Please tell me what confuses you about XPlane2Blender on this bug, or here!
We are going to be releasing the XPlane2Blender 3.4 beta soon, and with it, a refresh of the UI and documentation. Thanks to a great e-mail about a lack of documentation, it was put as an important part of 3.4 release roadmap. It goes to show… we can’t fix it if we don’t know what’s wrong, even if its not a code problem. And we do want to fix it, I swear!
In addition, I want to remind everyone a core part of the Laminar Research philosophy, identity, and business plan is a thriving modding and third-party plugin ecosystem. Aside from build scripts and the like, Laminar Research employees use the same scenery development tools that are available to all. This is was a deliberate choice that elevates everyone to the same level – except when there is a gap of knowledge. This is never intentional, and never benefits anyone in the long run, especially third-party-devs. If your work is suffering because we forgot that not everyone knows what every little checkbox means, tell us! We’ll put it in the bug queue like everything else, and try to get back to you, personally, quickly.
We just posted X-Plane 11.05 today – to try it, click “get betas” and run the updater. Steam users: we’ll try to get a Steam version up in a few days if no massive bugs are found.
This update is really a release of airports from the X-Plane Scenery Gateway – see the release notes here for a complete list of airports included.
This release also includes our first land-marks: custom buildings from the strip near Julian’s KLAS, which is also included.
A new release candidate is now available for X-Plane 11.02. There aren’t many bug fixes listed on the release notes page, but we think (hope!) we’ve fixed the new issues introduced in r1 and sneaked in a couple other improvements such as:
Crashing when reporting the field in sight at an untowered airport!
FPS hit when using external cameras near aircraft with scenery shadows on.
There’s a new 11.02 release candidate available – if you had the 11.02 beta, you’ll be notified to auto-update. In a break with previous policy, this RC is available now on Steam as a beta, despite us not having had time to kick the tires. (Normally we wait 24 hours to make sure the beta isn’t nuclear before posting it to Steam.)
Release notes here. This build has some work Sidney did to improve pauses and stutters when loading orthophotos. Also, by request from X-Plane users at FSConn: a new art control gives you writable access to the fog ratio (for fog hackers) – set “fog/fog_be_gone” to…well, whatever makes you happy. I can’t promise this art control will be around forever, but right now it works and is writable (unlike “fog/std_deviation_cutoff”, which is controlled by the sim to match real world observations).
I just got back from Flightsimcon (I live close enough to Hartford that it’s a day trip for me), but the show is still going on, and as you might have heard, we have X-Plane set up with built-in VR at our booth — you can try it! Austin, Philipp, Chris, Marty, Alex and Jim will all be there tomorrow, so stop by if you can.
If you’re local, stop by tomorrow – seeing the MD-82 cockpit in real stereo 3-d is something else. I’ve been working on VR support (on the rendering side) for the last few weeks and it’s really made me appreciate what our art team does.
I also wanted to say thanks to everyone there who has been supporting X-Plane, and also to the rest of the LR team who didn’t attend but who did the hard work that made today’s announcements possible.
There is video of our presentation – if there isn’t a better recording, Chris taped the thing, so we’ll get it posted probably some time this week.
Posted a few minutes ago: WorldEditor 1.6 release candidate 1. RC1 has a bunch of key bug fixes, is gateway-ready now, and can edit X-Plane 11 truck routes.
Ted and I have been working on a new version of XPlane2Blender for Blender 2.5. The new version mostly focuses on bug fixes and optimizations to get perfect WYSIWYG output from Blender to X-Plane with optimal OBJ code.
If you use the version 3.3.x of this exporter and would like to try test builds, please email me. We have a suite of test cases that we run the exporter through to confirm that it is operating properly, but it’s also useful to run it on real-world examples to see if there are cases we missed.
That’s a new dataref that (finally) lets plugin authors tilt the pilot’s head.
Previously this had to be done by manipulating the multi-monitor view offsets. That method worked (barely) but doesn’t work with multi-monitor in v11. The new dataref is multi-monitor friendly.
(The new dataref is also FMOD-sound-friendly — that is, when you roll your head over you’ll hear sounds above you out your left ear, as expected. Monitor offsets do not do that – only the pilot’s true virtual head position affects sound.)
