to me about an hour after the beta went live; it’s caused by changing where in the drawing process the moon is drawn.
This will be fixed for a beta 17 in the next 24 hours; you can work around it by turning your effects down to medium. Please do not report this bug, as it’s already being fixed. (Do report anything else you find though!)
There are some things fixed in beta 16 though!
- Clouds should be faster. If you are having performance problems with the clouds, please re-report a bug against beta 16.
- We fixed a lot of bugs for authors. Third party developers: please read the release notes carefully – we’ve tried to document every change we’ve made. The new FMS should be a lot more compatible, as should various parts of the flight model.
- A number of rendering artifacts are fixed: sky banding, etc.
Beta 17 (to fix the lit up cockpit) will likely be the last beta of the X-Plane 11.0 series.
A few third party developers have noted that their X-Plane 11 aircraft icons are too small – that is, the size of the airplane in the icon square is tiny when using X-Plane’s icon making function.
We use the bounding sphere of the aircraft to size the airplane, but it can be thrown off. In particular, the bounding sphere we use is the bounding sphere for drawing, but it is precomputed at load time, and therefore contains any mostly-hidden weird stuff on your aircraft.
If you’ve made a GPU cart or push-back truck OBJ and attached it to the ACF, the size of the airplane with the vehicle is being taken into account and it can make the airplane small.
It’s actually a little bit worse – if the object is animated (so it can “drive”) then we consider the animation track. If you have a translate whose end key frames are far from the aircraft, that can really change your bounding volume.
My suggestion: temporarily delete these objects from the aircraft file and then take the screenshot.
After 11.0 ships, I have a few ideas to make this better:
- We can use the aircraft’s physics sphere to size the icon, which should be a lot more accurate and won’t be fooled by ground trucks.
- Some day we’ll have a new persistent OBJ API for plugins – when this happens, please migrate your ground vehicles to this system – there are real costs to having non-airplane objects on the airplane.
Don’t Be That Guy
Finally, third party aircraft authors: please use our icon generator and don’t just splat a screen-shot into the X-Plane 11 icons. The aircraft picker is going to look terrible if it turns into a tile grid of screenshots.
Our graphic designer spent a lot of time and care getting the presentation of the main aircraft picker to look good and be user-friendly; this includes balancing the relative brightness of the user interface elements, the icons, the airport list, etc.
If one third party vendor puts a screenshot into a v11 icon, it looks “louder” than all other aircraft. This tempts other third party developers to do the same thing and before we know it, we’re going to have the ugliest flight picker ever.
If you are having trouble getting a clean icon screenshot of your aircraft, please let us know. Sometimes a complex third party aircraft has to have a few features turned off to make it work, but we are looking at fixing remaining bugs, etc.
(General tip: for best results, load the aircraft first, park it with engines on, then take the icon picture. In theory we can take the picture from the main menu, but in practice your plugin will be in a more ‘normal’ state if you go to the ramp first.)
