Here’s a feature that went into X-Plane 11.35 that will be really exciting to a very small number of scenery authors: in X-Plane 11.35, line files (.lin) can have custom painted end-caps on each end, and the texture repeats can be aligned to a grid.
Scenery authors who have gotten deep into X-Plane’s scenery system will already know from that first paragraph why this is useful, but for normal people who have seen the sun in the last 30 days, .lin files are the art files that define the look of thin linear features. X-Plane uses them for the painted yellow and white lines in the airport environment, but a developer can use them for anything linear.
Line files repeat, tile, and can follow the ground in a bezier curved path, which makes them great for curved taxiway lines. Their achilles heal up to now has been that when the line ends, the line just … stops. This makes them inappropriate for really thick uses, where that hard “cut” at the end of the line would be really noticeable and ugly.
In X-Plane 11.35 you can provide a start and end cap for each line definition. Like the line itself, it can be mulit-layered if desired. So, for example, you could use it to make dirt paths between buildings in a rural airport – where the path ends you can have a “soft” ending to the path and not have to worry about tucking the line under another scenery element to hide the cut.
We’re not using these in the default art yet, but the code is done, and I have updated the .lin file format specification with the new syntax.
We are nearing the end of the beta cycle and it is highly likely that the next build will be a release candidate. (Release notes here.) I’ll continue to sound like a broken record: please test your addons if you haven’t done so already!
One thing of particular note for aircraft authors in this update: we added datarefs to read the contents of the X-Plane default FMS Control and Display Unit (CDU) screen. You can read more about this addition here.
X-Plane 11.35 beta 4 is now live – run our updater and check “get betas”. Release notes here.
Steam users: we’ll release this tomorrow if there isn’t a sign of a huge fire overnight – it’s already uploaded to the servers.
Add-on Developers: if you haven’t run your add-on in 11.35, please put it through its paces now. Everything that might be risky or weird is already in and we’re just killing off bugs now. If your add-on has a compatibility problem, we need to know now if we’re going to fix the problem during beta. While we’ve tried to make everything “just work” with old add-ons, there’s always the chance that your add-on does something special we didn’t think of. Please test now!
Beta three is now available to LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours. This beta has the last of our planned code changes for 11.35 (in addition to bug fixes), so we expect the rest of the beta period to be focused on fixing regression bugs.
If you haven’t already, this would be a great beta to test your add ons in to ensure we haven’t broken them. If we have, get at us via the bug report form and be sure to include a copy of your add on.
Here’s our keynote talk from FlightSimExpo 2019 last week!
FSExpo 2019
Evans video team really did a fantastic job with the feed this year – everything was live-streamed in great quality, and the talk has a direct feed to the slides and good quality audio. Totally what we were hoping for!
In the past, our posts breaking down X-Plane usage data have been… well… intermittent at best. Not because we don’t think sharing this stuff is important—it absolutely is—but simply because gathering the data, putting it into nice charts, and writing up a blog post took time away from developing X-Plane itself.
Whenever we encounter a problem like this, we try to pull back and take the humans out of the process. Out of that philosophy, let me present to you:
We have fixed the two high visibility bugs reported over the last couple days, and now have beta two out. This build should have fixed the cloud rendering issue as well as the scenery pack typo.
If you had installed beta 1, you should be auto-prompted to update. It is also live on Steam.
It has been some time! I have been working as hard as I can on the
converter (to great applause so far!), but, there have still been some
features and fixes developed along the way. By now it was time to
collect and release them!
As always This is a beta. It makes data model changes which may still have bugs. Make backups!
Features
“Cast Shadow (Local)”
Previously, you could only set “Cast Shadow” to be on or off for “Scenery” and “Instanced Scenery” export types. This would, for the whole object, turn on and off shadows. Now, “Cast Shadow” has been removed from the OBJ settings and “Cast Shadow (Local)” has been placed in the material settings. With this, individual meshes can have shadows or not and it works for Aircraft and Cockpit objects too!
The first public beta for X-Plane 11.35 is now available! (Steam is staged and will be released shortly.) This is an update that includes new Gateway airports, FMOD sound for the Boeing B737-800 and KingAir C90B, improved aircraft systems, and landmark scenery packs for New York and Washington D.C.
Aircraft developers will want to review Philipp’s notes on the:
Update: We are aware of a cloud rendering bug with anti-aliasing. The work around for now is to turn off or use the lowest setting of anti-aliasing.
We are working on b2 to fix this issue and will be holding the wide release of the Steam beta for the fix. If you really, really, really want to use b1 with this known issue, you can email me directly at my first name @x-plane.com and I’ll get you into the private Steam beta.
As you may have heard, we’ll be at FlightSimExpo 2019 in Orlando this weekend! If you are attending, please stop by our booth and drop in on our talk Saturday afternoon. We’ll be qualifying people for a VR landing contest too.
For developers: Austin, Philipp, Chris and I will all be there – find us to talk about developing add-ons for X-Plane!
