It took longer than I wanted, but we’re on to beta 3. If you have X-Plane 10.40 beta 2, it will auto-update to beta 3. Beta 3 fixes a few big bugs in beta 2:
- Crash on startup for Mac users.
- Poor framerate on Windows with NVidia cards on prop planes when the props are on.*
- Legacy GPS not finding airports.
Full notes with the bug fix list is here.
Normally I try to get everything new in a release into beta 1, so that we’re just debugging during beta. But some of our internal plans have changed a bit, so I think there might be more features coming in a later 10.40 beta. I’m hoping to have that sorted out by next week.
Please keep filing bugs when you find them (on the bug report form, not the comments section). Please do not:
- File a bug and then tell me on the comments section. We already have the bug report!
- Ask if you should file a bug report. It takes just as long to handle the actual bug as to read the “should I file a bug” email. If the email is shorter than the bug report, it’s incomplete and we don’t even know what’s going on. If your email is the size of a bug report, just file the bug report!
Linux users running the unsupported open source driver: we already have a bug that it doesn’t work – for now if you run with –no_ubos –no_array_tex you can run, but this is not a long term solution.
* That’s that new OpenGL code we’re running. The slow down is only -barely- noticeable on my dev machine with a GeForce 680; it’s a 3% hit. Fortunately Jennifer was able to reproduce the full 25%+ hit that users are seeing. This is why we have beta, and why we try to get new OpenGL code into X-Plane incrementally. It’s definitely a case of write once, debug everywhere.
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Ben Supnik |
X-Plane 10.40 beta 3 should be out if things go well; I’ll post more on the state of the beta when it’s released. In the meantime, it’s been five years since I’ve ranted about this, so:
When you file a bug report, always be specific!
This is not a good bug report:
Radio tuning does not work in any aircraft.
The problem here is the word “any”. Whomever wrote this bug summary tried a particular aircraft in X-Plane (or maybe even two or three), found a bug, and then assumed that the bug applied to all aircraft. Whatever actual aircraft were tested are lost from the bug report.
Here’s what happens when we get a bug report like this:
- We read the bug report and find it doesn’t tell us which aircraft had the problem.
- Our tester picks one, say, the C-172.
- Murphy’s Law kicks in and the C-172 turns out to be an aircraft that does not show the bug.
- We email the user back with “cannot reproduce – what aircraft did you use.”
In other words, whomever is triaging this bug has now spent time testing and emailing to get information that should have been in the bug originally. This lengthens the time from when the bug is filed to when we can fix it.
When you file a bug, you know what aircraft you tested – tell us what it is! If you tested two or three, list all three. You don’t need to do any more testing work – you just need to include a little bit more information. Our tester and programmers will then go look at the exact aircraft you specified, and we’ll find the problem.
(If you are reading the developer blog, you probably know all of this – I’m really writing this up so we can link to it when sending requests for more information to users.)
I’m declaring WorldEditor 1.4 to be final. From now on, you must use WED 1.4 to upload to the X-Plane Scenery Gateway. If you have not upgraded yet, please do; you can download it here!
X-Plane 10.40 beta 1 is here now…you can download it by checking “get betas” and running an update.
This is an early beta and I strongly recommend running it on a copy of the sim, not your main setup.
Update: release notes are here!Release notes are coming soon; I’m posting this now because I want to find out if we have new OpenGL driver incompatibilities to fix. I’ll be in Hartford all weekend, but I’m hoping that if there is a broken graphics card, I can get a patch before I have to go.
So: please try it – on a copy. If you hit a graphics card problem, please file a bug!!
Update 2: there’s a hard crash on startup that appears to be affecting perhaps all Linux users, as well as what I’m guessing is a tiny handful of Windows users. I’ll try to get this fixed for beta 2. If you have this crash, please do report it with log files so we can catch all cases. You’ll have to use the updater to update to beta 2 when you see the announcement because the crash is happening before the auto-update check.
Update 3: beta 2 is out and fixes both the Linux startup crash and the Windows startup crash, which turns out to be specific to AMD processors. You’ll have to manually run the updater to get beta 2 if you were having crashes. Thanks to the several users who ran a ton of custom builds for me last night to isolate this.
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Ben Supnik |
X-Plane 10.36 has a button in the rendering settings screen labeled “set all rendering options for maximum speed”. Our recommendation for tuning your X-Plane settings has been to start low and build your way up, so that you don’t end up with one setting “hanging” the system at a low framerate (which stops you from seeing the affect of other changes).
This button was a good idea in principle, but in practice it had a few problems:
- The lowest settings are really just astonishingly ugly.
- Some of the settings that get turned off are nearly free, so pressing the button hurts graphics quality unnecessarily.
- Once you minimize your setting, what do you turn up? I’ve seen too many forum posts where users have picked a few random expensive settings and complained about a poor trade-off (e.g. poor performance for the hardware and quality).
So in X-Plane 10.40 we’ve replaced this single button with five pre-made presets: minimum, low, medium, high, and extreme. Each preset is hand-built to try to make good settings trade-offs; instead of having to fish for better visual quality after minimizing, you can simply try 2 or 3 presets, based on your hardware. If you have a very new system, try “high” and “extreme”. If your system is really old, try “low” and then go on to “minimum” or “medium.”
The settings aren’t coded into X-Plane; they come from a config file, and this is important for the process of tuning the presets. The truth is: the presets as picked in beta one are probably not that great. I did run them on my machines, but with only a few computers, it’s hard to know what a good setting is for most users.
In X-Plane 10.40, it will be possible to run the framerate using one of the rendering setting presets instead of one of the fps-test numbers. This will let us get direct, controlled measurement of the performance of specific presets on real machines. My hope is that by collecting this data and tuning the presets up and down, we’ll be able to dial in good compromises in terms of speed and quality.
I’ll post details on how to use the fps test once 10.40 goes live, so that we can start collecting data.
In the long term, the rendering settings need a lot more than just presets; they need a massive simplification. But within the scope of X-Plane 10.40, the presets will hopefully provide a better user experience, less time spent tuning X-Plane, and be a good stepping stone toward a better UI.
Finally, for advanced users who like to tweak things: it will be possible to edit settings.txt and change the presets. I see this in the forums a lot:
User 1: I have an Intel i7 clocked at 1675 ghz and I’m getting 10 fps. What’s wrong with X-Plane?
User 2: that’s weird – I have an Intel i5 clocked at only 900 ghz and I’m getting 350 fps!
With the presets, user 2 can build his settings into a preset and send the file to user 1, who can then try those exact settings and see how performance runs. Both users could also run our presets in the fps test and see if the performance problem is due to different hardware, different rendering settings, or different add-ons.
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Ben Supnik |
One of the new things in X-Plane 10.40: more modern OpenGL code. I mention this because that new code will probably create chaos during the early betas; we’ll get the bugs fixed as quick as we can.
The problem is that OpenGL can be an exercise in “code it once, debug it everywhere”, and while I have tried to set myself up with a wide range of hardware, I don’t have one of every combination of drivers and GPUs that X-Plane runs on.
X-Plane 10.40 will be a longer beta, like 10.30 was, so we should have enough time to work out the kinks in the new code. Having to do this kind of debugging during beta is annoying for everyone, but it’s also necessary to advance the sim forward.
When 10.40 comes out, if the beta doesn’t run on your hardware, please do report a bug; often users assume that if they see the bug then everyone does, so someone else will report it. Not only is this often wrong (because everyone assumes someone else will report a bug), but it might be that your combination of hardware and drivers is the only one that shows the bug!
Update: yesterday at the 2015 WWDC Keynote, Apple announced that they were porting Metal, their Apple-specific low level high performance 3-d API, from iOS to OS X. I will comment on this next week, after the WWDC sessions on the desktop version of Metal are available on the web. In the meantime, don’t panic – this definitely isn’t the end of the Mac, Windows, X-Plane, or the universe.
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Ben Supnik |
I cut a new release candidate for WorldEditor: WED 1.4r2 – please update to this latest build. (1.4r1 had a crash-on-export under a relatively rare configuration of lines in a scenery pack.)
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Ben Supnik |
Next week is FlightSimCon 2015 in Hartford, CT, and it looks like a bunch of us will be there. Austin is speaking on Sunday, and I think Chris, Philipp, Marty and I will be there too. So if you are attending, come say hi – we’ll be at Austin’s talk and if there’s a cocktail party, we’ll be there too!
(Chris is a total hermit and prefers to communicate with us via a series of grunts, but since it’s face to face, he’ll have no choice but to acknowledge you with at least shifty eye contact! 🙂
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Ben Supnik |
I’ve been meaning for weeks now to write up some notes about 10.40. I’ve also been trying to put the hood back on 10.40 so we can get it to public beta; instead the last few weeks have been a flying circus of driver bugs, expiring certificates, etc.
But we are making progress, so I’ll start off in this post by describing a change in how DSFs are loaded and the wide DSF box.
A Tangent: Stuttering and Pauses
A post that involves X-Plane pausing during flight is going to invariably bring up a bunch of blog comments: “X-Plane stutters while I fly on my really expensive machine!” This is not good, and from what I’ve been hearing, it sounds like something got worse recently; this is something that we are investigating now.
But I also want to mention that historically, X-Plane has never been “no-pause”. What we have done is periodically made the pauses much shorter; our goal is to get down to zero pauses, ever, but this will happen by finding every source of pausing and fixing them one at a time. In other words, we’re in the middle of a process of improving smoothness, but even if one source of pausing is fixed, another source might still be causing problems.
DSF Loading: the Old Way
X-Plane has, since X-Plane 9, loaded DSFs in the background on a second core while you fly. This cuts down the amount of time it takes to change scenery. (Older versions of X-Plane would pause while scenery was loaded and shifted.)
The old DSF loader did have a few weaknesses though:
- The sim pauses while DSFs are deleted. As DSFs become bigger, this pause is becoming more noticeable.
- If the loader ever gets behind by two scenery shifts, it just waits until it catches up. This is where the dreaded “Async load timed out after 30 seconds” comes in – it indicates that the DSF loader was so far behind that it locked up for half a minute and didn’t catch up.
- The old DSF loader loads one DSF at a time, tops.
DSF Loading the New Way
X-Plane 10.40 has the new DSF loader, which both loads and unloads DSFs on worker threads to keep flight smoother. It also will load more than one DSF at a time, limited only by the requirement that adjacent DSFs not be loaded at the same time.
X-Plane 10.40 also has the option of an extended DSF scenery region for sharper terrain; with this option off, two DSFs are loaded at one time during sim boot and one or two are loaded at a time while you fly. With the extended DSF region on, up to four DSFs are loaded at once during sim boot and one or two are loaded while you fly.
The extended DSF scenery region is optional; don’t use this if you’re using HD meshes or you’re short on RAM. The new DSF loader is always on.
I just posted WorldEditor 1.4 – “WED”, as we seem to call it most of the time – release candidate one for Mac, Windows and Linux – see the WorldEditor page for download links, report bugs on the gateway bug reporter.
Besides fixing a few bugs, this build has a new certificate so uploading/downloading from the gateway will work.
WED has a validate function that finds authoring problems in your scenery packs; two notes on this function:
First, I have been trying to improve the validation every time an issue comes up with a scenery pack. Therefore WED 1.4’s validation is quite a bit more strict than 1.3’s validation.
Once WED 1.4 goes final, it will become the required version to upload to the gateway. This ensures that we have the strongest validation, and saves Julian from having to hand check authoring issues.
This means that when you go to make a modification to your existing work, you might not be able to resubmit it until you fix existing problems. Your project didn’t change, the validation just became tighter.
Second, I have added the ATC layout error checks to the validation step. These checks (select crossing routes, select doubled nodes, select degenerate route lines) have been available since WED 1.2, but you now have to have a ‘clean’ layout to build your project. I’m hoping that this stricter validation will help fix layout bugs; when the layout is wrong, the AI aircraft’s taxi routes become even weirder than normal.
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Ben Supnik |
