Beta 7 is now available for LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours or so.
This is another small update. We have a few more tweaks to the flight model NaN crash reporting to help us track this down, a couple bug fixes, and improvements to AI airliner landings.
This is the first release of XPlane2Blender for Blender 2.80! As always, make backups, because there is no going back from overwriting your 2.79 .blend file with Blender 2.80.
The goal of this release was to having something people can play with right now without worrying about the design decisions coming down the line about Collections and LODs.
Root Objects is the only useable mode (despite Layers being left in the enum). Attempting to use Layers will cause the exporter to fail. The 1st LOD bucket is the contents of the first collection (alphabetically), the 2nd LOD bucket is the contents from 2nd collection, etc. The list of collections is taken from every single scene Again, the goal was “make it export” not “make it export perfectly”. I don’t recommend trying to use LODs when trying out Blender 2.80.
Even with just these limitations, I was able to successfully export several scenery objects and two of Laminar Research’s planes. As you can see, the converter is doing its job well!
(F-4 process from 2.49 to 2.79 then 2.80 going from left to right. Ignore the odd geometry under it. I simply forgot to take it out for the picture.)
Things to watch out for:
Right Click the collection > Visibility > Enable In Viewports to see it in the 3D View.Thank you so much for your patience while the converter got its last push during September! I can’t wait to see those Blender 2.80 screenshots!
This weekend we’ll be in Cosford for Flight Sim 2019. Well, not me personally, but Philipp, Marty and Thomson are there.
This summer when Marty asked if we could run the Vulkan version of X-Plane on our machines at the show I laughed a bit and then said “hell no” – at the time we were running scenery packs in the sim with default aircraft, but Vulkan was still a work in progress.
Vulkan is still a work in progress, but there has been a lot of progress, so when the marketing guys asked again I said “sure, yeah, what could go wrong” and Sidney cut them a build. We also told them not to throw out the shipping version, but if the app is well behaved people at the show may get to fly the Vulkan build for the first time.
At this point I’d judge us to be in the middle of the X-Plane 11.40 beta run. Beta 6 is reasonably stable and has fixed a bunch of problems that broke third party aircraft, and it’s now available to steam users. We’re still tracking down a bug where the physics code produces a NaN value. Since it just happens while flying and we haven’t gotten any useful reproduction steps, we’re pursing it by adding more checks and looking at automatic crash reports.
Please, always auto-report your crash. We don’t need you to fill out the description text field – just the auto-report and email is enough. We are looking for as many reports as possible, and we will probably stick with two betas a week until we chase this one down.
Third parties: if you haven’t yet, please test your add-on with the experimental flight model off against beta 6 – we don’t have any known bugs with the legacy flight model and third party aircraft at this point.
We are also killing off the last beta bugs in the new version of X-Plane mobile. There’s some really cool tech going into the lighting on mobile that I’ll write up soon in a blog post.
Beta 6 is now available for LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours.
This is another small update, with the main bug fix being for plugins trying to override engines. We also added a new feature: aircraft authors can now specify a preferred climb speed for when their aircraft are used as AI.
Update: B6 is also live on Steam.
Beta 5 is now available for LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours.
This is a small, quick update to fix the high volume of crashes we were seeing in beta 4. It also happens to include the latest cut of Gateway airports, which adds over 1400 new 3d airports.
Update: 11.40b5 is also now live on Steam.
Beta 4 is now available for LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours.
This update has a few more flight model fixes based on user feedback, a GPS error fix, and a fix for scenery decals.
UPDATE: We received a high volume of crash reports over the weekend with this beta. Because of this, we did not release it on Steam. We hope to have another beta out ASAP to help address the crash frequency.
After some unfortunate delays, the 2.49 converter is released! The instructions for installation, configuration, and use are quite long, so I won’t copy them here as usually do. To download the files, scroll down to the bottom of the page to “Assets”.
The GitHub page has an updated copy of our the 2.49 scripts. Download and install them.
The converter will only get better from real world examples, so please send me your feedback and screenshots so I can fully understand the world of 2.49.
And don’t worry, it was designed to work without Blender 2.49 if needed.
Download here! I can’t wait to see life breathed into these old projects!
Beta 3 is now available for LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours.
This update has fixes for a handful of user reported issues, as well as weather and time saved in .sit & .rep files.
Beta 2 of X-Plane 11.40 is now available for LR customers, and we expect Steam to be available within 24 hours.
This update has a few fixes to the experimental flight model and ground trucks. It also contains updates to code signing that start our preparations for the release of macOS Catalina.
We have a lot of exciting news for XPlane2Blender users on three fronts: the Blender 2.49 Converter, Blender 2.8 support, and v3.5.1-beta.2!
Firstly I want to say a huge thank you to all the community for all your patience, advice, and support during this time of heavy development and slow releases. One of the biggest changes, I think, to XPlane2Blender in the last few months has actually been all of you! I’ve asked for advice and gotten constructive comments in droves, I’ve asked for projects and I’ve gotten example files to work with! I even asked for help with contributions to the project and gotten several pull requests to merge! Your passion for Blender and X-Plane inspires my passion for making the tools you want and need!
Now for the details!
The XPlane2Blender 2.49 converter has been in development for nearly a year, and the alpha is almost here. Some doubted if it was even possible to save these old projects, but the results speak for themselves. Observe these screenshots of Laminar Research’s KingAir C90B, F-4, and Boeing 737 that have been converted and exported with XPlane2Blender for 2.79!
These are not proofs of concept, they actually work very well! Animations, manipulators, panel textures, meshes, lights, OBJ directives like shading, no shadow, DISABLE_DRAW, ATTR_light_level, and more, autodetecting textures, and preserving workflow features like picking the same OBJ file names and BULK export vs Regular export are all in the alpha. Basic scenery objects also convert, but some directives aren’t included yet.
We are not feature complete, and it will never be perfect: pre-conversion and post-conversion fixes will likely be necessary. However, spending only a day or two for the conversion is far better than redoing years of work!
The alpha is about two weeks away from release. In that time I HIGHLY recommend finding your old projects and doing the following
The cleaner the input file, the cleaner the conversion, the better the 2.79 file. That is why I’m releasing this guide before releasing the alpha – so that some of this work can be done beforehand and day 1 questions will be about the converter and not 2.49 problems.
One last note: Releasing our internal version of XPlane2Blender for 2.49 does not indicate support for it. It is merely there to help prepare your project for use with the converter. Remember, we’re trying to run away from 2.49 as fast as possible.
A person recently e-mailed me: “Will Blender 2.8 have support before the New Year?” My answer: Yes! Yes it will! Don’t lose hope!
During the alpha cycle for the converter I will be finishing the alpha for Blender 2.8 as fast as possible. We’re very close – the UI is working and I’m about half way through figuring out which API calls need to be replaced and how.
Before September is over you will start seeing more commits on the 399-blender-28-support branch. To keep up the hope, check out this screenshot of the BD-5J Microjet in XPlane2Blender in 2.8!
When I put out a desperate plea for some help developing the project I was gladly surprised by Kim Brandwijk, who has made several high quality pull requests that are small enough in scope to be added to v3.5.1.beta.2. I regret that I did not have time to merge them in a timely matter, but now with both alphas releasing soon all users can look forward to some excellent optimizations and speed increases soon. Hopefully the pull requests and community development can pickup some energy again.
I hope you all are as excited about this as I am! It has been a long summer of lots of coding, but I think people will be very happy with all the new features! Stay tuned for more news!