I have a bunch of stuff I need to post that I haven’t gotten to because this week has been the usual last minute chaos that always precedes a show.
In this case that show is FilghtSimExpo in Las Vegas, and if you click on that link you’ll see what a user told me — Saturday is completely sold out! While this is unfortunate for any X-Plane users who were on the fence about going and hadn’t registered, I think it’s great for flight simulation. For years now we’ve been wondering if the US can have a “big” flight sim trade show like the ones in the UK and Europe, and I think the answer is a resounding yes.
For those not going, there will be a team video taping the Laminar Research talk, and it sounds like they’re bringing some serious equipment, so I’m hopeful for the resulting video.
One note for third party developers: if you need to talk with me about a technical issue (e.g. you have some programming or add-on problem you want to get resolved) and you’re arriving at the show the day before, email me and maybe we can set up a time to talk early. For family reasons I have to leave very early Sunday morning so getting time to talk Saturday is going to be hard.
We are bringing almost the entire X-Plane development team, so with Philipp, Alex and Ted also present there will be plenty of people around to get add-on questions answered even when I’m not.
There have been a lot of questions about X-Plane’s road map and we’ll get into them in a lot more detail on the developer blog once the show is over.
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Ben Supnik |
X-Plane 11.21 is available in public beta. Like most “.1” releases, this is last minute bug fixes to 11.20.
Like every other website and app you use, X-Plane will now pop up a GDPR notification. We’ve been rolling notices into all of our apps and websites, and unlike RC1, in RC2 you can actually click the check-box to accept the notice and move on with life. (In RC1, the check box was outside the dialog box for some users, making the sim impossible to authorize.) Our actual private data use is almost entirely unchanged; we’re really not in the business of collecting or selling private data, and the data we do collect are for very specific purposes (e.g. your email address for the Q/A site so that you can receive notices that your question was answered. Once you accept GDPR, it is saved to prefs so you won’t get asked again.
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Ben Supnik |
This RC has two simple fixes that are non-breaking and totally awesome.
- #347: Optimization that brings export time down by a third to a half. The file size remains the side and nothing is needed to activate it. Using the “Optimize” checkbox was not optimized this time around.
- #350, #351: Two animation bugs that would cause strange offsets when using bones. You may or may not have experienced this. Again, there is nothing to do to activate this, it is part of every export.
If you run into problems, please file a bug. If you do not notice a decreased export time with large models, also please tell us. We’d love to benchmark this on more data.
X-Plane 11.20 is, of course, final! Like all good Klingon software, it was not so much released – rather it escaped captivity, leaving a trail of blood in the path of all whom opposed it.
I am aware of two plugin-related issues we are tracking:
- Some legacy plugins with widget UIs are missing buttons when the UI is at 150% or 200% scaling. We have a fix for this, but for now you can work around the problem by turning off UI scaling in the graphics settings tab.
- Some Mac plugins compiled against libstdc++ crash with the Steam version (but not the non-Steam version).
Philipp and I are still discussing what to do about this second thing, but if your plugin is in this category (so far we’ve seen it with HeadShake and X-Ivap), my suggestion is: compile and link against clang’s libc++ on OS X – it’s the native Mac C++ runtime and the one that’s going to work well in the long term.
We’ll release an 11.21 release candidate either late this week or early next week, once we collect the bug fixes that got away.
EDIT: HeadShake has been fixed by SimCoders!
Fourth Time’s a charm. RC4 is out and and fixes issues with the 747 autopilot. Hopefully this one is a keeper. Steam build coming Real Soon Now™.
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Ben Supnik |
It turns out that my teachers in college, a ton of engineering textbooks, and the internet in general all seem to understand what wings do. Also my airplane has wings, and those wings are designed to interact with the air as much as possible, so I can flight-test my airplane at any time (and I constantly do) to collect information about what the wings in said airplane do. And then I use the information from the several sources listed above to really dial in the flight dynamics in X-Plane. Without question, on my death-bed I will look back on my many flights flown while frantically scribbling down notes and flying the airplane at the same time fondly. This is a challenge that not enough people get to enjoy, and then turning that knowledge into a simulator that then turns into money for me… well, let’s just say I have very little to complain about. Read More
Third time’s charm? Maybe? RC3 fixes plugin issues we were seeing in RC2. Thanks to the plugin developers who tested our repaired XPLM DLLs yesterday. We’ll update Steam to RC3 soon if this build isn’t on fire.
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Ben Supnik |
X-Plane 11.20r2 has only one bug that we are trying to fix: a bug in the plugin SDK that can cause some plugins to crash when creating and destroying windows.
Tyler and I dug into this and found that the fix was a bit more intrusive than we wanted for this late in an RC.
So: if you are a plugin developer and you are working with the new SDK, either for VR compatibility, to use the new 3.x APIs, or just because you are updating the plugins, and you have time this weekend, please email me and I can send you our new fixed XPLM DLLs.
My hope is to get half a dozen plugin developers to bang on them over the weekend, so that when we cut 11.20r3, it really will be the release.
Edit: RC3 is live – thanks to everyone who helped!
X-Plane will be attending FlightSimExpo 2018 in Las Vegas, NV on June 8-10. Nearly the entire team will be there–they’re even letting me attend this event!
Members from the development team, such as Austin Meyer and Ben Supnik, will be presenting the latest news and behind-the scenes-information on our work on X-Plane on Saturday, June 9 at 10:15 am.
We’ll also have a booth open all weekend so you can stop by to say hello. Add-on developers should come by and pick our development team’s brains while we’re all in one place!
We received a last minute bug report that X-Plane 11.20r2 deletes scenery packs from scenery_pack.ini. This is true! It is also by design, not a bug, the same as X-Plane 10, and not particularly brilliant on my part.
scenery_packs.ini persists the order of your packs (putting newly discovered packs “in front” in alphabetical order upon discovery) and maintains enable-disable status. But it does not retain any other information. The file is totally rewritten on every run and the following otherwise useful stuff tends to get destroyed in the process.
- Comments and notes to yourself
- Whitespace and formatting
- Any scenery packs that can’t be found
Unfortunately this means that if you symlink to an external drive that is unmounted and run X-Plane, your scenery pack order gets lost. This definitely does suck.
In a future version, I can fix this. But we’re not going to mess with it now during RC because it’s totally not changed or broken compared to all past versions of X-Plane since we introduced the scenery_packs.ini file.
For now: you can lock the file as a hack-around to preserve your well-created order while your remote drive is unmounted – when you re-mount and restart, your order isn’t lost. But in this order, new packs aren’t persisted to the file, although they will be used.
If there’s things you want the scenery_packs.ini file to do, commenting on this post would be on-topic. One thing to consider: if we can’t drop missing packs, how do we know a pack was uninstalled? How does the file ever get cleaned?
