We had a request for information on the popular airports, so here’s a small addendum to the usage data from a couple weeks ago. We don’t currently track whether the airport is a default, Gateway airport or an add on, but we do have it on our radar to track the most popular add ons in the future.
We’ve filtered out demo users again, and this information is for the entire life of X-Plane 11 (1 Nov 2016 to 21 Nov 2017) since we’ve never published airport data before. I’ve only pulled the top 50 airports for this list, but we track 11,281 locations. Read More
Here are the results of the latest usage data as of 05 October, 2017. If you’d like to compare, here is the last usage data result from February 2017.
It took me a bit longer than I would have liked to compile the graphs while working around the 11.10 beta, but we now have a handful of easy-to-digest charts, plus the raw data at the bottom of the post for those that are interested. Read More
X-Plane 11.10 is the first major version release with a lot of code changes and new features. By design, this version has a lot of big changes in it that we’ve held back for weeks or even months. This also means it is more likely to be unstable and buggy, especially for the first few beta releases.
We’ve recently progressed to internal beta testing. Now we should have a public beta sooner rather than later, so I wanted to bring back out some great tips on beta testing that Chris wrote way back in 2012. Nearly all of the info remains as relevant today as it did 5 years ago, and I’ve included his best practice tips below. Read More
Austin Meyer will be hosting a Reddit AMA! Check it out tomorrow, August 16th at 9:30pm EST. Ask him anything! He’ll answer questions on X-Plane, flying, patent trolls, life, his new movie, game development, Android, and more.
A new release candidate is now available for X-Plane 11.02. There aren’t many bug fixes listed on the release notes page, but we think (hope!) we’ve fixed the new issues introduced in r1 and sneaked in a couple other improvements such as:
- Crashing when reporting the field in sight at an untowered airport!
- FPS hit when using external cameras near aircraft with scenery shadows on.
We have a new video tutorial on using FMOD to add custom sounds to X-Plane 11. This simple tutorial shows how to add a snapshot and an event in FMOD.
The video also has a permanent home on the video page of this site, and on the X-Plane YouTube channel.
As always, let us know your thoughts in the comments and if you have requests for other tutorials. I’m starting to get the hang of creating movies, and if you don’t troll me too hard about the quality I might make more. 😉
The latest WED 1.6 beta is now available to test.
This version includes multiple bug fixes, such as Ted’s fix to crashes caused by long tool tip text, and fixes when using orthophotos. See the included README file for the full change log, and, as always, let us know about bugs and problems on the Scenery Tools bug reporter.
You might have noticed we’ve been working our tails off to make X-Plane 11 an amazing sim, with tons of new features, and during that time we didn’t have the resources to do anything further with our proposal to publish X-Plane usage data. The good news about our delay is: we now have usage data for both X-Plane 10 and X-Plane 11.
Since one of us (ahem) remembered we had promised to provide this at intervals, here’s the latest data update. It’s still not particularly pretty, but we have a handful of easy-to-digest charts, plus the raw data at the bottom of the post for those that are interested.
Items of note
All data in these charts are for users of the full version only—we’ve filtered out demo users.
If an aircraft’s name, studio, or number of engine fields in Plane Maker are changed at any point, the aircraft will show up in the data as two different entries.
Aircraft
Hardware
Raw Data
There are four files here: hardware data and aircraft data, for X-Plane 10 & 11. Each contains all the information we have since September 2015, for paying customers only (no demo users).
The first beta for World Editor 1.5 is now available to download.
This version features numerous bug fixes, along with major improvements to make editing airports easier and faster by providing more visual clues. It’s also the first 64-bit version of WED!
Some highlights of this version include:
You can see the full list of bug fixes, improvements and new features in the README.WorldEditor file found in your downloaded WED folder.
Please try the latest version as soon as you can and let us know if you find any bugs by filing a report on the Scenery Tools tab of the Gateway (not the desktop bug reporter for once!).
This is a “Request for Comments” post—please discuss the proposal in the comments. Per our standard procedure, if you comment asking about the Oculus Rift, your comment will be piped to /dev/null.
X-Plane started collecting anonymous usage data in version 10.40. I used some of that data to compile this infographic you might have seen around the internet. It’s fun and colorful and has some interesting tidbits of data. However, just because I thought that those statistics were noteworthy doesn’t mean that you did.
So, is there anything else you, as third party developers, want to know? Is there information missing from the infographic that would help you decide where to put your development energy? Do you want more specific details about anything mentioned in the infographic? We have all kinds of statistics available, from what languages are used the most, to the most popular screen resolution.
If you’d like to have more information, how often would you like to see it, and what format would be the most helpful? Spreadsheets are easy and can be processed often, and we could throw some graphs in there to make them less boring.
Any of this sound appealing to you? Let us know in the comments!
