Giving X-Plane More Info About Aircraft

One of the new features in Plane Maker 10.40 is a variety of classification information available for aircraft files, found in the Standard > Author window.

These fields are not currently in use in the X-Plane user interface, but we do plan to use them in the future—we want to do away with clunky folder-based browsing of aircraft. Instead, we want to allow users to browse & search through their aircraft in a much more flexible way: by aircraft name, manufacturer, category (general aviation, airliner, glider, etc.), and design studio.

So, for instance, you might want to see just the planes that were developed by Carenado, so you would select Carenado from the aircraft studio dropdown. Or, you might want to see just the general aviation planes built by Cessna, so you’d select General Aviation from the category dropdown and Cessna from the manufacturer dropdown. Or, you might want to search for all the aircraft with “747” in their name, and see your 747-100, 747-400, etc.

We think this will be a serious improvement over folders, which allow you to organize your aircraft in only a single, fixed way.

But, before that happens, we’d like to get as many aircraft authors on board as possible—we can’t know, for instance, which design studio created an aircraft unless you add this info to your ACF files.

So, grab 10.40, open Plane Maker, and add this classification information to the aircraft you develop!

(As an aside, you might be wondering… what’s the difference between the aircraft’s “author” and “studio”? The idea here is that the “studio” is the group producing the aircraft—you want your “studio” to stay consistent for all the aircraft your group produces, while the “author” field credits the actual people involved in the plane. Your studio might be “Amazing Sim Planes,” while your “author” field might be something like “Jane Doe, flight model; John Doe, 3-D modeling; Jack Jones, texturing.”)

X-Plane 10.40 Beta 1 Is Here

X-Plane 10.40 beta 1 is here now…you can download it by checking “get betas” and running an update.

This is an early beta and I strongly recommend running it on a copy of the sim, not your main setup.

Update: release notes are here!Release notes are coming soon; I’m posting this now because I want to find out if we have new OpenGL driver incompatibilities to fix. I’ll be in Hartford all weekend, but I’m hoping that if there is a broken graphics card, I can get a patch before I have to go.

So: please try it – on a copy.  If you hit a graphics card problem, please file a bug!!

Update 2: there’s a hard crash on startup that appears to be affecting perhaps all Linux users, as well as what I’m guessing is a tiny handful of Windows users. I’ll try to get this fixed for beta 2. If you have this crash, please do report it with log files so we can catch all cases. You’ll have to use the updater to update to beta 2 when you see the announcement because the crash is happening before the auto-update check.

Update 3: beta 2 is out and fixes both the Linux startup crash and the Windows startup crash, which turns out to be specific to AMD processors.  You’ll have to manually run the updater to get beta 2 if you were having crashes.  Thanks to the several users who ran a ton of custom builds for me last night to isolate this.

Rendering Setting Presets

X-Plane 10.36 has a button in the rendering settings screen labeled “set all rendering options for maximum speed”. Our recommendation for tuning your X-Plane settings has been to start low and build your way up, so that you don’t end up with one setting “hanging” the system at a low framerate (which stops you from seeing the affect of other changes).

This button was a good idea in principle, but in practice it had a few problems:

• The lowest settings are really just astonishingly ugly.
• Some of the settings that get turned off are nearly free, so pressing the button hurts graphics quality unnecessarily.
• Once you minimize your setting, what do you turn up? I’ve seen too many forum posts where users have picked a few random expensive settings and complained about a poor trade-off (e.g. poor performance for the hardware and quality).

So in X-Plane 10.40 we’ve replaced this single button with five pre-made presets: minimum, low, medium, high, and extreme. Each preset is hand-built to try to make good settings trade-offs; instead of having to fish for better visual quality after minimizing, you can simply try 2 or 3 presets, based on your hardware. If you have a very new system, try “high” and “extreme”. If your system is really old, try “low” and then go on to “minimum” or “medium.”

The settings aren’t coded into X-Plane; they come from a config file, and this is important for the process of tuning the presets. The truth is: the presets as picked in beta one are probably not that great. I did run them on my machines, but with only a few computers, it’s hard to know what a good setting is for most users.

In X-Plane 10.40, it will be possible to run the framerate using one of the rendering setting presets instead of one of the fps-test numbers. This will let us get direct, controlled measurement of the performance of specific presets on real machines. My hope is that by collecting this data and tuning the presets up and down, we’ll be able to dial in good compromises in terms of speed and quality.

I’ll post details on how to use the fps test once 10.40 goes live, so that we can start collecting data.

In the long term, the rendering settings need a lot more than just presets; they need a massive simplification. But within the scope of X-Plane 10.40, the presets will hopefully provide a better user experience, less time spent tuning X-Plane, and be a good stepping stone toward a better UI.

Finally, for advanced users who like to tweak things: it will be possible to edit settings.txt and change the presets. I see this in the forums a lot:

User 1: I have an Intel i7 clocked at 1675 ghz and I’m getting 10 fps. What’s wrong with X-Plane?

User 2: that’s weird – I have an Intel i5 clocked at only 900 ghz and I’m getting 350 fps!

With the presets, user 2 can build his settings into a preset and send the file to user 1, who can then try those exact settings and see how performance runs. Both users could also run our presets in the fps test and see if the performance problem is due to different hardware, different rendering settings, or different add-ons.

Let X-Plane Tell Us How You Use X-Plane

One new addition to Version 10.40 is almost guaranteed to be controversial: at the user’s discretion, we now collect anonymous usage information.

Before you light your torch and grab your pitchfork, let me explain why we have not become the next Spyware Kings.

Whose information are we collecting?

The X-Plane 10.40 installer has a screen to explain the data collection, and a checkbox to opt-out. If X-Plane is already installed, you can toggle data collection on or off using the Operations & Warnings window in 10.40 and later.

We will only collect usage information from users who have that checkbox enabled. If you upgraded to v10.40 from an older version of X-Plane, for instance, the checkbox in the Operations & Warnings window is disabled by default.

(But, read on to find out why you should go turn it on!)

What does “anonymous usage information” mean?

In our case, we collect two main types of information:

• system configuration (including your operating system, CPU model, graphics card model, amount of RAM, what language you’ve selected, and so on)
• X-Plane usage (including which aircraft are flown, which airport you start at, and so on)

This information is 100% anonymous. Essentially, all we ever learn is that some user, somewhere was running Windows with a Core i7 CPU, 8 GB of RAM, etc. and they flew the C172 from KBFI. We cannot trace this information back to a specific person.

Will I be contacted or be spammed if I participate?

No.

Since everything we collect is anonymous, it obviously does not include contact information like your name or email address. We can never use the information collected to contact you in any way: no marketing, no spam, no way to bug you.

Why does X-Plane want this information?

In essence, your usage data helps us make better decisions about the future of X-Plane.

For instance, if we found that 50% of users were running 10 year old machines, we would need to think long and hard about increasing the system requirements in future versions.

Similarly, if we found that only 10 people ever flew a particular aircraft, we could conclude that users weren’t very interested in it, so we probably shouldn’t create a new aircraft that was very similar. Likewise, if 25% of flights involved the 747, we might decide that people really like big airliners, so we should probably create another.

This is roughly a billion times better than the way we currently make decisions about this type of thing (both in terms of hardware support and sim features). The current model looks like this:

1. Make a guess about what users want
2. Argue with the other developers who guessed differently
3. Ship something that users may or may not actually like

I can’t stress how much having actual data will improve our ability to make X-Plane the product that users really want.

Why you should participate

Sending this anonymous usage information is like casting a vote—in this case, a vote for us to support the way you use X-Plane. When you send your usage information, you cast your vote for us to support your hardware configuration, to build more of the planes you like to fly, or to improve the airports that you like to fly at.

Just like in electoral politics, you have every right to abstain. But abstaining means we’ll hear other people’s voices and not your own.

If you’d like to participate, you just need to do the following:

1. Get the 10.40 update and launch X-Plane
2. Open the Operations & Warnings dialog
3. Check the box labeled “Send anonymous usage information to help make X-Plane better.”

More OpenGL Code in 1040

One of the new things in X-Plane 10.40: more modern OpenGL code. I mention this because that new code will probably create chaos during the early betas; we’ll get the bugs fixed as quick as we can.

The problem is that OpenGL can be an exercise in “code it once, debug it everywhere”, and while I have tried to set myself up with a wide range of hardware, I don’t have one of every combination of drivers and GPUs that X-Plane runs on.

X-Plane 10.40 will be a longer beta, like 10.30 was, so we should have enough time to work out the kinks in the new code. Having to do this kind of debugging during beta is annoying for everyone, but it’s also necessary to advance the sim forward.

When 10.40 comes out, if the beta doesn’t run on your hardware, please do report a bug; often users assume that if they see the bug then everyone does, so someone else will report it. Not only is this often wrong (because everyone assumes someone else will report a bug), but it might be that your combination of hardware and drivers is the only one that shows the bug!

Update: yesterday at the 2015 WWDC Keynote, Apple announced that they were porting Metal, their Apple-specific low level high performance 3-d API, from iOS to OS X. I will comment on this next week, after the WWDC sessions on the desktop version of Metal are available on the web. In the meantime, don’t panic – this definitely isn’t the end of the Mac, Windows, X-Plane, or the universe.

See You In Hartford?

Next week is FlightSimCon 2015 in Hartford, CT, and it looks like a bunch of us will be there. Austin is speaking on Sunday, and I think Chris, Philipp, Marty and I will be there too. So if you are attending, come say hi – we’ll be at Austin’s talk and if there’s a cocktail party, we’ll be there too!

(Chris is a total hermit and prefers to communicate with us via a series of grunts, but since it’s face to face, he’ll have no choice but to acknowledge you with at least shifty eye contact! 🙂