First, X-Plane 10.45 release candidate 2 is out. There was a bug in RC1 where the instructor’s operator station (IOS) couldn’t change aircraft over the network. I’m hoping we don’t have any other last-minute fire-drills; the IOS bug was reported the day I was going to call RC1 final.
I keep on telling myself during the day “I’ll blog some developer news later when I’m too tired to code” and (shockingly) at 10 pm, after the second round of coding after the kids have gone to bed, I find myself too tired and go “meh, I’ll blog tomorrow.”
So in an attempt to post something rather than keep delaying…
Spock And Friends
The Vulkan API was released today. Vulkan is the third new next generation 3-d graphics API (the other two are Metal for OS X and iOS and DirectX 12 for Windows). Vulkan should be available on Windows, Linux and Android devices. The specification is 651 pages long, so I have some light reading to do.
Faster Cockpit Lights
FlightFactor sent me a test case to look at a while ago – a possible bug in the Blender 2.49 exporter. While exploring the performance of the test case, I discovered that the code that runs ATTR_lit_level in a cockpit OBJ was a lot less performant. (If you don’t create 3-d cockpits, ATTR_lit_level lets you turn the brightness of a 3-d model’s night texture up and down based on a dataref; it is crucial for creating cockpit lighting animations, including annunciators.)
I ripped out a pretty huge pile of code in the process, and I am hoping we’ll see a performance boost. On the mobile product (this code is shared on mobile and desktop) the changes cut the number of driver calls we make down by about 25%. (That doesn’t mean a 25% speed-up – not all calls are equal, but it shows that there was a real win in there.) My measurements of the ATTR_lit_level test case run the OBJ itself 10x faster. (Again, that doesn’t mean 10x the framerate – it means this one very small part of X-Plane runs 10x faster). Once the work is done I’ll post some performance numbers. This code is targeted at X-Plane 10.50.
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Ben Supnik |
X-Plane 10.45 release candidate 1 is out (and will be available on Steam for users who have selected to get betas within a few days). If you aren’t running betas and would like to try it, run your X-Plane Installer, pick update and check “Get Betas”.
If you are the developer of an add-on aircraft and you haven’t tried 10.45 yet, please try it as soon as possible! We caught a few surprising systems-related bugs and fixed them for RC1, but overall beta bug reporting has been quite low; we can’t fix what we don’t know about, and some bugs might only be reproducible using your add-on.
X-Plane 10.45 is a “small” patch for us in that it doesn’t contain major changes to the code, but it contains a number of features you might like:
- An update to the global airports.
- The global airports won’t conflict with custom scenery – new exclusion technology prevents overlapping buildings.
- Nav data has been significantly updated – lots of bug fixes are in 10.45.
- The GPS data for the G430 now contains IAFs, so you can fly GPS approaches with proper transitions.
- Proper prop torque for aircraft that opt in.
I keep meaning to post about other stuff we’re working on; I’ll post an update soon. But for now, try 10.45 before it goes out the door!
MH1212, developer of the Prefab Airports for X-Plane, requested this feature, and it looks like we are going to be able to sneak it into X-Plane 10.45. (If we hit bugs, it might get pushed out to 10.50, but so far things look okay.) The feature is: the ability to exclude objects by airport ID without using exclusion zones.
Right now when a custom scenery pack replaces an airport (via apt.dat), the old apt.dat is completely ignored. But the DSF-based overlay objects, facades, etc. are included; the custom scenery pack has to use exclusion zones to kill them off.
With this extension, the DSF-based overlay objects in a scenery pack can act as if they are in the apt.dat file, disappearing when the apt.dat airport is replaced. This means that when you replace an airport (via apt.dat file) not only do the runways go away, but so do the overlay elements.
Here’s the win: we can export our global airports from the X-Plane Scenery Gateway this way, and custom scenery will remove the overlay elements automatically just by replacing the apt.dat, even if no exclusion zones are present.
Here are some details:
- The scheme works if the underlying airport is correctly marked as having its objects and facades “inside” the airport. So unlike exclusion zones, this scheme works if the underlying airport is modified, not the overlaying airport.
- This is a new scheme – no existing scenery already does this; scenery must be re-exported to gain access to this functionality.
- The functionality requires the latest version of X-Plane, but is harmless to old X-Planes – the DSFs will still load.
- Exclusion zones still work and are still recommended; if you are making custom scenery and you are on top of autogen or an old scenery pack that is not modified using this new scheme, only an exclusion zone will save you.
There are two big advantages of this scheme:
- We (Laminar Research) re-export our collection of thousands of airports on a regular basis, so we can tag the entire set of global airports using this new scheme and have them ready for by-airport-ID exclusion very quickly. So this scheme will start to help conflicts immediately.
- The scheme doesn’t require modifying the overlying scenery at all. There are freeware airports that are effectively orphaned – the author cannot be found and the license doesn’t allow the community to modify them*. Since these airports cannot be legally redistributed with exclusion zones, this technique will help.
Once X-Plane has this extension and the global airports are re-exported using it, global airports will fully disappear when any custom scenery pack replaces the airport by apt.dat, even if the custom scenery pack doesn’t have good exclusion zones.
This functionality will be available to third parties in WED 1.5 when it goes beta. In WED 1.5, if an overlay element is in the folder for an airport, it will be excluded when that airport is excluded. If an overlay element is ‘loose’ in the outer level hierarchy, it will not be excluded by airport (but will be affected by other pack’s exclusion zones).
Since gateway airports already have the objects “in” the airport folder, they are already authored to make this scheme work.
If you create your own DSFs using a low level tool like DSF2Text, the DSFLib source code, or something else crazy, I have posted the proposed schema here. That’s a technical link for people tinkering with the DSF format itself, but if you’re in that category, please do ping me to get early test materials. (The new code is also on GitHub.)
Two warnings to custom scenery authors: if you are creating a custom airport scenery pack, especially payware, please read these very carefully:
- This is not an invitation to stop using exclusion zones. There are plenty of scenery packs in the wild that do not have their objects tagged by airport, as well as autogen and all sorts of junk that can be under your payware. If your airport doesn’t have an exclusion zone and it conflicts with another pack, it is your fault. Go add exclusion zones, like I told you to do years ago.
- If a scenery pack from X-Plane Airport Gateway is removed by your pack (by airport ID) then our exclusion zones are removed too. This means that if trees on the runway have been removed by an X-Plane Airport Gateway airport, you will no longer get those exclusion zones for free. You must exclude those trees yourself! (If you put exclusion zones in from point 1 this is a non-issue.) Test your airport with global airports enabled and disabled to make sure your pack is good.
* As a side note I consider it a real problem that airports get uploaded and shared with the community under licenses that don’t allow for abandon-ware to be maintained. It’s clearly the right of the author to use any license you want, but as a community I hope we can encourage freeware authors to use a permissive open license.
X-Plane 10.45 Beta 1 is out – here are the release notes. This is a small update in terms of code change; the new feature is updated global airports and nav data, as well as a bunch of bug fixes; the beta period should be relatively short.
To get the new beta, run the X-Plane installer, update your copy of X-Plane and make sure “get new betas” is checked.
Prop Torque
Prop torque is fixed in X-Plane 10.45 beta 1; the calculation was incorrect (causing too much torque from props) in previous versions of X-Plane.
In order to get the new correct physics, you must resave your aircraft in Plane-Maker 10.45 beta 1.
We have heard of authors doing a number of things to lower the effects of prop torque in old versions of X-Plane, including having plugins apply a counter-torque and tweaking the physics parameters of the aircraft itself. Because we cannot know if an aircraft has such work-arounds applied, the prop torque fix is applied only to aircraft resaved in 10.45 beta 1 or newer. This way the fix takes affect when an aircraft author can remove work-arounds.
We’ve seen a few reports (and Philipp has experienced first hand) that X-Plane will crash on startup with the very latest Catalyst drivers that came out last week. The crash appears to only happen if you have a machine with a discrete AMD GPU (e.g. a 7970M) and a built-in GPU on your CPU for low-power use.
We are investigating this with AMD now; in the meantime please use the previous Catalyst driver if you are seeing crashes.
If you have a desktop machine, don’t have an AMD card, or are on Mac or Linux this does not affect you.
X-Plane 10 Mobile is among the first games to be released for NVidia’s Shield set top box.
Part of the work of doing this release was putting game controller support into X-Plane mobile – you’ll be able to use a game controller on your Android or iOS phone or tablet too.
And part of the work was making the entire user interface accessible from a game controller, e.g. only button presses, no touch screen input. That code is going back to X-Plane 10 Global for keyboard navigation in our next generation user interface.
The 747 is out for X-Plane 10 Mobile too (iOS and Android):
The 747 started on X-Plane 10 Global and has been moved over to X-Plane 10 Mobile. We’ve tried to keep the two versions synchronized, so we can move some of the improvements from mobile back to the desktop version of X-Plane.
If you have a computer that can handle more detailed base meshes, AlpilotX’s free HD and (for those with serious hardware, UHD) meshes are a really great looking enhancement to X-Plane. Alpilotx just released a new HD version of South America with more up-to-date land class and OSM data.
Here are comparison screenshots.
X-Plane 10.42 is a small bug fix release, and it’s out now as a free update for all X-Plane 10 customers, Global Edition, Digital Download and Steam. We also updated the installer on Monday.
With 10.42 out, we’re looking to get onto 10.45 ASAP, which will include the latest set of airports from the X-Plane Scenery Gateway.
I’d like to see us release new airports from the gateway every eight weeks, as long as there are enough new updates (and so far that has definitely been the case). I’m posting that here, publicly so that when Julian and Robin are ready to release new airports and data and I’m going “um, well, maybe next week, I’m really busy and the kids threw up on me this morning” they can point to this post and go “eight weeks!”
Since El Capitan came out, SASL has been crashing on quit when used in aircraft with customized sound. While I work on neither SASL nor El Capitan, both are (at least partly) open source, so I spent a few hours yesterday and located the bugs.
The good news is: this bug is fixed in SASL version 2.4. The bad news is: you’ll need to make sure the aircraft you are flying is using SASL 2.4 – and this applies to every aircraft that you have that uses SASL.
If you develop an aircraft using SASL, you can get the latest free version of SASL here. Note that this new version is apparently 64-bit only.
If you are using a freeware aircraft that is no longer supported, I think you could theoretically drop in the new SASL and see if it fixes things. If the aircraft is payware, the aircraft author might not be thrilled to have to support a “modified” aircraft and might prefer to do the upgrade in-house.
If you are a developer of SASL or you use OpenAL, you can read the gory technical details here.
X-Plane 10.41 release candidate 3 is live – check “get betas” to update to it using our installers, or enable betas on Steam to get it via Steam. Hopefully it will go final within a few days; r3 fixes the stupid version number typo and also fixes a bug in our crash detection analytics and the instructor station.
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Ben Supnik |
