X-Plane 10.20 Beta 1 is now public, and it is available in both 32 and 64-bits. First, here are some things you should read:
X-Plane 10.20 Beta 1 is a somewhat raw beta. Our goal is to get 64-bit executables into the hands of as many plugin developers as possible as early as possible. There are known bugs that we haven’t held the beta for. We have not yet shipped updates to the airplanes or new art assets for autogen.
At this point, this is the info we are looking for:
- Regressions: if something works in 10.11 but does not work in 10.20, please let us know ASAP.
- 32-vs-64-bit differences: if sim functionality does not work in 64-bits but does work in 32-bits please let us know.
- Plugin authors: do report problems with your plugins.
Here are three kinds of problems we do not want to hear about:
- Long-standing bugs in the sim. First, if you have already reported a bug, you don’t need to report it again. Second, we aren’t really ready for new bugs. If you report one, that’s fine, but we’re just going to file it until a later beta.
- Problems with someone else’s plugins. We really need to hear from the plugin author. Please don’t report plugin bugs on behalf of your add-on maker.
- Plugins that aren’t 64-bit ready. We do not need any bug reports telling us that a plugin isn’t 64-bit ready. This is normal and to be expected!
Finally, for users who are very excited about 64-bit: please be patient with your add-on makers. They are only getting a complete set of 64-bit build materials today. Please give them at least 10 minutes before hounding them for 64-bit updates.
Update: beta 1 has a bug on Mac where X-Plane will ignore keyboard input if it is started in full screen. If you have a mouse, you can toggle full screen off and on to get keyboard back. We’ll fix this for beta 2 shortly.
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Ben Supnik |
Follow-ups to this post:
First, the Intel Graphics. There are two sets of chips in the bucket of 4th-gen Intel motherboard graphics:
- The older half of the bucket runs Open GL 2.0 only (with GLSL version 1.10). This chipset has never run X-Plane 10. Given how insanely old and underpowered machines with this chipset tend to be, given that the driver doesn’t even support GLSL 1.20, and given how many other problems I have had with Intel GPU drivers, I am going to declare this set of chips as “unsupported”, which I think is consistent with what we have told users with this chipset over time. I believe that no one has managed to make this chipset work on Windows, which is why no recent reports have been with this chipset.
- The newer half of this chipset runs OpenGL 2.1 and apparently runs X-Plane 10.05r1. I am trying to find hardware to test this bug, and I am trying to find a contact on the driver team, so we’ll see how that goes. This isn’t going to be quick to fix, because we don’t have the hardware in house. I strongly recommend against running X-Plane on these chips, but since it used to work, I’m going to try to fix whatever has gone wrong.
Second, joysticks: as far as I can tell, 100% of users with joystick instability are using game-port joysticks and not USB. So (this is getting to be a familiar refrain) I’m going to have to go find a gameport joystick to see if I can reproduce this problem, as all of my hardware is USB.
For gameport joysticks, we may be able to get some cases to work again, but some of what I have seen is way in the bucket of “unsupported.” Here’s a hint: if, to make your gameport work, you have to take OS components from an OS you do not run and copy them into the OS you do run so that you can trick a third party driver into installing, we’re not going to support that. If it works, great, but you’re on your own.
I am not going to hold up 10.20 beta for either of these issues; since they both involve finding hardware, there will probably be some delay in getting them fixed.
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Ben Supnik |
A few foolishbrave 3rd party developers are testing 64-bit X-Plane builds, as well as our internal art team. Their early testing will help us fix a few of the “duh” bugs quickly before we go public beta, which should be Real Soon Now.™
(Please do not ask for a 64-bit build; we selected the first-round testers and we are not looking for any more private testers. Everyone will get the build soon!)
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Ben Supnik |
Some of our users have the bad luck of having a laptop with Intel 4th generation graphics. This is the last generation of the “GMA” graphics cores – they generally come on motherboard (and often you’ll have one that you don’t use even if you have a PCIe graphics card) and they’re not very powerful. Motherboard graphics are designed to lower the cost of the entire computer for users who don’t need 3-d. They are not designed to make X-Plane look awesome.
These GPUs are causing two problems with X-Plane 10.10:
- They crash on startup when we ask the driver about our window’s format. Why it does that is not yet clear to me, but there may be a work-around.
- Our shaders won’t run on the GPU, which claims we ran out of texture units.
I consider this second problem very silly, as the card tells us how many texture units it has, the number is the same as every other GPU, and we don’t use more than those numbers. There may not be a work-around to the second problem; in particular if the shader compiler has a bug that causes it to misunderstand our shaders, we won’t be able to do anything.
So at this point X-Plane compatibility with the gen-4 Intel GPUs is an unknown. It looks like there are subtle core differences within the series that may also cause problems.
I can tell you this: if we ever get them running, it’s not going to be pretty or fast. I have the 6th generation GPUs (Intel HD graphics in an i5-2500) and the performance is not on the same planet as a discrete GPU.
Other Intel Cores
We do not support the 3rd generation and earlier GMA GPUs. The numbering scheme is really nutty, so that table can help.
We do support “Intel HD” graphics – they’re not great, but they do run. That includes any built-in mobo GPU from a “core i5” or “core i7” chip.
TL;DR
The short version is: if you have a gen-4 Intel GPU and see crashing, please stand by; we are investigating now. We will either fix the crash and provide a work-around in the upcoming 10.20 patch or declare the GPU unusable. I’ll post an update in a few days.
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Ben Supnik |
X-Plane 10.11 is now final, so you will receive an update notification even if you have not participated in the beta program.
Starting with 10.11, I am stripping the ‘r’ designation off the end of the build; the complete build number is still visible in the log file and properties, but what you see on your startup screen will just read 10.11.
I do not know if we will cut an X-Plane 10.12 before we get into a 10.20 public beta of 64-bit; I have seen a number of bug reports for 10.10/10.11 that need investigation, but I don’t know if the problems are due to bugs, running out of memory, rendering settings cranked too high, etc.
The main goal of 10.20 is to get us to 64 bit; we’ll also ship better anti-aliasing and autogen in that build. We aren’t sure what will come in 10.30, but at this point more performance tuning and stabilization is likely.
A while ago, I wrote up a summary of the issues with OSM and water. I still do not know a time-frame or plan for OSM recutting, but I can say it will be after getting 64-bit done, and once 64-bit is done, it will be high priority. If the water you care about is not in the OSM map itself, a recut won’t help until you or someone else in the OSM community updates the map.
(For Americans who are frustrated about water that was in X-Plane 9 but is not in X-Plane 10: X-Plane 9 used US Government data. There is work in the US mapping community to get the NHD data into OSM; I suggest participating in this effort. You can import and check a single water shed and thus bring a local region up to date, and the changes are ‘forever’ since they are in the OSM data set themselves.)
X-Plane 10.11 rc3 is ready for testing. If you see a lot of spurious warnings about LOD errors in your Log.txt file on Windows, get this build by running the updater and checking “get betas” – it should help.
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Ben Supnik |
10.11 Release Candidate 2 is out – this fixes the constant hail that was showing up in 10.11r1. If you have 10.11r1 it will prompt to auto-update.
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Ben Supnik |
X-Plane 10.11 release candidate 1 is now available online – run the installer, and update with the “get betas” button checked to get it. This is a small bug fix build to get new Japanese strings out; most of these bug fixes were coded during 10.10’s release candidate period but held to keep the sim stable for DVD pressings. It’s a small update.
EDIT: Please stand by, the upload did not work right – it should be available later tonight.
EDIT 2: Okay – now we are live.
We may do one more small bug fix release (e.g. a 10.12) before we get to 10.20, which will introduce 64-bit and have a longer beta period. 64-bit porting is going well and I am happy with the progress so far.
What About WED?
A number of WED users have reported a really nasty bug: while mousing around, WED would put up a fatal error dialog box and quit, with work lost. This bug sucks, and what was worse, no one could find a good procedure to reproduce it. The steps appeared to be “do some work, get a lot of changes ready, click, lose work.”
That is, until now; the other day Chris round the reproduction case. I now have a fix, so I will try to cut a WED 1.2 beta 2 in the next week.
X-Plane 10.10r3 came out this weekend – go use it! This is my expectation over the next week:
- Barring a truly horrific bug, we’ll probably declare 10.10r3 to be the final build of 10.10 and make it live to everyone.
- We will probably cut a 10.11 bug fix patch within the next week.
Why do I expect 10.11 so soon? Because there is always one bug that we don’t find out about until we make the rc live to everyone – inevitably one hour after the build goes live, someone reports something that no one saw in development, no one saw in the company, no one saw in beta, that we want to fix. Murphy’s law is irrefutable.
In the case of 10.10, the rate of bugs coming in on 10.10 has slowed down a lot, so if we continue to fix bugs in rc, we’ll be fixing bugs at a very low rate without moving on to the next thing. Thus it’s likely we’ll “kick it out the door”, get our one late bug, and cut a quick patch. We may also get additional localization into 10.11, depending on what we get from our translators.
It looks like the next sim patch after 10.1x (e.g. 10.10 plus any bug fixes) will focus on finishing and shipping 64-bit, hopefully with more autogen coming along for the ride.
As always, please report bugs to the bug reporter, not the blog, and not email; link is on the right.
(A quick side note/rant: my email server kind of exploded a week or two ago – lots of emails bounced, lots of emails were lost. This is one reason why I do not want bugs by email! I am always threatening “if you don’t file a bug, it might be lost.” Well, if you sent me a bug by email, for all I know it was lost. Please use the bug reporter!!!)
First, X-Plane 10.10r1 is out, at least for the next few hours; beta notes here. There are already two known issues:
- 10.10 is not particularly happy with current shipping ATI Windows drivers. We’re still figuring out what our best path is. We may have to disable functionality when we identify this driver set.
- It turns out I broke the P-180 3-d panel, so we’ll cut a new release candidate pretty soon.
If you create add-ons, please go test this release candidate! We can’t fix bugs that are not reported, so now would be a good time to find out if your add-on is adversely affected.
Screen-Cast: Engine Settings
While the changes to the starter are pretty limited, Chris and I did spend a lot of time experimenting with the starters on a number of planes. (The starters are tuned on the 747, C90, B58, P180, and C172.) So I decided to try a screen-cast showing how to edit the starter settings.
This is not exactly the highest production value screen-cast you’ll ever see; rather it’s something I whipped out in less than an hour while the release candidate was uploading.
If this kind of resource is useful, please let us know. During the developer conferences, Austin and I did some short hands-on demos; it isn’t hard for us to turn that kind of thing into a screen-cast.
The screen cast and the blog are not meant to be a replacement for documentation; we’re working on that too. But creating demonstration materials is significantly easier in screen-cast form than document form.
