X-Plane 11.50b7 has been recalled before it even made it fully out the door.
We had a ton of changes in this one–at one point I pulled over 100 Git commits on our release branch. Ben and Sidney also knocked nearly all items off their features-to-do list.
But thank goodness we asked our third party developers to kick the tires early on this one. They found a beta stopping bug in about 30 minutes! In our attempts to fix some performance issues, we caused the aircraft to be blurry in almost all cases, and we knew that was not an acceptable regression bug for a flight sim.
So sit tight for beta 8 to come soon, and don’t panic when your version numbers skip b7.
In 11.50b6 we added a command line argument to run Aftermath, a debugging utility, hoping it will give us more insight into device loss errors.
A “device loss” error is specifically the crash that accompanies the on-screen (or log.txt) error message “Encountered Vulkan device loss error!” Using Aftermath will not help us investigate VRAM issues–that is a different issue entirely.
If you are on Windows, have an NVidia GPU and you see a device loss error followed by a crash, you can help us track these bugs down by running X-Plane with Aftermath enabled. We know from 11.50b5 that many devices are not compatible with Aftermath, so if you crash and burn immediately, you can go back to using beta 6 without the extra command line option.
Aftermath Instructions
We will be using the command line via Command Prompt. (Here are instructions on getting started with this if needed.)
Launch X-Plane from the command line with the following flag:
--aftermath
You can then try to reproduce the steps that caused the initial device loss, or just fly as usual. If device loss happens again, the auto crash report form should come up again. Please fill out your email and submit the auto report to us for investigation.
X-Plane 11.50b4 is now available if you update via the Laminar Research installer. (Steam users: it’s on the servers and we’ll hit go in a few hours if we don’t hear reports of massive crashing and pain again.)
This update was focused on crash fixes and better triaging. We’ve been seeing a huge uptick in volume of bug reports and auto reported crashes since the initial 11.50 public beta release. We are trying to cut through the noise and provide better information in logs and in the remaining crash reports to fix issues faster, and let our support team (primarily me) get the inbox under control.
The best way to help us handle crashes on Windows and Linux is still to submit the auto report form. You can include your email if you want us to be able to find your specific crash, but we do not need the message field–the log and back trace will have pretty much all the info we need. If you send an auto report, please do not also send a bug report form email.
Mac users do not have the ability to auto report, so they should fill out the bug report form, and include the Apple crash report as well as the log.txt. This can be found under your username /Libraries/Logs/DiagnosticReports. The name will include the date & time of the crash and will end in .crash. You may need to show hidden folders to access it.
X-Plane 11.50b3 is now available if you update via the Laminar Research installer. (Steam users: it’s on the servers and we’ll hit go in a few hours if we don’t hear reports of massive crashing and pain like we did last night.)
We waited on releasing beta 2 on Steam after we started hearing reports of new, unintended crashes, and we spent the last 24 hours coding and testing the fixes. The only new fixes in beta 3 are for crashing with Linux + Vulkan, and null pipeline crashes with third party aircraft.
Hopefully this update will be more stable and we can get back to our regularly scheduled programming of working on a wider range of fixes for beta 4 next week.
The latest update for World Editor is out of beta testing and considered the official version. It can now be used to upload scenery to the Gateway, and is an incremental update that features the ability to preview facades in 3D, faster loading, and up to 100 “undo” operations.
See README.WorldEditor for the full list of changes, or Michael’s extended release notes here. Download this version for Linux, Mac, or Windows here.
Release Candidate 2 is now available for LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours or so.
This is a very small patch with a few minor fixes. At the risk of sounding like a broken record: if you haven’t tried your add on aircraft in 11.40 yet…do it now! The reports have been pretty quiet the last couple weeks, and nobody enjoys a last minute surprise bug.
Release Candidate 1 is now available for LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours or so.
We are moving towards the end of the beta period, so we’re minimizing the number of code and flight model changes at this point. If you haven’t tried your add on aircraft in 11.40 yet…the time is now!
This update contains mostly tweaks to AI & ATC interaction to improve landings, replay sound improvements, and includes a few new datarefs requested by devs.
Beta 9 is now available for LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours or so.
This update includes a few more fixes for crashes and issues with third party add ons. The rate of bugs and crashes reported has slow down dramatically in the last week or two, and we don’t have open third party compatibility bugs, so we are getting ready to wrap up the beta.
Developers: expect r1 soon, and make sure you test your add ons.
