Over the weekend, I published a Python package called xplane_airports. This serves two major use cases:
- Parsing the airport data (
apt.dat) files used by X-Plane, and asking questions like “does <some airport> support <some feature>?”
- Nicely wrapping the X-Plane Scenery Gateway’s API to get information about the airports available there. This includes the ability to download scenery packs and manipulate them just like you would an
apt.dat on disk.
If you’re doing any sort of automated analysis or manipulation of X-Plane airports, this should be a huge help.
It’s available via pip now:
$ pip install xplane_airports
And there’s a ton of documentation in the project’s README on GitHub.
Bug reports, feature requests, & pull requests are all welcome. 🙂
Posted in Tools
by
Tyler Young |
We’re pushing to get a stable X-Plane 11.30 beta 3 right now, and I think we’re making progress: Chris has fixed the crash when using the radio stack audio (this Windows-only crash was very frequent) and I have found at least one case of collapsing landing gear.
The bug report was the landing gear collapsing when taxiing on orthophoto-based scenery. It turns out that the custom DSF meshes have triangles that are duplicated and then flipped. In other words, a few of the triangles have twins that are upside down.
Here’s a pair of pictures to illustrate.
The image on the left is the “tops” of the orthophoto mesh triangles – this is what you expect to see. The image on the right is the bottoms!
Now normally the “bottom” view should show nothing – we should see only the light blue background, because the camera is above the mesh, so all of the triangle backs are facing away from us. Those extra triangles you see are copies of parts of the orthophoto mesh that have been duplicated and flipped over, so that their fronts face down and their backs face up.
This DSF violates the DSF specification, which requires all triangles to be wound counter-clockwise when viewed from above. But as of X-Plane 11.26, this wasn’t a huge problem; X-Plane blissfully ignored the flipped triangles. X-Plane 11.30 is intermittently detecting the upside-down triangles and the resulting upside-down normal vectors are making the collision physics go crazy. We should have a fix for this in X-Plane 11.30 where we filter out these flipped triangles.
One last bit of the mystery: the creation agent on both bad DSFs I have looked at is “X-Plane Scenery Creator 0.9a”. Does anyone have a link to this tool or know who the author might be?
Post script: there is a separate bug where the new physics code is reacting to DSF boundary cracks more severely than X-Plane 11.26. I had hoped this would all be one big bug but it’s not, so mesh cracks will be next on my todo list.
X-Plane 11.30 beta 2 went up yesterday – it fixes a few of our really big bugs, e.g. crashing and completely whacked out graphics. In terms of what’s next for the beta:
- We should have a Steam version of beta 2 early next week. As always, Steam betas will wait until we’ve proven a beta doesn’t crash; given how easy it is to get Steam betas, we can’t risk the reputation of the product by posting broken betas. The delay for Steam betas should be days, unless the beta is broken, in which case you shouldn’t want it anyway.
- We have a number of performance problems that we’re looking into now. The good news is that these are perf problems that may be fixable; the new tech in 11.30 that was suppose to be fast actually is fast, so I’m optimistic that things will run decently once we get these lumps out.
- We should have beta 3 mid next week; we don’t have much out-standing in terms of flight model compatibility bugs.
If you make a third party aircraft, you should be carefully evaluating your aircraft for compatibility bugs ASAP. The window for reporting compatibility bugs is going to close next week, and if you tell us late in the beta (after the app has been available for six weeks) that there’s a compatibility problem, you may have to wait for a patch to get a fix.
Do not wait for the release candidate to check compatibility!
Posted in News
by
Ben Supnik |
Art controls are internal tuning constants in X-Plane that we put in so that our art team can modify the behavior of X-Plane while they work without having to recompile the sim from source code. We leave them in the final product because they are sometimes useful to third parties, useful for in-field debugging, and because we are generally okay with people hacking the sim if they understand the limitations. X-Plane has always been a relatively open sim to play with and lots of X-Plane authors got their start just poking around. Our first instinct isn’t to encrypt everything.
We don’t go out of our way to break art controls. We don’t go in and change their names in every beta just to mess with third parties. But we also spend absolutely zero time trying to maintain art control compatibility with previous versions of the sim. Backward compatibility takes a lot of planning and effort and there’s just no way we can keep a bunch of internal tweaks the same while modifying the sim.
In X-Plane 11.30, a number of art controls have stopped behaving the way they used to. They aren’t going to go back to the way they were, because we don’t spend time trying to support hacks based on art controls. Here’s what happened and why:
As part of our work to port X-Plane to Vulkan, I rewrote the code that renders a frame in two ways:
- All off-screen rendering needed to draw the frame is now done before the frame is rendered; up to X-Plane 11.25 some of this work was done as a diversion, mid-frame.
- The graphic resources (mostly off-screen rendering buffers in VRAM) are allocated once when the configuration of the sim changes, rather than being allocated “just in time” when we get into a frame and realize something has changed.
Change 1 was needed to match how Vulkan and Metal handle off-screen rendering*; change 2 helps avoid stutters by allocating expensive resources early when we are not flying.
The side effect of this is that art control edits take effect only when the sim is reconsidering its graphic setup anyway (e.g. due to a window size change or rendering setting change); if the art controls change mid-frame, any code that does resource allocation ignores them because it is no longer “sniffing” for configuration changes per-frame. Other code that uses the art controls notices the change, and the result is often haywire drawing due to a half-used art control.
* This was an example of the OpenGL driver doing a lot of work for us, and hurting performance, to support an abstraction that doesn’t make sense. The real graphics card has to do real work when a rendering pass begins and ends; the OpenGL driver automatically synthesizes these rendering passes on the fly for the GPU as the app runs. Because Vulkan/Metal requires that we spell out the passes explicitly, we (the app) know exactly when we are doing something expensive (starting a new rendering pass) and we can minimize the cost.
We’ve been breaking X-Plane apart so we can put it back together with a revised flight model, shaders, joysticks, and particles. All these changes have resulted in some interesting effects at times. Here are some of the best mistakes I’ve seen as we’ve been hammering away at 11.30. Enjoy! Read More
Almost! we’ve been running a small scale private beta for the last few weeks while we finish new features and fix major bugs. I don’t want to curse the beta, but it looks like we may be able to get the public beta posted this weekend.
In the last two days we’ve had two major show-stopping bugs, but both are fixed, so we’re going to keep trying to nail this thing down and get it posted.
The public beta features not only the new particle system, available to third parties, but it is now in use for most (but not all) of the built-in effects in the sim. New Plane-Maker options let authors specify which effect categories (e.g. engine effects, wheel effects, etc.) they want to replace.
At this point it looks like we won’t have anything public for Vulkan this year, although I do think we will hit some internal milestones.
XPlane2Blender is now X-Plane 11.30 ready! Not much has changed since beta.3, just some fixes to the particle stuff.
Bug Fixes
#373 – Test Script’s –filter flags now needs less escaping for its regexes
#377 – Show/Hide animations on empties is now being exported again
#384 – Particle follow non-colocated animations
Sound Emitter has been removed from the Empty Special types menu. One day it will be back in!
As you may have seen on our social media, we have new joystick features coming in the next major update. There are two major features here:
- Custom response curves
- Special (semantic) ranges for certain axis types
The first may be of general interest, while the second is almost exclusively useful to hardware makers and custom cockpit builders.
Custom response curves
For as long as I can remember, X-Plane has had a “control response” setting, which makes your controls respond non-linearly. More of your joystick’s range is mapped to the center of the your pitch/roll/yaw axis’s center, and less of the range is devoted to the extremes. This gives you fine-grained controls in the region where the controls are typically used, at the expense of more coarse controls at the limits.
In X-Plane 11, these settings live in the Control Sensitivity window (launched from the bottom of the Settings > Joystick screen), and they will continue to be there in the 11.30 update.
The problem with the existing control response setting, though, is that it applies to all joystick hardware you might plug in. You get just three values—pitch, roll, and yaw—that apply to every axis of that type, no matter the device. Moreover, if you have a different type of axis whose input you want to curve (e.g., throttle, tiller, etc.), you’re simply out of luck.
So, in 11.30, we’re adding support for setting custom curves on any axis type. When applied to a pitch, roll, or yaw axis, this will override the global control response curve; applied to other axis types, it will support new functionality not previously available.
These curves are incredibly powerful. They can do things like:
- Manually configure a null zone
- Create a smooth curve (a straightforward replacement for the old “control response” setting)
- Create really complex curves, with loads of control points, and your choice of interpolation method (linear, or one of two methods of smoothing)
But the fun doesn’t stop there!
New semantic ranges
There’s a new component to the curve editor that bears calling out explicitly.
When you’re editing a response curve for certain axis types (throttle, prop, or mixture), you’ll have the option of also configuring the ranges for certain axis-specific behaviors:
- Beta & reverse ranges for throttles
- Feather range for prop controls
- Cutoff range for mixture controls
X-Plane has always set these ranges automatically based on the aircraft model you were flying. For the first time, though, you can configure it yourself to match your hardware.
These are aimed primarily at hardware builders who have physical detents on their controls—you can make X-Plane’s idle point exactly match your throttle’s physical detent, for instance. This makes it possible to build really nice throttle-prop-mixture quadrants that play nicely with X-Plane.
If you’re a commercial hardware maker, and you’d like X-Plane to correctly configure your hardware by default for your users, you can set up both the axis & button assignments and the semantic axis ranges from the settings UI, then click the “Create Default Configuration File” button. Send the file it creates to me (my email is my first name at X-Plane.com) and I’ll get it shipping in the next release.
A quick note on 11.30: we have an internal build of 11.30 that seems to be working and we’ll be rolling out private betas next week, as soon as we get menu items for the particle system editor. Once we get some feedback on the private beta we’ll know if we’re close to public beta or not.
Two new feature for aircraft authors coming in 11.30:
4K Panels. I do not promise that this is going to have good performance, so try it and go back to 2K if things get slow, but in X-Plane 11.30 you can use a 4K texture for your panel. This is mostly useful for aircraft that are generating a lot of plugin-based dynamic texture effects.
Cockpit Objects. Before X-Plane 11.30 the cockpit object is a magical object found by file name (aircraft name_cockpit.obj). In X-Plane 11.30 the cockpit object is just one among many “misc” objects in Plane-Maker, with the “cockpit object” check-box set.
X-Plane and Plane-Maker will automatically upgrade/interpret old planes, so there’s no “todo” here or compatibility loss.
This feature means that, starting with 11.30, you can now share a single cockpit object amongst multiple .acf files in the same folder. This means you can create multiple editions of your aircraft (e.g. for engine types) and not have to duplicate your cockpit .obj files.
Update: just to clarify something that a number of authors asked about, you cannot have multiple cockpit objects under the new system. You are still required to put all of your manipulators and camera-stopping surfaces in a single cockpit object. Now you have complete control over which object that is. (Panel texture may be used in any aircraft-attached object; this is true for all of X-Plane 11 and some X-Plane 10 versions.)
Those who know Austin know that he is really tall. It’s a running joke that at company events, he ends up half a mile ahead of the group because each of his steps is quite a bit longer than the rest of ours. If he and I want to see eye-to-eye on something, I literally need a step stool.
But for those who haven’t run into him at a convention or event, this picture should put things into perspective.
