If you’re at FSWeekend, say hey to our peeps there! In the meantime, we’re working to kill off the last 12.1.0 features. A few internal pics* from killing off the last features: Author-controlled de-icing has had a series of bugs in 12.0.x. For 12.1.0 we’ve gone over it with a fine tooth comb; Alex ran the above tests with our Kingair, which has the unusual case of two overlapping de-icing zones. We’ll have updated docs, Blender exporter support, and builds for authors. Some tests of real weather. In the first pic, the sky says clear but there’s a distant cl ..read more

In my previous post I drew an analogy between a scenery system with its file formats and a turtle within its shell. We are limited by DSF, so we are making a new file format for base meshes so we and all add-on developers can expand the scope of our data and make better scenery for X-Plane. The really big change we are making to base meshes is to go from a vector-centric to a raster-centric format. Let’s break that down and define what that means. Vectors are fancy computer-graphics talk for lines defined by their mathematical end-points. (Pro tip: if you want to be a graphics expert, you just ..read more

Thomson and Dellanie posted a preview of what’s coming in X-Plane 12.1 – click over to the news blog to see the pretty pictures. Short story long, it’s a graphics-intensive release, but it’s also a big release, with weather, systems, avionics and ATC updates too. What follows here is a few details for developers. Private Alpha Builds Soon As with all past X-plane 12 patches, we are planning to do a private “alpha build” test run with the developer lobby before public beta. We do this both to find out about add-on compatibility and to get the worst bugs fixed with a smaller test group. As of th ..read more

At the X-Plane Developer Conference in Montreal this year I gave a presentation sharing my thinking on our next-gen scenery system. This has created a lot of interest but also a lot of confusion. So in these next two blog posts I want to start by clarifying two fundamental ideas about scenery. Here’s the key point for the first one: A new scenery format is not the same as new scenery. This can be confusing because we haven’t changed either our scenery file formats or our scenery in quite a while, and often the two change together. Let’s break this down. A scenery file format is the way we re ..read more

After the X-Plane Developer Conference in Montreal this weekend (thanks to everyone who came and especially ToLiss for hosting/making us feel totally at home in Montreal) I thought “I should probably post something to the dev blog talking about what we’re up to.” I logged in and saw…I haven’t posted anything in four months. So that’s not great. The truth is the X-Plane team is larger than it was in the v10 days and I spend most of my communications time talking to the internal team and third party developers. I’m going to try to post once a week here. This sentence may be an embarrassing monum ..read more

The next X-Plane update will focus primarily on flight-model and systems, plus external-visual networking and some ATC features. While that update is in beta, we can work in parallel on real weather and graphics. But there are two graphics bugs we already have fixed in-house which should relieve some 12.06/12.07 pain: Running out of memory mid-frame. Turns out if you got into a fairly tight situation VRAM wise (and we try to do that to max out the texture res you can have) then X-Plane might run out of memory trying to draw trees and…melt down like a toddler who can’t have any more candy. We ..read more

Editor’s note: what follows is very, very, very, very, very silly. Last week we shipped X-Plane 12.06; since then we have found a few straggler bugs; like typical lARRge patches from the days of X-Plane 11, a few bugs escaped us until after final, including some crashes we could see in the auto reportARR. While it’s not great to be shipping a “hot patch” to our release, it is pretty fantastic to announce X-Plane 12.07 ARRsea 1 on International Talk Like a Pirate Day (the 19th of septembARR). The rest of this blog post only gets worse; you’ve been wARRned. 12.08 Is The New 12.07 Internally, nob ..read more

A few quick notes on 12.06-related chaos – it’s been a weekend. Global Airport Errors “Don’t rock the boat in a release candidate.” This is the lesson I should know, since I have cut at least 187 of them. In 12.06rc1, we were missing HEKA (completely) and all of the airports at KLAS; the KLAS problem was due to a missing art asset. One of the multiple confounding factors in this bug is that the global airports don’t put up a “there was a problem with the scenery pack” pop-up message when art is missing. So, being the brainiac I am, I went “oh, that seems dumb, we’ll never know if the pack has ..read more

X-Plane 12.06 beta 4 is out – we pushed for a second beta this week because I’ll be out of the office next week and the installer-making machine lives in my basement, so beta five will hopefully be in about ten days. Here’s some release notes. The team has fixed a bunch of big bugs this week, including water flashing, clicking problems with mouse-flies and a bunch of crash bugs. The Crash Reporter…Crashed?!? XPD-14312 was a meta-bug: the bug was that on Mac, when the sim crashed, it would hang instead of showing the auto-crash-reporting box. I’d like to use this bug as an excuse for a public s ..read more

X-Plane 12.06 beta 1 is here! And it contains a lot of changes. Here’s a few of the bigger things we changed, and a few notes about the beta process. Clouds and Weather Since X-Plane 12.0 shipped, we’ve been working on the clouds and the weather system to improve performance, accuracy and quality. 12.06 ships the first two steps in this multi-step process: The cloud shaders are now faster and have fewer artifacts. Daniel rewrote the way clouds are marched, fixing zebra stripes and generally making things less pixelated and ugly. The cloud shaders also contain a dedicated path for cirrus cloud ..read more