A few things are in the works:
- The X-Plane messaging system, which checks for updates, can hang up if DNS isn’t available. I should have fixed this a lot sooner, but this will be addressed in a very small 9.22 patch, in the process of being built now.
- 9.22 will also include Robin’s latest apt and nav data.
- For Linux users: 9.22 should work with threaded OpenGL on newer distros – thanks to Jan for sending me the code snippet to fix this!
And on the iphone front: the next X-Plane iphone free update should improve memory use during DSF load. This in turn will hopefully address the application suddenly quitting on “loaded” iphones (that is, iphones with a lot of email accounts or other background tasks that use memory). Memory was temporarily spiking as we optimized the DSF during load. I am not sure when this will make it to the iTunes store.
I am looking at OpenAL on Linux, but this will have to wait for 930 and a longer beta program. 922 will also not have a FADEC – 922 is a quick bug fix patch, not a feature release!
Posted in News
by
Ben Supnik |
User Rs2Play is now the first user to be banned from the X-Plane Wiki. WikiMedia has some automatic features, like banning all associated IP addresses with a banned user, so if you find yourself kicked from the Wiki in error, email me and I will fix it. (This would only happen if you were in the same shared IP pool as the user in question.) Thanks to the users who immediately removed the spam while I was out of the office.
(If we have more spam, I can promote a few users to admin status to ban spammers faster, but so far we have had only one case.)
Unfortunately the situation with the X-Plane SDK Wiki is not as good. The problem is that the SDK Wiki does not use MediaWiki – it uses phpwiki, so we do not have the rich set of user admin tools that MediaWiki comes with out of the box. There is currently a user who is (for some reason) attacking the user database by registering fake email addresses over and over. I do not know what the user hopes to accomplish, other than wasting my time.
The unfortunate side effect is to leave the SDK Wiki user database in a state of chaos. When I have time, I will be adding some new features to the user signup code and trying to clean out the user base.
Why are we not using MediaWiki for the SDK? Well, besides history (we used what we found at the time), the SDK Wiki’s code is customized to integrate the SDK development tools with the Wiki itself. This is how you get the latest documentation and user generated content on one page when you look up an XPLM
function.
There is no scenery system Wiki – something I have debated a bit. At this point though I am more concerned with getting the scenery tools out than with updating the documentation; once we have a more complete tool set, then I can ask the question “can users figure out how to use these tools.”
I am back from India — I seem to have done a particularly lousy job of telling anyone I was going off the grid this time, so if you were wondering where I was, well, now you know. I am sorting through about 700 emails now, so it’ll be a few days before I can respond to even just the “really time critical” stuff.
Posted in News
by
Ben Supnik |
Lines are a bit long here in Maryland, and we’re not even a swing state. Doesn’t matter! Go vote!
Starting Wednesday I will be out of the office – Lori and I are going on a 2+ week trip to India!
So first, the obvious: your comments to the blog won’t show up until I get back and can moderate them. Similarly, I will be even less on email than I am now. I am trying to dig out my tech support emails as much as possible before I go!
I will announce this before I go: I finally got an end-to-end render of a global scenery tile using CGAL 3.3.1. Andrew did the original work on this, modifying parts of the scenery generation code to handle his NZ scenery. I’ve been working on the rest of the algorithms and finished it today.
This doesn’t mean very much immediately, but it…
- Will fix the instability bugs in MeshTool.
- Will address missing antennas and obstacles in the global scenery.
- Provides a solid basis for building scenery out of just about any kind of data.
- Provides a bunch of nice tools for writing better algorithms, which means nicer looking scenery.
The next steps will probably be to create a new release of the tool set, including perhaps a bug-fixed Mesh Tool, etc.
The 2.05 installer is now released – this is a multi-language update that fixes a few bugs and makes the map interface more usable. If you have existing DVDs, you may want to use the new 2.05 DVD installer because it scans the scenery folder very quickly when you pick “add-remove scenery”.
(The old installer would check the signatures of all scenery files – this one simply checks whether they exist.)
No URLs have changed – installers will always have the same file names and live at the same URLs; you can pick “Get Info” or “Properties” to tell their version (or run with –version on Linux).
I have a ton of emails I need to get through, so if you emailed me, I do apologize; I will try to clean out the pending tech support issues, etc. in the next week.
Sometimes I have one of those weeks where all I do is look at crashes and weird behavior. This is turning into one of those weeks. So here’s some status on the various bugs floating around.
I should say: you’ll find a lot of developers blaming the technology providers for bugs (just look at how many OpenGL developers have blamed ATI for their apps crashing). Sometimes it’s the app, sometimes it’s the driver. More importantly:
- You don’t know who’s fault it is until you fully understand the bug.
- The fix for a bug might not be in the broken code. That is, one piece of code can work around a bug in another.
So…you can’t necessarily tell whose fault it was from new drivers coming out, us changing the sim, etc. But…when it’s my stupid code, I’ll admit it openly – no one should think that a bunch of other smart programmers are screwing up on my behalf. (This is also useful to other apps developers, who can know that my bug isn’t the same as their bug, since my bug was in my code.)
X-Plane: we’re happy with 921r2 finally…the final bug (crash on startup on the Mac) was due to an incompatibility between Apple’s OpenAL implementation and special memory allocator (which is really just a wrapper around NEDMalloc). I still don’t know exactly what the rules should be (you try reading the C++ spec!) but for now we turned the allocator off on Mac.
(This brings up another issue about bugs – you can’t tell whose bug it is by whose code crashes, since one piece of code can sabotage another.)
So the next X-Plane release will probably be 930, with new features. We may have a few more language patches if needed.
iPhone: the 9.01 iPhone patch is out, and it improves framerate a bit. We are still seeing crashes on startup for users who have just downloaded the app. Rebooting the phone will fix this, but please see
this post for more info! We need your help to collect more data.
Radeon 9800 on Windows: for the longest time we’ve had users reporting “framebuffer incomplete” errors when using catalyst 8.x drivers, an R300 chipset, and Windows with X-Plane 9.x. I have been trying to reproduce this problem “in the lab” off and on for months, but finally saw it this week. From what I can tell, we’re getting into some low-memory condition and the driver is freaking out in various ways. The command line options people sometimes use to get past this are probably rearranging memory, not saving it. I don’t know why the Catalyst 7.x drivers don’t have this problem. But…at least I am making more progress than I was before. Please see
this post for more info.
Installers: I am working on the 2.05 installer. I have seen a number of users report problems running a full install from DVDs, so I am just starting to investigate that. I will post more when I have something to test. Unfortunately the problems reported are not something we see here.
The 921 patch is now available. This fixes the bad-alloc problems relating to complex airports.
Please note: if you have a bad-alloc crash, it could be because you are out of memory. Make sure you have virtual memory turned on, your page file is large enough, your disk isn’t full, etc. If you have a bad alloc error, try the sim without third party add-ons to see if you really are running out of memory. If you are running Vista or XP, use /3GB or the BCD – see this for more info. Basically when you are running out of memory, you either can crash on “bad alloc” if we need memory for the CPU or “we ran out of video card memory” if we can’t map geometry into virtual memory.
If you get a crash with 921 on OS X, please let me know by email! I’ve seen one of these reports.
I also have cuts of the new installer/updater suite, version 2.05 – if you are going to update, tryo ne of these:
//dev.x-plane.com/update/installers9/stage/
The main features of the new installer are:
- Support for French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Russian.
- Clearer colors on the world map.
- Scanning the global scenery folder to add/remove scenery is much faster.
I recommedn the new installers for that last point alone.
There are a lot of patches coming out soon:
- 921rc1 – this is a patch on 920 to fix the bad-alloc crash.
- 921rc2 – same as 921rc1, but with some improvements to the translations.
Why two patches in a row? Basically we did 921 rc1 a while ago, but Austin’s net connection got hit by lightning. He’s on a, um, “borrowed” wifi signal right now, and it isn’t real strong, so the 921 patch is just taking forever to post. It’s equally likely that we skip straight to 921 rc2 because we can get the translation improvements done before we even get the patch up on the server.
Now regarding French: first I must say thank you to Daniel, who is helping us with the translation…we’ve been behind schedule, and his helping us with a big block of strings is a real life saver. I must also thank my wife, who was also up pretty late working on some strings. 921 rc2 will address all other languages; we’ll do a new patch once we have complete a French translation. If this is soon, that could be 922 (another patch). If it takes a while, it’ll be part of 930 (which will have new features). Time will tell!
There is also an update coming out for the iphone soon – improvements to the UI and some framerate improvements. I believe that the iTunes store should make downloading the update pretty seamless.
After all this patching, we’re on to 930. I’m not entirely sure what will be in 930 yet, but I have already made some rendering engine changes for 930 that improve framerate.
EDIT: 921r1 is now up as a beta – so you can get it if you set your installer to “get betas”. If you have the bad_alloc crash, try this beta.
Posted in News
by
Ben Supnik |
Traditionally, a pilot’s priorities are: aviate, navigate, communicate.
But that might not be true for X-Plane for the iPhone.
It’s real! And it pretty much is X-Plane – there really are OBJs and DSFs in there, as well as an ACF model, all tuned for the iPhone.
In the next few posts I’ll blog a little bit about the impact of doing an iPhone port on scenery development. The iPhone is an embedded device; if you go digging for system specs you’ll see that it’s a very different beast from the desktop. The porting process really helped me understand the problems of the rendering engine a lot better, and some of the techniques we developed for the iPhone are proving useful for desktop machines as well.
