Release Notes
X-Plane 10.10 Beta 5
We now support devices with an insane number of buttons and axis like the Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog (That thing is an insane beast).
Improved consistency in views. Right click and scroll are now used everywhere for camera movement and zoom respectively.
Implemented Quick-Look view commands to allow users to save predefined views on a per-aircraft basis. See discussion here.
OBJ File Format Extensions - docs coming soon!
ATTR_no_shadow disables shadows for just one part of an OBJ; polygon-offset (ATTR_poly_os) geometry now works this way too.
A new pixel-based manipulator lets you define drags that work horizontally or vertically, with scaling. This manipulator is intended to make draggable knobs.
GLOBAL_cockpit_lit object attribute declares that ATTR_cockpit will use real 3-d lighting. This provides a better migration path for old airplanes that depend on translucency.
Bug Fixes:
Fixed broken hot-spots on Altimeters
Fixed broken adjustment on attitude indicator
Fixed 3/4 deflection on Joystick Axis page on some devices (Saitek Flight Stick, Epic USB, etc.)
Fixed "sticking" hat-switches that would sometimes not turn off once pressed.
Fixed Joysticks with missing buttons/axis on Windows such as the Logitech G940 or G25
Bump maps now work in .ter files again.
The HDR pipeline has been severely thrashed in an attempt to improve the look of translucent scenery. While there are still translucency artifacts in HDR mode (and all airplanes should use the "glass" option in plane-Maker for windshields and canopies) translucency should be better than it was before.
Fixed ugly blue glowing water at night.
Added back 3-d cockpit toggle command to match v9.
Airplane is converted to metric before plugins are run.
X-Plane 10.10 Beta 4
This beta updates and renames the Aerosoft airports that ship with X-Plane 10 global, fixing naming inconsistencies between different DVD editions. You should only notice the update if you have installed European global scenery.
This beta also includes initial rough translations for Japanese and Portuguese; we'll be refining this over the beta period. The French translation has also been updated.
Bug Fixes:
Fixed crash at night (take 2, the fix in beta 3 was in itself broken).
Fixed cockpits going dark and camera angle moving at night.
Fixed support for Epic USB and other devices that send unsigned axis data but have LogicalMax with the signed bit set. 0xFF vs 0x00FF.
Improved update screen dialog so users can reject updates without a crash.
Liveries can be selected.
Barometric pressure knob fixed on C172 and other panels.
Plane-Maker won't prompt for safe-mode after an X-Plane crash.
Fixed crash if previous flown airplane is missing when X-Plane is next run.
Fixed sun glare on landing markings at KSEA when bump/normal mapping is disabled.
Interior geometry shown for older planes. Note that showing the inside of the fuselage and misc bodies is not recommended, not possible in airplanes saved for v10, and will be dropped completely in the future.
X-Plane 10.10 Beta 3
Bug Fixes:
Fixed washed out cockpits on older airplanes like the CL415. Blog post coming soon explaining what this was, why authors might want to update their planes, and what's coming in the future for cockpits.
Fixed erratic joystick behavior on windows that prevented proper calibration
Fixed linux joystick problem preventing the detection of rudder pedals/trim wheels etc (NOTE: If it still doesn't find your device, you'll need to UDEV your /dev/input/event* device to give X-Plane permission).
Fixed roads shooting into the sky at LSZA. (There are a lot of the roads on this planet and we can't check them all by hand, so if you find yet more roads shooting into the sky, please file a bug!!)
Sim won't go into 'safe mode' after an auto-update.
Aircraft carrier wake doesn't show through carrier.
Fixed crash at night with C130 and other planes with no 3-d cockpit.
Fixed heat blur to not show up in first class cabin of 747 and other interiors.
X-Plane 10.10 Beta 2
Bug Fixes:
Fixed crash on startup on Windows caused by some Joysticks
Joysticks no longer have a negative impact on frame rate.
Roads no longer shoot up into the sky at DSF tile ends.
Fixed crash with v9 DSFs with powerlines.
Hedges and bushes in autogen no longer stick into the street.
4x SSAA HDR mode fixed to not draw into 1/4 of the screen.
Fixed blue and red artifacts in HDR mode on Windows machines.
Fixed white box around bomb craters in HDR mode.
Fixed blue flicker when QuickFlight carousel spins.
Fixed night water reflections in non-HDR mode.
Fixed brightness of lights reflected in water.
Improved UI tile scrolling in quick-flight dialog.
X-Plane 10.10 Beta 1
USABILITY
X-Plane now features a "Quick Flight" screen, which can open on load if desired. Besides being a nice way to quickly set up a simple flight and see all of your airplanes, the Quick Flight screen will save you time, because it appears before scenery is loaded. No need to wait for scenery to load, then change airports, then wait again. Start your flight where you want with the plane you want.
Q E R F < > arrow keys to move around: SHIFT to go FAST CONTROL to go SLOW this gives more control for movie-makers, as requested by various movie-makers.
20 new commands: 10 MEMORIZE view in 3-d cockpit 10 RECALL view in 3-d cockpit The 10 views, called "Quick-Look" views, are commands in the VIEW group in the keyboard assignment screen, but if you delete your preferences in the output/preferences folder, then they will default to the 10 numeric keypad numbers, and hit CONTROL plus that number to memorize a new view.
Joysticks can now be hot-plugged; X-Plane detects your joystick changes as they happen; no need to restart!
X-Plane now features automatic crash reporting. When X-Plane crashes (due to its own code or a plugin) it will gather up a crash report, which goes into its Output/Crash Reports folder. It will then present you the _option_ to send the report to Laminar Research automatically.
Whether or not you choose to send the report, the report is retained in Output/Crash Reports so you can see what data was collected and would have been sent. Reports you choose to send go into a database so that we can analyze them and search by common problems (e.g. do all of the crashes at this point in the code happen on this graphics card).
X-plane will attempt to detect low memory conditions before an actual crash happens and warn you. If possible, it will stop loading scenery but not terminate the app so you can save any preferences if desired. This is not a replacement for 64-bit but is designed to help differentiate low memory vs. an actual crash bug.
If X-Plane crashes, it will offer to optionally start up in 'safe mode' on the next run, with rendering settings set back to factory defaults. If you change a rendering setting that takes effect on restart and thus cannot restart the sim, this gives you an easy way to restore things.
COOL NEW STUFF
New oil rig... see it in the oil rig approach... really amazing detail.
New plane: Columbia-400!
Piaggo Avanti updated to be really nice, and is our default airplane for now.
Updated scenery textures. New textures for dry regions and Volcanos, as well as enhancements and refinements, including color adjustment.
New lights - the light texture and table of colors has been tuned up for better night lighting.
More "stuff" in the airport library.
(Autogen improvements are still in progress and will be available in a later beta.)
RENDERING ENGINE
The entire HDR pipeline has been rewritten to fix bugs and boost performance. It may be a bit before the bugs are all thrashed out.
Tone mapping in HDR mode now features dynamic exposure as you move the camera. The dynamic exposure is set to very small changes for now; we'll tune it during the beta.
Night lighting performance has been tuned considerably.
The "ATI Windows" issue is fixed: the ATI Windows driver is a bit slow to map memory compared to other drivers/platforms, so we use an alternate code path. This should provide lower CPU use for clouds on ATI Windows systems. If you still have slow clouds, then X-Plane is slow or your machine is slow or your settings are too high.
SCENERY SYSTEM
X-Plane creates a .ini file in Custom scenery to manage your scenery packs. You can reprioritize scenery without renaming folders by editing the file. This feature is meant as a base; someday we'll get a UI in front of it. Disable a pack you don't like by replacing SCENERY_PACK with SCENERY_PACK_DISABLED. New packs will be added to the .ini file automatically as they are found, so you never _have_ to edit this .ini file.
Scenery packs in custom scenery can be symbolic links, short cuts or aliases to other hard drives. Link the pack - that is, put the pack anywhere, and put the alias in custom scenery. draped objects work without specific LOd
The road rendering code has been overhauled to not put roads up in the sky and to avoid putting powerline towers on roads when possible. If you see a case where a road goes straight up into the air, please, re-report the bug against 10.10b1. But note that we are still tuning and fixing bugs in the roads.
Other scenery system bug fixes:
Line-style forest rendering fixed - the lines could be garbled.
Facade roof textures flipped horizontally - they were wrong before.
Placement of tiles in autogen strings improved.
Objects with draped geometry work even if there is non non-draped geometry and no LOD instructions. In 10.05r1 the default LOD was miscalculated. To ship scenery that works with 10.05r1, just use the explicit ATTR_LOD_draped command.
IMPROVED FLIGHT MODEL
controllable ram-air recovery for propeller engines assign the ram air recovery percentage for your recip or turboprop engine installation, and see what kind of power boost you can get at speed with a properly-designed inlet! this used to be hard-wired at 10% (pursuant to flight-test in my Cirrus) but is now controllable by you per-aircraft.
electric motors are limited on torque and power, so if you exceed redline rpm, the torque will be gin to fall off to hold constant power! electric motors can have efficiency as well, indicating what percentage of the watt-hours coming out of the battery make it to the prop! electric motors can re-gen power as well, if you enter a re-gen efficiency in the engines screen of Plane-Maker (Spool-Up tab.. where the engine efficiency mentioned above is also set) the re-gen model causes the prop to go into re-gen mode if the throttle is at idle, running the braking torque (and thus battery charge) up linearly with rpm until braking torque equals max allowable drive torque at redline prop rpm. These things are designed to make electric motor simulation really run well in X-Plane... even well enough to plan how a real electric airplane will perform!
manifold pressure tweaked still more! I am sorry to keep twiddling this one parameter, but i sure do want to get it right! we now DO use the max manifold pressure that you enter into Plane-Maker, so you should be able to control the results well.
when you fail the left or right flaps, they simply stay in the position they were in the moment the failure occurred. this makes it possible to fail the flaps when extended, so only one side RETRACTS! rather interesting for go-arounds with failed flaps on one side when you start to clean up the plane!
The weight and balance predictor in Plane-Maker (designed by me to test out real airplane designs!) now has a different weight and balance entry for each fuel tank, so you can see CG ranges at all possible fuel tank load-outs.
Metal coefficient on concrete increased a bit... this will reduce skidding on helos a bit, and make dynamic roll-over more likely!
More refinement of the transition from subsonic to supersonic flight model, with input from an F-18 pilot that spends time flying in both speed regimes. In reality, the air accelerates to (and beyond) the speed of sound as it moves around the body of the aircraft... even BEFORE the airplane makes it up to the speed of sound. We now start to emulate that effect a bit, starting to move to the supersonic flight modeling as the aircraft speed approaches Mach 1, with drag rising as shock waves form.
You now enter the starter HORSEPOWER in the engines screen, and it's behavior should be more realistic in flight. As well, starter current draw should be a lot more realistic now, and the starter torque should fall off as the rpm comes up due to power limits of the starter and it's associated circuitry.
New variable in Plane-Maker: Prop pitch time to enter beta. Enter a value here (in the Engines screen, Spoolup tab) to set how quickly the propeller can move. While you only enter the time to move from idle to beta, this prop speed is then used for ALL propeller operations.
AIRPLANES
Translucency is fixed in HDR mode - translucent glass should look the same in forward and HDR renders. If you have a model whose translucency changes, please re-report a bug!!!
V9-style lights don't "leak" - landing light affect exterior objects and global interior spill affects interior.
Prop disc overrides fixed.
NEW STUFF FOR AUTHORS
Textures can now be up to 4096 x 4096 pixels. Use good judgment as this can eat a lot of VRAM!!!
A new OBJ attribute GLOBAL_no_shadow excludes an object from shadow calculations. This is both good for performance and gets rid of ugly shadows on objects like grass that should not have shadows.
Autogen and roads can have attached objects that appear more often in higher rendering settings. Our artists will be using this to tune rendering performance.
Draped geometry in an object now has all of the same shader options as a road or autogen tile. Docs on this coming soon!
PLUGINS
Changing weather datarefs will not regenerate cloud puffs unless cloud-related datarefs change.
The sim no longer tests for a "crashed" airplane when the sim is paused. This test was causing the sim to believe that the user had crashed the aircraft when a plugin changed the airplane's position in the world. So now writing the airplane's position should work correctly even for far-away locations.
PLANE-MAKER
The screenshot command still works in Plane-Maker.
SMALL VISUAL REFINEMENTS
landing lights light up the rain and snow now... kind of a nice detail
heat blurr moved according to the exhaust location even with tilting engines for VTOL ops...nice if you want to try something like a JET V-22 type aircraft.
less water spray effect form hovering helos over wet terrain, as per reality.
no more brakes hanging on free-casting nosewheel craft. (oops!)
the LOCATION of the jettisonable load on the aircraft is now considered on all aspects of the flight model
in the weight and balance screen, add a nice big jettisonable water load and put it out on the wingtip! let the fun commence!
GENERAL OPERATING REFINEMENTS
situations can be saved even if you just loaded a situation to start up with! kind of convenient. situations within situations.
mouse controls rudder again, as desired, when no joy controls found
new file-open is nice... try it! should be much quicker to use. as well, new livery selection is nice... it is integrated with the aircraft-open
more failures that do not apply to your airplane are culled from the failure UI list
new command: "sim/flight_controls/brakes_toggle_auto" to toggle auto-brakes, as requested.
the cloud layers can now be as close together as you like
SLIGHT change in the icing model: you now only need ONE switch for bleed air or pneumatic on the panel now. it will active any bleed air and pneumatics on BOTH wings.
New command: "sim/autopilot/knots_mach_toggle" This is a new command (assignable to a joystick button or keyboard, and one shat should be used by custom-aircraft makers) that properly toggle between speed and mach number on the airspeed hold.
New command: "sim/flight_controls/tail_wheel_lock" Toggles the tailwheel lock.
New commands: ADF 1 and 2 cards, pilot and copilot, rotate up and down.
Much less turbulence from RAIN... you have to select STORMS or the turbulence slider to get noticeable turbulence,
or fly into CUMULUS clouds.
BUG-FIXES
shooting down other airplanes works.
lift fans possible, as intended.
these are insanely fun.
equip your plane with 1 (or more!) jet engine but set up 2 (or more) props.
be sure that the jet engine is set so it can be VECTORING! set the vector range in the helos and VTOL screen to at least 90 degrees, and check it as vectoring in the engines screen
for the props, set them to type LIFT FAN and give them plenty of RPM and make them ducted and at a vertical cant of 90 degrees
if you balance out the fan speed and radius number of blade and chord to absorb the right amount of power from the jet, then you should be able to get the thing balanced out to fly nicely like an F-35!
carrier catshot mission won't launch prematurely off the deck just cause you have toe-brakes, and should have better physics in place holding you before the shot
July 31, 2012
Release Notes
Release Notes
X-Plane 10.10 Beta 5
We now support devices with an insane number of buttons and axis like the Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog (That thing is an insane beast).
Improved consistency in views. Right click and scroll are now used everywhere for camera movement and zoom respectively.
Implemented Quick-Look view commands to allow users to save predefined views on a per-aircraft basis. See discussion here.
OBJ File Format Extensions - docs coming soon!
ATTR_no_shadow disables shadows for just one part of an OBJ; polygon-offset (ATTR_poly_os) geometry now works this way too.
A new pixel-based manipulator lets you define drags that work horizontally or vertically, with scaling. This manipulator is intended to make draggable knobs.
GLOBAL_cockpit_lit object attribute declares that ATTR_cockpit will use real 3-d lighting. This provides a better migration path for old airplanes that depend on translucency.
Bug Fixes:
Fixed broken hot-spots on Altimeters
Fixed broken adjustment on attitude indicator
Fixed 3/4 deflection on Joystick Axis page on some devices (Saitek Flight Stick, Epic USB, etc.)
Fixed "sticking" hat-switches that would sometimes not turn off once pressed.
Fixed Joysticks with missing buttons/axis on Windows such as the Logitech G940 or G25
Bump maps now work in .ter files again.
The HDR pipeline has been severely thrashed in an attempt to improve the look of translucent scenery. While there are still translucency artifacts in HDR mode (and all airplanes should use the "glass" option in plane-Maker for windshields and canopies) translucency should be better than it was before.
Fixed ugly blue glowing water at night.
Added back 3-d cockpit toggle command to match v9.
Airplane is converted to metric before plugins are run.
X-Plane 10.10 Beta 4
This beta updates and renames the Aerosoft airports that ship with X-Plane 10 global, fixing naming inconsistencies between different DVD editions. You should only notice the update if you have installed European global scenery.
This beta also includes initial rough translations for Japanese and Portuguese; we'll be refining this over the beta period. The French translation has also been updated.
Bug Fixes:
Fixed crash at night (take 2, the fix in beta 3 was in itself broken).
Fixed cockpits going dark and camera angle moving at night.
Fixed support for Epic USB and other devices that send unsigned axis data but have LogicalMax with the signed bit set. 0xFF vs 0x00FF.
Improved update screen dialog so users can reject updates without a crash.
Liveries can be selected.
Barometric pressure knob fixed on C172 and other panels.
Plane-Maker won't prompt for safe-mode after an X-Plane crash.
Fixed crash if previous flown airplane is missing when X-Plane is next run.
Fixed sun glare on landing markings at KSEA when bump/normal mapping is disabled.
Interior geometry shown for older planes. Note that showing the inside of the fuselage and misc bodies is not recommended, not possible in airplanes saved for v10, and will be dropped completely in the future.
X-Plane 10.10 Beta 3
Bug Fixes:
Fixed washed out cockpits on older airplanes like the CL415. Blog post coming soon explaining what this was, why authors might want to update their planes, and what's coming in the future for cockpits.
Fixed erratic joystick behavior on windows that prevented proper calibration
Fixed linux joystick problem preventing the detection of rudder pedals/trim wheels etc (NOTE: If it still doesn't find your device, you'll need to UDEV your /dev/input/event* device to give X-Plane permission).
Fixed roads shooting into the sky at LSZA. (There are a lot of the roads on this planet and we can't check them all by hand, so if you find yet more roads shooting into the sky, please file a bug!!)
Sim won't go into 'safe mode' after an auto-update.
Aircraft carrier wake doesn't show through carrier.
Fixed crash at night with C130 and other planes with no 3-d cockpit.
Fixed heat blur to not show up in first class cabin of 747 and other interiors.
X-Plane 10.10 Beta 2
Bug Fixes:
Fixed crash on startup on Windows caused by some Joysticks
Joysticks no longer have a negative impact on frame rate.
Roads no longer shoot up into the sky at DSF tile ends.
Fixed crash with v9 DSFs with powerlines.
Hedges and bushes in autogen no longer stick into the street.
4x SSAA HDR mode fixed to not draw into 1/4 of the screen.
Fixed blue and red artifacts in HDR mode on Windows machines.
Fixed white box around bomb craters in HDR mode.
Fixed blue flicker when QuickFlight carousel spins.
Fixed night water reflections in non-HDR mode.
Fixed brightness of lights reflected in water.
Improved UI tile scrolling in quick-flight dialog.
X-Plane 10.10 Beta 1
USABILITY
X-Plane now features a "Quick Flight" screen, which can open on load if desired. Besides being a nice way to quickly set up a simple flight and see all of your airplanes, the Quick Flight screen will save you time, because it appears before scenery is loaded. No need to wait for scenery to load, then change airports, then wait again. Start your flight where you want with the plane you want.
Q E R F < > arrow keys to move around: SHIFT to go FAST CONTROL to go SLOW this gives more control for movie-makers, as requested by various movie-makers.
20 new commands: 10 MEMORIZE view in 3-d cockpit 10 RECALL view in 3-d cockpit The 10 views, called "Quick-Look" views, are commands in the VIEW group in the keyboard assignment screen, but if you delete your preferences in the output/preferences folder, then they will default to the 10 numeric keypad numbers, and hit CONTROL plus that number to memorize a new view.
Joysticks can now be hot-plugged; X-Plane detects your joystick changes as they happen; no need to restart!
X-Plane now features automatic crash reporting. When X-Plane crashes (due to its own code or a plugin) it will gather up a crash report, which goes into its Output/Crash Reports folder. It will then present you the _option_ to send the report to Laminar Research automatically.
Whether or not you choose to send the report, the report is retained in Output/Crash Reports so you can see what data was collected and would have been sent. Reports you choose to send go into a database so that we can analyze them and search by common problems (e.g. do all of the crashes at this point in the code happen on this graphics card).
X-plane will attempt to detect low memory conditions before an actual crash happens and warn you. If possible, it will stop loading scenery but not terminate the app so you can save any preferences if desired. This is not a replacement for 64-bit but is designed to help differentiate low memory vs. an actual crash bug.
If X-Plane crashes, it will offer to optionally start up in 'safe mode' on the next run, with rendering settings set back to factory defaults. If you change a rendering setting that takes effect on restart and thus cannot restart the sim, this gives you an easy way to restore things.
COOL NEW STUFF
New oil rig... see it in the oil rig approach... really amazing detail.
New plane: Columbia-400!
Piaggo Avanti updated to be really nice, and is our default airplane for now.
Updated scenery textures. New textures for dry regions and Volcanos, as well as enhancements and refinements, including color adjustment.
New lights - the light texture and table of colors has been tuned up for better night lighting.
More "stuff" in the airport library.
(Autogen improvements are still in progress and will be available in a later beta.)
RENDERING ENGINE
The entire HDR pipeline has been rewritten to fix bugs and boost performance. It may be a bit before the bugs are all thrashed out.
Tone mapping in HDR mode now features dynamic exposure as you move the camera. The dynamic exposure is set to very small changes for now; we'll tune it during the beta.
Night lighting performance has been tuned considerably.
The "ATI Windows" issue is fixed: the ATI Windows driver is a bit slow to map memory compared to other drivers/platforms, so we use an alternate code path. This should provide lower CPU use for clouds on ATI Windows systems. If you still have slow clouds, then X-Plane is slow or your machine is slow or your settings are too high.
SCENERY SYSTEM
X-Plane creates a .ini file in Custom scenery to manage your scenery packs. You can reprioritize scenery without renaming folders by editing the file. This feature is meant as a base; someday we'll get a UI in front of it. Disable a pack you don't like by replacing SCENERY_PACK with SCENERY_PACK_DISABLED. New packs will be added to the .ini file automatically as they are found, so you never _have_ to edit this .ini file.
Scenery packs in custom scenery can be symbolic links, short cuts or aliases to other hard drives. Link the pack - that is, put the pack anywhere, and put the alias in custom scenery. draped objects work without specific LOd
The road rendering code has been overhauled to not put roads up in the sky and to avoid putting powerline towers on roads when possible. If you see a case where a road goes straight up into the air, please, re-report the bug against 10.10b1. But note that we are still tuning and fixing bugs in the roads.
Other scenery system bug fixes:
Line-style forest rendering fixed - the lines could be garbled.
Facade roof textures flipped horizontally - they were wrong before.
Placement of tiles in autogen strings improved.
Objects with draped geometry work even if there is non non-draped geometry and no LOD instructions. In 10.05r1 the default LOD was miscalculated. To ship scenery that works with 10.05r1, just use the explicit ATTR_LOD_draped command.
IMPROVED FLIGHT MODEL
controllable ram-air recovery for propeller engines assign the ram air recovery percentage for your recip or turboprop engine installation, and see what kind of power boost you can get at speed with a properly-designed inlet! this used to be hard-wired at 10% (pursuant to flight-test in my Cirrus) but is now controllable by you per-aircraft.
electric motors are limited on torque and power, so if you exceed redline rpm, the torque will be gin to fall off to hold constant power! electric motors can have efficiency as well, indicating what percentage of the watt-hours coming out of the battery make it to the prop! electric motors can re-gen power as well, if you enter a re-gen efficiency in the engines screen of Plane-Maker (Spool-Up tab.. where the engine efficiency mentioned above is also set) the re-gen model causes the prop to go into re-gen mode if the throttle is at idle, running the braking torque (and thus battery charge) up linearly with rpm until braking torque equals max allowable drive torque at redline prop rpm. These things are designed to make electric motor simulation really run well in X-Plane... even well enough to plan how a real electric airplane will perform!
manifold pressure tweaked still more! I am sorry to keep twiddling this one parameter, but i sure do want to get it right! we now DO use the max manifold pressure that you enter into Plane-Maker, so you should be able to control the results well.
when you fail the left or right flaps, they simply stay in the position they were in the moment the failure occurred. this makes it possible to fail the flaps when extended, so only one side RETRACTS! rather interesting for go-arounds with failed flaps on one side when you start to clean up the plane!
The weight and balance predictor in Plane-Maker (designed by me to test out real airplane designs!) now has a different weight and balance entry for each fuel tank, so you can see CG ranges at all possible fuel tank load-outs.
Metal coefficient on concrete increased a bit... this will reduce skidding on helos a bit, and make dynamic roll-over more likely!
More refinement of the transition from subsonic to supersonic flight model, with input from an F-18 pilot that spends time flying in both speed regimes. In reality, the air accelerates to (and beyond) the speed of sound as it moves around the body of the aircraft... even BEFORE the airplane makes it up to the speed of sound. We now start to emulate that effect a bit, starting to move to the supersonic flight modeling as the aircraft speed approaches Mach 1, with drag rising as shock waves form.
You now enter the starter HORSEPOWER in the engines screen, and it's behavior should be more realistic in flight. As well, starter current draw should be a lot more realistic now, and the starter torque should fall off as the rpm comes up due to power limits of the starter and it's associated circuitry.
New variable in Plane-Maker: Prop pitch time to enter beta. Enter a value here (in the Engines screen, Spoolup tab) to set how quickly the propeller can move. While you only enter the time to move from idle to beta, this prop speed is then used for ALL propeller operations.
AIRPLANES
Translucency is fixed in HDR mode - translucent glass should look the same in forward and HDR renders. If you have a model whose translucency changes, please re-report a bug!!!
V9-style lights don't "leak" - landing light affect exterior objects and global interior spill affects interior.
Prop disc overrides fixed.
NEW STUFF FOR AUTHORS
Textures can now be up to 4096 x 4096 pixels. Use good judgment as this can eat a lot of VRAM!!!
A new OBJ attribute GLOBAL_no_shadow excludes an object from shadow calculations. This is both good for performance and gets rid of ugly shadows on objects like grass that should not have shadows.
Autogen and roads can have attached objects that appear more often in higher rendering settings. Our artists will be using this to tune rendering performance.
Draped geometry in an object now has all of the same shader options as a road or autogen tile. Docs on this coming soon!
PLUGINS
Changing weather datarefs will not regenerate cloud puffs unless cloud-related datarefs change.
The sim no longer tests for a "crashed" airplane when the sim is paused. This test was causing the sim to believe that the user had crashed the aircraft when a plugin changed the airplane's position in the world. So now writing the airplane's position should work correctly even for far-away locations.
PLANE-MAKER
The screenshot command still works in Plane-Maker.
SMALL VISUAL REFINEMENTS
landing lights light up the rain and snow now... kind of a nice detail
heat blurr moved according to the exhaust location even with tilting engines for VTOL ops...nice if you want to try something like a JET V-22 type aircraft.
less water spray effect form hovering helos over wet terrain, as per reality.
no more brakes hanging on free-casting nosewheel craft. (oops!)
the LOCATION of the jettisonable load on the aircraft is now considered on all aspects of the flight model
in the weight and balance screen, add a nice big jettisonable water load and put it out on the wingtip! let the fun commence!
GENERAL OPERATING REFINEMENTS
situations can be saved even if you just loaded a situation to start up with! kind of convenient. situations within situations.
mouse controls rudder again, as desired, when no joy controls found
new file-open is nice... try it! should be much quicker to use. as well, new livery selection is nice... it is integrated with the aircraft-open
more failures that do not apply to your airplane are culled from the failure UI list
new command: "sim/flight_controls/brakes_toggle_auto" to toggle auto-brakes, as requested.
the cloud layers can now be as close together as you like
SLIGHT change in the icing model: you now only need ONE switch for bleed air or pneumatic on the panel now. it will active any bleed air and pneumatics on BOTH wings.
New command: "sim/autopilot/knots_mach_toggle" This is a new command (assignable to a joystick button or keyboard, and one shat should be used by custom-aircraft makers) that properly toggle between speed and mach number on the airspeed hold.
New command: "sim/flight_controls/tail_wheel_lock" Toggles the tailwheel lock.
New commands: ADF 1 and 2 cards, pilot and copilot, rotate up and down.
Much less turbulence from RAIN... you have to select STORMS or the turbulence slider to get noticeable turbulence,
or fly into CUMULUS clouds.
BUG-FIXES
shooting down other airplanes works.
lift fans possible, as intended.
these are insanely fun.
equip your plane with 1 (or more!) jet engine but set up 2 (or more) props.
be sure that the jet engine is set so it can be VECTORING! set the vector range in the helos and VTOL screen to at least 90 degrees, and check it as vectoring in the engines screen
for the props, set them to type LIFT FAN and give them plenty of RPM and make them ducted and at a vertical cant of 90 degrees
if you balance out the fan speed and radius number of blade and chord to absorb the right amount of power from the jet, then you should be able to get the thing balanced out to fly nicely like an F-35!
carrier catshot mission won't launch prematurely off the deck just cause you have toe-brakes, and should have better physics in place holding you before the shot
X-Plane 10.10 Beta 5
We now support devices with an insane number of buttons and axis like the Thrustmaster HOTAS Warthog (That thing is an insane beast).
Improved consistency in views. Right click and scroll are now used everywhere for camera movement and zoom respectively.
Implemented Quick-Look view commands to allow users to save predefined views on a per-aircraft basis. See discussion here.
OBJ File Format Extensions - docs coming soon!
ATTR_no_shadow disables shadows for just one part of an OBJ; polygon-offset (ATTR_poly_os) geometry now works this way too.
A new pixel-based manipulator lets you define drags that work horizontally or vertically, with scaling. This manipulator is intended to make draggable knobs.
GLOBAL_cockpit_lit object attribute declares that ATTR_cockpit will use real 3-d lighting. This provides a better migration path for old airplanes that depend on translucency.
Bug Fixes:
Fixed broken hot-spots on Altimeters
Fixed broken adjustment on attitude indicator
Fixed 3/4 deflection on Joystick Axis page on some devices (Saitek Flight Stick, Epic USB, etc.)
Fixed "sticking" hat-switches that would sometimes not turn off once pressed.
Fixed Joysticks with missing buttons/axis on Windows such as the Logitech G940 or G25
Bump maps now work in .ter files again.
The HDR pipeline has been severely thrashed in an attempt to improve the look of translucent scenery. While there are still translucency artifacts in HDR mode (and all airplanes should use the "glass" option in plane-Maker for windshields and canopies) translucency should be better than it was before.
Fixed ugly blue glowing water at night.
Added back 3-d cockpit toggle command to match v9.
Airplane is converted to metric before plugins are run.
X-Plane 10.10 Beta 4
This beta updates and renames the Aerosoft airports that ship with X-Plane 10 global, fixing naming inconsistencies between different DVD editions. You should only notice the update if you have installed European global scenery.
This beta also includes initial rough translations for Japanese and Portuguese; we'll be refining this over the beta period. The French translation has also been updated.
Bug Fixes:
Fixed crash at night (take 2, the fix in beta 3 was in itself broken).
Fixed cockpits going dark and camera angle moving at night.
Fixed support for Epic USB and other devices that send unsigned axis data but have LogicalMax with the signed bit set. 0xFF vs 0x00FF.
Improved update screen dialog so users can reject updates without a crash.
Liveries can be selected.
Barometric pressure knob fixed on C172 and other panels.
Plane-Maker won't prompt for safe-mode after an X-Plane crash.
Fixed crash if previous flown airplane is missing when X-Plane is next run.
Fixed sun glare on landing markings at KSEA when bump/normal mapping is disabled.
Interior geometry shown for older planes. Note that showing the inside of the fuselage and misc bodies is not recommended, not possible in airplanes saved for v10, and will be dropped completely in the future.
X-Plane 10.10 Beta 3
Bug Fixes:
Fixed washed out cockpits on older airplanes like the CL415. Blog post coming soon explaining what this was, why authors might want to update their planes, and what's coming in the future for cockpits.
Fixed erratic joystick behavior on windows that prevented proper calibration
Fixed linux joystick problem preventing the detection of rudder pedals/trim wheels etc (NOTE: If it still doesn't find your device, you'll need to UDEV your /dev/input/event* device to give X-Plane permission).
Fixed roads shooting into the sky at LSZA. (There are a lot of the roads on this planet and we can't check them all by hand, so if you find yet more roads shooting into the sky, please file a bug!!)
Sim won't go into 'safe mode' after an auto-update.
Aircraft carrier wake doesn't show through carrier.
Fixed crash at night with C130 and other planes with no 3-d cockpit.
Fixed heat blur to not show up in first class cabin of 747 and other interiors.
X-Plane 10.10 Beta 2
Bug Fixes:
Fixed crash on startup on Windows caused by some Joysticks
Joysticks no longer have a negative impact on frame rate.
Roads no longer shoot up into the sky at DSF tile ends.
Fixed crash with v9 DSFs with powerlines.
Hedges and bushes in autogen no longer stick into the street.
4x SSAA HDR mode fixed to not draw into 1/4 of the screen.
Fixed blue and red artifacts in HDR mode on Windows machines.
Fixed white box around bomb craters in HDR mode.
Fixed blue flicker when QuickFlight carousel spins.
Fixed night water reflections in non-HDR mode.
Fixed brightness of lights reflected in water.
Improved UI tile scrolling in quick-flight dialog.
X-Plane 10.10 Beta 1
USABILITY
X-Plane now features a "Quick Flight" screen, which can open on load if desired. Besides being a nice way to quickly set up a simple flight and see all of your airplanes, the Quick Flight screen will save you time, because it appears before scenery is loaded. No need to wait for scenery to load, then change airports, then wait again. Start your flight where you want with the plane you want.
Q E R F < > arrow keys to move around: SHIFT to go FAST CONTROL to go SLOW this gives more control for movie-makers, as requested by various movie-makers.
20 new commands: 10 MEMORIZE view in 3-d cockpit 10 RECALL view in 3-d cockpit The 10 views, called "Quick-Look" views, are commands in the VIEW group in the keyboard assignment screen, but if you delete your preferences in the output/preferences folder, then they will default to the 10 numeric keypad numbers, and hit CONTROL plus that number to memorize a new view.
Joysticks can now be hot-plugged; X-Plane detects your joystick changes as they happen; no need to restart!
X-Plane now features automatic crash reporting. When X-Plane crashes (due to its own code or a plugin) it will gather up a crash report, which goes into its Output/Crash Reports folder. It will then present you the _option_ to send the report to Laminar Research automatically.
Whether or not you choose to send the report, the report is retained in Output/Crash Reports so you can see what data was collected and would have been sent. Reports you choose to send go into a database so that we can analyze them and search by common problems (e.g. do all of the crashes at this point in the code happen on this graphics card).
X-plane will attempt to detect low memory conditions before an actual crash happens and warn you. If possible, it will stop loading scenery but not terminate the app so you can save any preferences if desired. This is not a replacement for 64-bit but is designed to help differentiate low memory vs. an actual crash bug.
If X-Plane crashes, it will offer to optionally start up in 'safe mode' on the next run, with rendering settings set back to factory defaults. If you change a rendering setting that takes effect on restart and thus cannot restart the sim, this gives you an easy way to restore things.
COOL NEW STUFF
New oil rig... see it in the oil rig approach... really amazing detail.
New plane: Columbia-400!
Piaggo Avanti updated to be really nice, and is our default airplane for now.
Updated scenery textures. New textures for dry regions and Volcanos, as well as enhancements and refinements, including color adjustment.
New lights - the light texture and table of colors has been tuned up for better night lighting.
More "stuff" in the airport library.
(Autogen improvements are still in progress and will be available in a later beta.)
RENDERING ENGINE
The entire HDR pipeline has been rewritten to fix bugs and boost performance. It may be a bit before the bugs are all thrashed out.
Tone mapping in HDR mode now features dynamic exposure as you move the camera. The dynamic exposure is set to very small changes for now; we'll tune it during the beta.
Night lighting performance has been tuned considerably.
The "ATI Windows" issue is fixed: the ATI Windows driver is a bit slow to map memory compared to other drivers/platforms, so we use an alternate code path. This should provide lower CPU use for clouds on ATI Windows systems. If you still have slow clouds, then X-Plane is slow or your machine is slow or your settings are too high.
SCENERY SYSTEM
X-Plane creates a .ini file in Custom scenery to manage your scenery packs. You can reprioritize scenery without renaming folders by editing the file. This feature is meant as a base; someday we'll get a UI in front of it. Disable a pack you don't like by replacing SCENERY_PACK with SCENERY_PACK_DISABLED. New packs will be added to the .ini file automatically as they are found, so you never _have_ to edit this .ini file.
Scenery packs in custom scenery can be symbolic links, short cuts or aliases to other hard drives. Link the pack - that is, put the pack anywhere, and put the alias in custom scenery. draped objects work without specific LOd
The road rendering code has been overhauled to not put roads up in the sky and to avoid putting powerline towers on roads when possible. If you see a case where a road goes straight up into the air, please, re-report the bug against 10.10b1. But note that we are still tuning and fixing bugs in the roads.
Other scenery system bug fixes:
Line-style forest rendering fixed - the lines could be garbled.
Facade roof textures flipped horizontally - they were wrong before.
Placement of tiles in autogen strings improved.
Objects with draped geometry work even if there is non non-draped geometry and no LOD instructions. In 10.05r1 the default LOD was miscalculated. To ship scenery that works with 10.05r1, just use the explicit ATTR_LOD_draped command.
IMPROVED FLIGHT MODEL
controllable ram-air recovery for propeller engines assign the ram air recovery percentage for your recip or turboprop engine installation, and see what kind of power boost you can get at speed with a properly-designed inlet! this used to be hard-wired at 10% (pursuant to flight-test in my Cirrus) but is now controllable by you per-aircraft.
electric motors are limited on torque and power, so if you exceed redline rpm, the torque will be gin to fall off to hold constant power! electric motors can have efficiency as well, indicating what percentage of the watt-hours coming out of the battery make it to the prop! electric motors can re-gen power as well, if you enter a re-gen efficiency in the engines screen of Plane-Maker (Spool-Up tab.. where the engine efficiency mentioned above is also set) the re-gen model causes the prop to go into re-gen mode if the throttle is at idle, running the braking torque (and thus battery charge) up linearly with rpm until braking torque equals max allowable drive torque at redline prop rpm. These things are designed to make electric motor simulation really run well in X-Plane... even well enough to plan how a real electric airplane will perform!
manifold pressure tweaked still more! I am sorry to keep twiddling this one parameter, but i sure do want to get it right! we now DO use the max manifold pressure that you enter into Plane-Maker, so you should be able to control the results well.
when you fail the left or right flaps, they simply stay in the position they were in the moment the failure occurred. this makes it possible to fail the flaps when extended, so only one side RETRACTS! rather interesting for go-arounds with failed flaps on one side when you start to clean up the plane!
The weight and balance predictor in Plane-Maker (designed by me to test out real airplane designs!) now has a different weight and balance entry for each fuel tank, so you can see CG ranges at all possible fuel tank load-outs.
Metal coefficient on concrete increased a bit... this will reduce skidding on helos a bit, and make dynamic roll-over more likely!
More refinement of the transition from subsonic to supersonic flight model, with input from an F-18 pilot that spends time flying in both speed regimes. In reality, the air accelerates to (and beyond) the speed of sound as it moves around the body of the aircraft... even BEFORE the airplane makes it up to the speed of sound. We now start to emulate that effect a bit, starting to move to the supersonic flight modeling as the aircraft speed approaches Mach 1, with drag rising as shock waves form.
You now enter the starter HORSEPOWER in the engines screen, and it's behavior should be more realistic in flight. As well, starter current draw should be a lot more realistic now, and the starter torque should fall off as the rpm comes up due to power limits of the starter and it's associated circuitry.
New variable in Plane-Maker: Prop pitch time to enter beta. Enter a value here (in the Engines screen, Spoolup tab) to set how quickly the propeller can move. While you only enter the time to move from idle to beta, this prop speed is then used for ALL propeller operations.
AIRPLANES
Translucency is fixed in HDR mode - translucent glass should look the same in forward and HDR renders. If you have a model whose translucency changes, please re-report a bug!!!
V9-style lights don't "leak" - landing light affect exterior objects and global interior spill affects interior.
Prop disc overrides fixed.
NEW STUFF FOR AUTHORS
Textures can now be up to 4096 x 4096 pixels. Use good judgment as this can eat a lot of VRAM!!!
A new OBJ attribute GLOBAL_no_shadow excludes an object from shadow calculations. This is both good for performance and gets rid of ugly shadows on objects like grass that should not have shadows.
Autogen and roads can have attached objects that appear more often in higher rendering settings. Our artists will be using this to tune rendering performance.
Draped geometry in an object now has all of the same shader options as a road or autogen tile. Docs on this coming soon!
PLUGINS
Changing weather datarefs will not regenerate cloud puffs unless cloud-related datarefs change.
The sim no longer tests for a "crashed" airplane when the sim is paused. This test was causing the sim to believe that the user had crashed the aircraft when a plugin changed the airplane's position in the world. So now writing the airplane's position should work correctly even for far-away locations.
PLANE-MAKER
The screenshot command still works in Plane-Maker.
SMALL VISUAL REFINEMENTS
landing lights light up the rain and snow now... kind of a nice detail
heat blurr moved according to the exhaust location even with tilting engines for VTOL ops...nice if you want to try something like a JET V-22 type aircraft.
less water spray effect form hovering helos over wet terrain, as per reality.
no more brakes hanging on free-casting nosewheel craft. (oops!)
the LOCATION of the jettisonable load on the aircraft is now considered on all aspects of the flight model
in the weight and balance screen, add a nice big jettisonable water load and put it out on the wingtip! let the fun commence!
GENERAL OPERATING REFINEMENTS
situations can be saved even if you just loaded a situation to start up with! kind of convenient. situations within situations.
mouse controls rudder again, as desired, when no joy controls found
new file-open is nice... try it! should be much quicker to use. as well, new livery selection is nice... it is integrated with the aircraft-open
more failures that do not apply to your airplane are culled from the failure UI list
new command: "sim/flight_controls/brakes_toggle_auto" to toggle auto-brakes, as requested.
the cloud layers can now be as close together as you like
SLIGHT change in the icing model: you now only need ONE switch for bleed air or pneumatic on the panel now. it will active any bleed air and pneumatics on BOTH wings.
New command: "sim/autopilot/knots_mach_toggle" This is a new command (assignable to a joystick button or keyboard, and one shat should be used by custom-aircraft makers) that properly toggle between speed and mach number on the airspeed hold.
New command: "sim/flight_controls/tail_wheel_lock" Toggles the tailwheel lock.
New commands: ADF 1 and 2 cards, pilot and copilot, rotate up and down.
Much less turbulence from RAIN... you have to select STORMS or the turbulence slider to get noticeable turbulence,
or fly into CUMULUS clouds.
BUG-FIXES
shooting down other airplanes works.
lift fans possible, as intended.
these are insanely fun.
equip your plane with 1 (or more!) jet engine but set up 2 (or more) props.
be sure that the jet engine is set so it can be VECTORING! set the vector range in the helos and VTOL screen to at least 90 degrees, and check it as vectoring in the engines screen
for the props, set them to type LIFT FAN and give them plenty of RPM and make them ducted and at a vertical cant of 90 degrees
if you balance out the fan speed and radius number of blade and chord to absorb the right amount of power from the jet, then you should be able to get the thing balanced out to fly nicely like an F-35!
carrier catshot mission won't launch prematurely off the deck just cause you have toe-brakes, and should have better physics in place holding you before the shot
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