Thanks to everyone who came out to see us at FlightSimExpo – it was great to get to meet so many people in person. Just a few quick notes:
I don’t have an ETA yet on video of our talk that was shot by the event coordinators (the cameras you might have seen dead-center). We’ll post slides soon. There is an audience-shot video that some people have seen – the audio is understandable.
Regarding the new particle effects system, the biggest single question has been: will it work on scenery objects? The answer is: yes, eventually. Right now you can attach a particle system to an object attached to an airplane or created with the XPLMInstance API. Scenery-attached particles are on our road map, and if they don’t make the initial release in 11.30, we’ll get them as soon after as we can. (The same thing actually goes for FMOD sound – we intend to have FMOD sound on scenery objects, but we don’t have this done yet.)
Regarding “research mode”: the intent here is to have a non-versioned beta flight model available for longer periods of time in an otherwise final sim so that people doing experiments on the flight model or building new aircraft designs have access to the latest in Austin’s physics without having to build a new permanent version for the physics on every single release. Up to now, it has been really hard for Austin to get useful feedback on the FM because it is either hidden (non-beta) or locked down, except for tiny 8-week windows, during which the rest of the sim is so unstable that aircraft developers don’t want to touch it.
So you can think of research mode as getting access to in-progress 11.40 physics within 11.30. If you’re the kind of person who holds a flair over the air-stream of your aircraft, this is a useful way to compare the real world to Austin’s latest work.
Research mode is not available in Plane-Maker as a setting because there’s no versioning control, so an add-on that depends on it is asking for trouble. When we reach a point where the research-mode physics seem well-behaved, we’ll make a real “version” and make them default for all non-old aircraft (as defined by when saved in Plane-Maker).
A lot of the new systems announced (new engine types, new auto-pilots), etc. are strictly opt-in. e.g. the old behavior is unaffected if you pick an old autopilot or engine model. This is a case that’s fairly easy for us to do without compatibility problems.
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Ben Supnik |
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 |
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 |
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 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!
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Tom Kyler |
X-Plane 11.20r2 is up – we’re just killing off the last show-stopping bugs – full notes here. Steam build should be available Real Soon Now™ – it’s already uploaded and just waiting to make we didn’t blow something up.
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Ben Supnik |
Before Ben left on his family trip (and he was very adamant that it was not a “vacation” because the kids were going along) we got an X-Plane 11.20r1 build ready for possible release this week. Tyler and I must feel lucky because we’ve gone ahead and pulled the trigger to make this build public now.
This means that we need you to test your add ons now–seriously we mean it–speak now or forever hold your peace. All our features and changes that are going in 11.20 are in*, and the only changes we will put in from here on out are any regression bugs you bring to our attention. Read More
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Tom Kyler |
X-Plane 11.20b5 came out this week – notes here. Beta 5 fixed the rest of our open rendering engine/material bugs, including artifacts on orthophotos. If you are a scenery or aircraft developer, please check your aircraft or scenery against 11.20 beta 5 and make sure there are no rendering changes compared to 11.10. If it looks different than 11.10 in a bad way, we don’t know about it and it’s not going to be fixed if you don’t say something.
Over the last year we’ve been working quite a bit internally to automate testing. We still do a lot of hand-testing (that is, Jennifer flies the sim and then tells us we’re bozos) but we also have extensive infrastructure to script the sim. So we’re looking to automate the process of checking third party scenery for rendering artifacts, so we can catch more rendering bugs more often.
I’ll post once 11.20 is final about how to get your custom scenery into our test. My hope is that with automation, we can catch bugs faster and you (the third party author) can have your add-on tested without having to do the work yourself.
I’m OOTO next week but if things go well, we’ll have a release candidate when I get back.
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Ben Supnik |
After much bug fixing, X-Plane 11.20 beta 4 is out – here are the fixes. This beta fixes Linux performance, a few material rendering bugs for custom aircraft, and a bunch of X-Plane SDK bugs for VR.
We have a new WED 1.7.0 release candidate – hopefully the third time’s a charm!
And…we have docs on the vrconfig.txt file format. The VR config file is used to add VR-specific data to an aircraft, including:
- Hot spots for seats (E.g. where does the pilot sit).
- Extra data for manipulators.
- Parameters for the yoke in VR.
Please do not ship your add-ons based on 11.20 VR tech – wait for us to go final. All file formats are subject to change during beta!
We are reaching the end of beta, for both WED and X-Plane. We’ll see, based on incoming bugs, whether we need a beta 5 before RC; hopefully WED 1.7.0r3 is a keeper.
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Ben Supnik |
