Ace-Xi's Blog

Unofficial Guide to X-Plane, Flight simulators and MORE!!! No Vulgarities, Keep it nice :)

The day our skies fe||, the heavens split to create new skies...-PROJECT ACES

February 15, 2012

UPDATE!

Release Notes (Updated 18/3)

X-Plane 10.04 Release Candidate 2

Manifold pressure works the way it did in 10.03. We'll revisit better manifold pressure indications in a future beta when there's more time to get it right.
Trim setting labels in Plane-Maker's control tab fixed.
X-Plane 10.04 Release Candidate 1

Bug fix for ATC issuing altimeter on descent.
Fixed pilot-heading dataref to put sim in command-look mode.
Fixed parsing of OBJs with hard surfaces.
X-Plane 10.04 Beta 7

Beta 7 is out now. Note that to get it you need the new 3.1 installer. If you try to run the old installer, it will give you an error; if you simply update from the "about box", the new installer will be downloaded for you.

With this new installer, the installer and updater are one program. See here for more info than you ever wanted to know.

Lots of new art!!!

The C-130 is included!
Lit textures on cities and more city facades.
Tuning of spill lights in the airport library to improve fps.
Tuning and revision to natural terrain textures and forests.
For users with the X-Plane 10 Global DVD, you will get Aerosoft's European airports if you install scenery for those areas, or if you update and have those areas already installed.
Bug Fixes:

Fixed crash when loading airplanes or quitting, introduced in beta 6.
Fixed crash at EDDM on Linux (due to ATC taxi layout autogen running off the rails.)
Fixed missing sky and clouds with P180, x737 and other wide panels when 4x SSAA and HDR are in use.
Fixed the nasty bumps that airplanes were seeing when taxiing on runways at high altitude airports.
Fixed multithreaded scenery load on Windows. This may help some users with flashing triangles.
Rendering Engine & Scenery

Object exclusion zones now also exclude autogen, so scenery packs that get rid of default buildings now get rid of the v10 default autogen. There is not going to be an "Exclude autogen" - just use the objects exclusion zone!
Objects placed at high altitudes should now be at the correct location.
Latest apt.dat data from Robin included.
Plugin bug fixes, included in this beta:

XPLM returns a version with an extra digit, to match v9.
XPLM load/save data file APIs fixed.
De-icing failure datarefs fixed.
Datarefs.txt now matches the sim.
Refinements:

Manifold pressure model and Real-Weather reading are all improved... Now the manifold pressure model is based on real physics just like the rest of X-Plane (instead of just following the values entered in Plane-Maker) and the Real-Weather reading is refined to work with more accuracy and read reports in more countries, where formats can vary somewhat.
X-Plane 10.04 Beta 6

It's just like X-Plane 10.04 beta 5, but with the texture files back! See below for the fixes!

X-Plane 10.04 Beta 5

Note: Beta 5 was pulled due to missing texture files.

Clouds:

Cloud performance has been tuned. The cloud slider is not calibrated the way it was in 10.04b4; please don't worry about the number you see. Tune the slider to get the trade-off of quality and performance you want on your computer. The "100%" mark represents what we think a high-end system might show; you can go past this if you really liked the older high settings from previous betas, but realistically there's no need to do this.
The far view clouds should look less strange from orbital altitudes.
ATC:

Controllers now issue altimeter settings to aircraft on handoffs, on descents OUT of a flight level and every 50nm when appropriate.
Controllers now expect aircraft to fly with the correct altimeter setting and also properly monitors aircraft at flightlevels expecting them to be flying at a PRESSURE altitude (with their altimeters set to 29.92). At this moment, the transition level for the WORLD is set to 18,000 feet as it is in the USA. In the future, this will vary based on region.
AI aircraft are spawned at more appropriate speeds. In the past, they were spawned too slowly which caused them to stall and lose altitude which caused ATC to constantly nag them to regain their altitude. This was the primary cause for radio congestion!
Improved taxi routings across the world so they're a bit smarter.
Rendering:

The 3-d cockpit draws correctly for multi-monitor configurations with offset views on the side.
Our low-level OpenGL setup on Windows is now done a little bit differently; this change was recommended by people at NVidia who are very smart. But if you are running on Windows and you _can_ run 10.03 but you cannot start up the new beta at all, please file a bug!!
ATTR_draped now works with objects that do not have any LOD statements! There was a previous bug in X-Plane so that if you used ATTR_draped and did not have ATTR_LOD anywhere, the sim would not draw the draped geometry. This is now fixed, so ATTR_draped really does work as a drop-in replacement to ATTR_poly_os. Docs coming soon!!
Scenery:

Fixed facades in the airport library that were generating errors on load.
The roof edge of urban downtown facades should look correct.
DRM:

We are reworking our installer and DVD detection. If the sim won't go out of demo mode, but 10.03 works correctly, please be sure to file a bug!
MORE COOL NEW STUFF:

Compressor stall failures are refined, and can be solved by pulling fuel to the engine to shut it down.
Aircraft icing is now a bit more aggressive and realistic, and flexible with the ability to add 2 switches for AOA heat,
pitot heat, static port heat, engine inlet heat, prop heat, and wing heat! This lets you control these systems more precisely... and expect the correct results from their operation in flight!


from Austin - 2012-02-11

X-Plane 10.04 Beta-3 is here now!

Just some little bug-fixes, and the DVD should only be checked once pr day, even if you run the sim any times per day... might be a bit more convenient

Have at it and let me know how it goes!

austin


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from Austin 2012-02-09

X-Plane 10.04 Beta-2

We are really moving towards REFINING the app here, getting the sim running just exactly the way we EXPECT it to.

This update has a good handful of bug-fixes, and these bug-fixes are getting into the real nitty-gritty stuff (multiple different FMS's in the same plane? quicktime movie compression not quite detailed enough for you? these are the types of things we have tuned for this release)

Anyhoo, run the updater from X-Plane.com to get it, and go to http://wiki.x-plane.com/Beta to see all the new stuff!

Have at it and let me know hoe it goes!

austin
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