10.25b2 is Dead On Arrival. This happens periodically to betas – they pass internal tests, I upload them, and then immediately find something bad wrong with them that is a show stopper.
So for now 10.25b1 is the current beta (again) – just re-run the updater if you accidentally got beta 2 in the 10 minutes that it was available. Beta 3 will be up as soon as I can get a new beta cut; due to the time it takes to sync our servers, that might be late tonight.
See the beta wiki for what was in beta 2 – beta 3 will be all that plus it should actually work.
X-Plane 10.25 beta 1 is now live on the servers. Release notes here, bug reporter here. Please do not submit beta bugs on this post. There are a few big features of this update that I want to mention in a little bit more detail than the release notes go into.
Community-Created Airports
This is the first release to include airports with 3-d buildings submitted by the community. We have received over 250 submissions so far; last I counted there were over 35,000 objects placed in those airports.
If you are working on an airport that you have not submitted, do not panic; we will continue to collect airports and release patches regularly to get them to all users. We are also working on web resources, documentation and training to help make the creation process more accessible.
(A few pictures of default airports at moderate settings, airports picked at random.)
In these pictures I have tried to align the far views with the airnav overview pictures so you can get a sense of how closely people can and can’t match the real world with the airport library elements.
Urban Terrain
For the longest time, our cities have looked like a big green blob. We have been working on this for a while; the problem is actually a three-part one.
The urban terrain we shipped wasn’t very good – in some cases it wasn’t even meant to be released.
The application of urban terrain to cities errs on the side of vegetation (and not concrete) in the DSFs, due to problems with the DSF zoning algorithm.
The autogen footprints don’t persist when rendering settings are turned down.
The urban terrain in 10.25 beta 1 addresses problem (1) for wet climates. I am hoping we’ll get a working dry-climate urban terrain set before the beta is over, but that is still in progress.
What about the other issues? We have a fix for (2) in our DSF generator, so recut cities will have better far-view balance than the first generations do. We have ideas on how to fix (3) for a future update.
In these pictures you can see a far view of New York City in 10.22 (shipping now), 10.25 (new wet urban terrain), and 10.25 with a recut DSF fixing zoning, based on the current DSF generation code we hope to use.
Wide view of NYC area as ships in 10.22.
Wide view of NYC area with new urban wet terrain from 10.25 beta 1.
Wide view of NYC with 10.25 urban wet terrain and recut DSF.
Hopefully you can see from these images that while the new urban terrain helps, it works best when the zoning bugs are fixed in the DSF as well.
Edit: to be clear, 10.25 does not ship any DSF recuts. We have not yet shipped recut tiles. The NY City pictured is a recut DSF I made for myself last night for code testing purposes; it illustrates improvements to the DSFs due to new data and bug fixes in the generation algorithms.
I just posted a beta of WED 1.2.1; hopefully it will only take one beta to get this quick “bug fix” patch done.
Some usability fixes:
Locked and hidden items don’t cause clicks to select their parents.
The interior of an airport boundary is not selectable – it never should have been.
The marquee tool will never select the “world” entry on the hierarchy.
The click hot spots of handles don’t shrink at low zoom – they were doing that before, which made clicking hard.
(Basically Chris tried to use WED and got really annoyed*, so we dug in and fixed some of the smaller annoyances. The ones we left (like how locking works) need a major rework and can’t go into a bug fix.)
1.2.1 also filters out the private and deprecated library items (once you have X-Plane 10.25, beta coming “real soon now”). This should make the library display a lot cleaner. Also, hidden airports won’t export or fail validation, which is what you would expect.
The only other changes are a bug fix for exporting polygons on a DSF edge, and a bunch of changes to help Robin collect global airports.
If you are using WED 1.2r4 to make airports, please try 1.2.1b1 this weekend, and file bugs here.
* Which was difficult to differentiate from his normal state.
Now that the final season of Breaking Bad is over, we can finally all get back to work on X-Plane!
I kid – while it is true that we maintained an internal betting board on the ending of the fifth season of breaking bad, we’ve actually all been heads down working on new code for the last few weeks. A few bits of status update:
It looks like we will cut a 10.25 with new art assets after all. Currently in the queue: Albert’s new terrain textures, a few library tweaks to get the sim ready for DSF recuts, revised urban terrain textures for cold wet climates, and texture optimization for the airport scenery library.
About those urban terrain textures: Alex has revised urban terrain textures for cold wet climates, and they’re a nice improvement over what we shipped. Our goal is to use the new revised urban textures for all climates, but we don’t have the variants yet. I’m going to put the cold-wet ones into 10.25; we’ll get the rest out when they are available. (Why delay a fix for New York just because we don’t yet have a fix for San Diego?)
I’m working with Robin to try to get some user-submitted lego-brick airports into the update.
Alex has a bunch of partly done autogen work, but based on my last discussion with him, it looks like it needs to go into a bigger AG update and can’t be distributed in pieces, because a lot of the autogen shares common textures and objects for performance.
10.25 won’t be a big code change – we’ll have a fix for Foreflight compatibility and a few other small bug fixes, but 10.30 will be the next major code-changing release. The goal of 10.25 is just to get art out.
Alpilotx is re-importing OSM data this weekend; I’m not sure what the time frame will be for DSF recuts, but my goal is to make sure that 10.25 can run recuts. This way we can push recuts before 10.30 if that’s how things get done.
…are greatly exaggerated. I was out of the office last week on vacation (for the first time in 2.5 years) and didn’t bother to post first. Austin and Chris were also out on vacation for at least a week each.
We are not dead, we are not out of business, and we are definitely not stopping development of X-Plane 10! Austin has been working on X-Plane since approximately 1637 (well, the 90s at least) and he is not going to stop now.
Stuff We’re Working On
I am still working with Alpilotx and others on DSF recuts. This work is moving forward, but my side at least is going slowly because I am also working on other features that are pre-release and have not been announced.
I also had some time to do some OpenGL modernization over the last two weeks before vacation. This code does not directly improve X-Plane, but it sets us up to improve performance: once we have more modern code we can get access to newer GPU features.
Upcoming Releases
At this point I am looking at two releases:
Some kind of short-beta release to roll out new terrain textures, some of the userr-submitted lego-brick airports, and possibly a few small bug fixes.
Then a long-beta release, where we could put a major feature or two, and also ship code that needs more serious testing (e.g. the OpenGL modernization).
Over the last few years that I have been working on X-Plane, the time between major patches has been steadily increasing. Back in X-Plane 7 or 8, we might have a major patch every three months; with X-Plane 10 that interval is more like six months. I think this longer time between major betas is good for X-Plane 10:
It lets us run longer 8-week betas without being in beta perpetually. This gives third party developers more time test.
Fewer larger patches means less work for third parties, since a major patch means retesting add-ons.
X-Plane 10 is a much bigger product than X-Plane 6 – it needs a longer development cycle.
Still On Fire?
The other factor making it seem quiet around here (besides slower major betas and the occasional time off is that we are finally moving out of fire-fighting bug-fix mode into doing structured development. When we were fixing bugs in X-Plane 10.0 as fast as possible, a bug fix was followed by a beta and announcements as quickly as possible.
Now that we have a stable 64-bit build out, we’re writing code that looks to build the future of X-Plane, rather than just fixing its past. So the quiet you hear now should hopefully turn into good features in the future.
X-Plane 10.22 release candidate two is now officially final – if you did not participate in the beta program, you will get the update via auto-update. This build provides X-Plane-managed memory allocation for Lua-based plugins on Windows, which should help the problem of Lua plugins running out of memory.
If you have add-ons based on SASL 1.0 64-bit, you will need to get an update from the airplane vendor that uses SASL 2.0! Please do not report SASL 1.0 64-bit crashing on Windows; this is a known problem with SASL 1.0 64-bit that was fixed with SASL 2.0 64-bit.
Laminar Research, creators of the X-Plane flight simulator franchise, is pleased to announce the availability of WorldEditor for X-Plane (WED) version 1.2.
WorldEditor is an airport scenery creation and editing tool for Laminar’s X-Plane. WED is intuitive and easy-to-use, as it features drag-and-drop scenery creation in a graphical environment that is designed for the typical X-Plane user.
WorldEditor takes a graphical CAD-like approach to creating airports. All airports are made up from a collection of different items or entities of a specific type. For example; runways, taxiways, windsocks, signs, and buildings. A runway has length, width, surface type, lighting and taxiway signs for example. WED is organized to create and edit each of these different items on an individual basis, so a user can add an item, then edit it’s characteristics or attributes at will.
A key feature of WorldEditor is the ability for a user to create an airport scenery and then send his or her creation to Laminar’s airport scenery database service. Once checked by Laminar for acceptability it is then included in the airport data when X-Plane users receive automatic X-Plane updates from Laminar.
Robin is ready to accept submissions of airport layouts including ATC traffic flows and default airport object placements using the new “Export for Global Database” function. We are also working on tutorials and additional documentation beyond the WED user manual.
X-Plane 10.22 release candidate one is now posted. If things go well, we should be final in less than a week.
Aircraft authors: if your airplane uses 64-bit SASL 1.x for Windows or Linux, update to SASL 2.0 as soon as you can! The old 64-bit SASL 1.x builds do not correctly support LuaJIT memory management, and will not run on X-Plane 10.22 and newer.
Albert has new terrain textures to release, but I think we will put this in a separate update (e.g. 10.25) to keep the 10.22 patch small. I think that the next autogen update is not ready yet.
A new 10.22 beta is out – it fixes a crash-on-startup in beta 1 that some users were seeing.
If you can’t auto-update (because the sim crashes before the update message appears) simply run your installer, pick update, and check “get new betas”.
X-Plane 10.22 Beta 1 is available now (release notes, bug reports). To get this beta you’ll need to check “Get New Betas” in the X-Plane 10 Installer’s update screen.
This is a very small bug fix patch; there will not be an art asset update, and we’re only including three fixes that we think are critical enough to release ASAP, as well as support for the latest Xavion iPad app.
I will comment on Lua memory allocation in a separate post.
Landing Gear Problems
Plane-Maker 10.21 has a bug: when you save your airplane, the weight distribution coefficients for landing gear are calculated incorrectly, causing the plane to tilt or lean on the runway. Astute users noticed that resaving the plane in Plane-Maker 10.20 fixed the problem.
This bug is fixed in Plane-Maker 10.22; if your plane has “the leans”, just re-save it in Plane-Maker 10.22 and the problem should resolve itself.
This bug was always a bug in Plane-Maker, not in X-Plane itself; airplanes whose data was not saved incorrectly would fly correctly in 10.21, which is why it took a while for the bug report to get to us.
Copy Protection
First: let’s agree to disagree re: copy protection. No one likes copy protection, and we can all agree that copy protection is always imperfect. (That is, it never avoids annoying users completely and it never stops piracy completely.) Users who buy products and the companies that sell them often disagree about where to draw the line between deterrence and annoyance.
So please: no rants about how awful DVDs are in the comments section. The goal of this part of the post is to explain what we fixed so that users who have seen a known bug can have better situational awareness.
X-Plane 10 “remembers” that you have inserted X-Plane DVD 1 recently, so that you do not need to have the DVD constantly in the drive to fly. Right now X-Plane needs to see DVD 1 (for each product you purchased) every seven days or so.
Every now and then we get a bug report from a user where the process of saving the DVD information fails; due to a bug in X-Plane 10.21 and earlier, when this process fails, the DVD would not enable scenery loading at all and the user interface would tell a global scenery user that a regional DVD was found. This was very confusing and also annoying (since it stops paying customers from using the product).
The bug in X-Plane is fixed in 10.22; furthermore if the preference-saving process fails we now put up a message for the user to contact tech support; previously it was a small item in Log.txt. If this preference-saving process fails, we want to know about it and fix it. (So far the only cases we’ve seen are Hackintoshes with hardware configuration issues and one case of a borked network preferences file.)
Water, Water Eveywhere
There is a separate bug in the copy protection system that I couldn’t fix for 10.22; we’ll revisit this issue for 10.30. The issue is this:
When X-Plane needs to see your DVD to get out of demo mode, it tells you after you have started your flight.
By that time you are on a runway that is all water.
When you insert the DVD, does not reload scenery; you have to go to another airport and then come back to your original airport to “force” a scenery reload.
This behavior is confusing – X-Plane says “now you can fly anywhere in the world” but where’s your scenery? We get a fair number of tech support calls about this. The problem is that if we reload scenery when the DVD is inserted and your airplane is on the runway (in water-world) then once scenery is reloaded your aircraft is underground and your aircraft is destroyed. So a fair number of things need to change (e.g. when we check for the DVD, what we do when we find it) to fix this use case. That’s too much change for 10.22 and will have to wait for 10.30.
