Some personal news: this fall a lot is going to change; I’ll be heading back out west (again) and back to school (for a third time) – this time to Stanford. Their joint degree program is really good if you’re looking to get into IP law. At $50k per year, it’s on the pricy side, but fortunately (for me) LR is paying.
Why would Laminar Research pay for this? Well, if you haven’t read the news…
PRESS RELEASE
Laminar Research announces concession to Microsoft Flight Simulator, will withdraw from flight simulation market.
New business model in Intellectual property announced.
April 1, 2013
Columbia, SC:
THE CANCELLATION OF X-PLANE:
Austin Meyer, author of X-Plane, announced today that he will be withdrawing X-Plane, and ceding the flight simulation market to Microsoft Flight Simulator. “Sales of X-Plane are growing exponentially, but I wanted sales to grow exponentially times TWO!” claimed Meyer, citing poor sales as one of the reasons that he will be removing X-Plane from the market.
As well as canceling X-Plane for Macintosh, Windows, and Linux, Laminar Research will be removing X-Plane for iOS and Android from the App Stores. When asked why, Laminar Research President Austin Meyer was very clear. “Let’s be clear”, Meyer said “The AppStore generates significant revenue for Laminar Research, but only after I have UPLOADED the App for people to buy, and this is a frustrating process that can take in excess of 30 minutes… sometimes even 45 minutes if I am downloading episodes of “Breaking Bad” at the same time! I just cannot justify that type of grueling WORK!” Meyer noted that he believes that the Apple AppStore is an old idea with “limited potential” that only benefits a few people at the top of huge mega-corporations, since small, hard-working, creative developers could never get an Application ON the AppStore, thus leaving all of the profits to a few huge, faceless corporations.
THE NEW BUSINESS MODEL FOR LAMINAR RESEARCH:
Laminar Research is announcing exciting new prospects for the future, though! Beginning this April, when Laminar Research removes the X-Plane product from all servers and sales outlets, it will move into the “Intellectual Property Licensing” business. Laminar Research has filed or acquired a number of patents on “blade element theory”, and “using a computer to calculate forces on an airplane”, and will be suing all companies in the flight simulation market for a percentage of THEIR income, rather than actually making anything of it’s own. “Remember” quotes Meyer “Running a business that actually CREATES something is so much WORK! You have to create a product that someone would actually VOLUNTARILY WANT to BUY, and then find a way to PRODUCE, DISTRIBUTE, and SUPPORT it! This is far too much work. It is much easier to SAY that I invented the IDEA of SOMEONE ELSE building a flight simulator, and then SUING anyone that actually DOES! That way, THEY do all the work, and I get the money for it! This is really a much more enlightened business model, and will be very profitable for Laminar Research, since I can now sue MANY companies in the flight simulation space without having to go through the tiresome process of actually MAKING anything!”
When asked for the specifics of how Laminar Research could actually do this, Meyer elaborated his future plans: “The patent system is EXCELLENT!” claims Meyer “All I do is send a piece of paper to the United States Patent Office claiming that I am the first person to think of someone ELSE writing a flight simulator! Since nobody in the United States Patent Office knows what a flight simulator is (Why WOULD they!??! They don’t build flight simulators!!!!!!!!), they OBVIOUSLY approve my patents, and that allows me to sue anyone that has actually CREATED a flight simulator!” When asked how Meyer could do this, when flight simulators have been in use since 1909, Meyer claims: “I never HEARD of anyone writing a flight simulator before I did, so I just logically assume that I am the first person to think of the idea! So I must OWN the work anyone ELSE does in flight simulation. That’s how the patent system works!”
None of the other companies in the flight simulation industry could be reached for comment, but are advised to save up money for their lawyers: Patent-infringement cases run about $2,000,000 in defense fees.
I am very excited for the company’s new direction; I’ve been coming up with obvious programming ideas for years now; finally we’ll get to monetize them without having to debug code first.
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Ben Supnik |
X-Plane 10.20 went final last night – we are now officially 64-bit (as well as 32-bit).
We have a number of small bug fixes that we will put into 10.2x bug fix releases – the name of the game here is small, unintrusive fixes that make a big difference to the sim without risking more problems. We’ll get to bigger fixes in 10.30.
Small things may include:
- A new apt.dat/nav.dat drop from Robin.
- Fixing the King-Air wipers – it looks like our exporter script went nuts.
- Fixing the command key on Mac – the control key works as expected.
Fog is invasive – that’ll have to wait until 10.30.
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Ben Supnik |
X-Plane 10.20 rc2 is out – just a few crash fixes and the final code to support Lua-based add-ons.
If you make a third party add-on, please: go try your add-on with 10.20 rc2 now!
If we don’t find any new bug reports, 10.20 will go final next weekend.
Edit: the Kingair is, weirdly, missing a small panel of its fuselage in the right rear corner. Tom has already edited the file and I’ll post it shortly. I’m going to let the RC sit for a day or two to see if anything else washes up.
Here’s a rough road-map for getting X-Plane 10.20 and friends out the door:
- X-Plane 10.20: if all goes well, release candidate 2 will be posted overnight and you’ll get a crack at it this weekend. RC2 fixes a few crash bugs and sets up Lua memory allocation the way we want it to be for 64-bits going forward. (I also plan to post the rest of development materials for Lua plugins tonight.)
- X-Plane 10.21: we are planning a 10.21 bug fix release. It will include bug fixes that we have already coded but didn’t want to put into 10.20 late in the game. It will also include new apt and nav data from Robin once he gets the next release done, and possibly more autogen. (If 10.21 goes out before the next autogen drop, we’ll do a 10.22 for autogen.) We’re not looking to do anything major or disruptive in 10.21.
- WorldEditor 1.2: WorldEditor finally has some (desperately needed) time on the road map; this should allow me to close out the major bugs in 1.2 and get it posted. This is a high priority for us; we’ve done most of the work for the new airport system, but it doesn’t do anyone any good until WED 1.2 goes final. (Yes, you are reading correctly, WED 1.2 is earlier in the road map than an X-Plane release.)
- X-Plane 10.30: we don’t know when this will be or what will be in it with any kind of certainty, but there are some areas we’re looking at, like fog and visibility (where we have a mix of bugs and feature requests that might go well together). I think that even for 10.30 we’ll be in “fix what we already have” mode, not “add more stuff” mode; we want to make X-Plane 10 as stable, solid and fast as possible.
One of the goals of this roadmap is to make sure that 10.20 itself is a stable 64-bit release that authors can target and users can run. One reason why late bug fixes are going into 10.21 is to avoid delay in getting a solid, ‘final’ 64-bit release to everyone. (We also expect that at least one major bug that was not reported during the long 10.20 beta will pop up as soon as we hit “final”, hence the expectation of 10.21.)
Please do not turn the comments section into a guessing game about 10.30; we don’t have a precise list of what goes into it, and if we did I wouldn’t post it anyway, because it’s likely to change over time as we get new data.
I have some specific comments on airports and ATC, but that’ll be another post.
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Ben Supnik |
A quick follow-up on yesterday’s post regarding LuaJIT memory failures on Windows:
We will be making a change to how plugins interact with LuaJIT and X-Plane for 10.20 rc2. If you have an add-on that uses a LuaJIT-based plugin (SASL, Gizmo, or FlyLua) you must get new 64-bit binaries for your add-on! If you do not get new binaries, it will only be a matter of time before your 64-bit add-on stops working.
This change is unavoidable – it either has to happen now (in RC, when only beta testers have X-Plane 10.20) or later (when we’ve shipped the product and everyone is happily flying). I think now is better — I would rather not have to do this at all, but the memory problems are not going away.
I am already in direct contact with the plugin developers who use LuaJIT to work with them on the needed changes.
With this in mind, I am hoping to cut RC2 later this week.
A quick status update on X-Plane 10.20:
- The Portuguese language bug in the installer is fixed – thanks to all of the users who helped test the new installer.
- X-Plane 10.20 rc1 has two bugs that we have fixes for: a crash when opening radio controlled planes and a crash on 64-bit Mac under heavy load with Lua-based plugins. We have fixes for both of those; the second has been privately tested for about a week.
- We have one more new bug report that I am investigating: memory failures with Lua-based plugins and Windows. This last bug (if it needs fixing) is serious and will kill our release schedule. If we don’t need to fix it, we’ll get an RC2 out shortly. I hope to have a verdict on the bug by tomorrow.
There’s a bug in the latest installer/updater: if your machine’s default language is Portugese, it will crash. I will post new installers that fix this as soon as I get back home on Monday (maybe Tuesday if the snow storm is bad enough).
For now, the sim will run, even though the updater will not.
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Ben Supnik |
10.20 release candidate is out now; see the release notes for a list of changes. There are two sets of bugs that we didn’t get to:
- Some users on Windows are having sound problems; I will write more about this shortly in another post; we’ll fix this as soon as we can.
- I have a set of bug reports relating to the airplane exterior lighting; I hope to get those fixed in a 10.21 build (as well as whatever one bug gets reported the day after 10.20 goes final).
Plugin authors: if your plugin has a problem with 10.20, you should have reported it weeks ago. The 2.1.2 SDK is done, 10.20 is a release candidate, so the 64-bit SDK is ready for you and has been for a while now.
We will continue to slip additional airplane improvements and autogen into updates as we get them from our art team.
ppjoy users on Windows have been experiencing a crash on startup; this was a bug in X-Plane 10.10/10.11, induced by particular virtual HID devices that only ppjoy could make. I found the problem and it will be fixed in 10.20.
In the meantime, if you need to use ppjoy and want to work around the problem, set your hat switches to discrete directions, not analog. (X-Plane can’t use an analog hatswitch anyway; most people have this because it is a ppjoy default.)
As a side rant to ppjoy users: I was a bit horrified with the process of installing ppjoy. ppjoy is an unsigned driver so I had to turn off driver signing in Windows. ppjoy is also, as far as I can tell, not hosted anywhere official. So I had to install an unsigned driver off of a file locker onto my Windows machine with the safeties off.
To be clear, I do not think that this is the author’s fault. He is making freeware, and the only thing that would remedy these problems is money. I do not and cannot expect him to give up not only his time (to code) but also pay to solve the distribution problems of official hosting and buying a signing certificate.
Still, the process of taking off all of the safeties to put random third party binary software on my Windows box was unnerving and not something I would ever do as an end-user.
As far as I know, the ppjoy crash and the PS3 controller crash are the only two known regression bugs* with joystick hardware, and they’ll both be fixed in 10.20. (Linux users, needing to edit udev rules to use hardware is not something that we consider to be a bug – see this post.)
When will 10.20 go final? Real soon now. Plugin authors, if you aren’t already running on 10.20 betas, you should have been doing that weeks ago.
* Regression bug means: it used to work in 10.05 and stopped working in 10.10 when we rewrote the joystick code.
It’s been a slow week – I’m sick, Alex was sick, Chris is sick, Chris’s wife is sick, my wife is sick, Chris’s daughter is sick, my son is sick…basically all of New England has bubonic plague. Skype meetings sound like a 19th century sanitarium for TB patients. But we are making progress on 10.20 betas. What’s still left?
- There are a handful of new 10.20 bugs that I still hope to resolve before we go final: sound problems, Intel GPU compatibility, etc.
- The installer needs to be made 64-bit aware.
- There are a handful of authoring bugs that were present in 10.11. I may push these off to a 10.21 bug fix patch, so that we can get 10.20 out the door sooner.
Users: please stop asking your favorite third party developers when they will release a 64-bit version of their add-ons. The devs are really stuck until we finalize 10.20. If they release an add-on before 10.20 goes final and then something comes up during beta, the dev is stuck fire-drilling a quick fix of the add-on.
Thanks to everyone who offered help WRT Intel GPUs. I have been in contact with the Intel driver team and we have a potential work-around for the HD4000 GPUs crashing. We do not yet have a fix or work-around for Gen-4 (GS45 chipset) GPUs crashing.
We also do not have a work-around for black sky with Intel HD GPUs and HDR mode, but honestly if you have an Intel GPU, I recommend keeping HDR off for frame-rate reasons. (I only have the HD3000 though – it’s possible that the GPUs on the new Ivy Bridge chipsets are faster. We’ll know once the shader-compiler issue is fixed.)
