X-Plane Update Changelog

What's new in X-Plane Update 10.50

Sep 8, 2016
  • Total airports with 3-D scenery in the 10.50 release: 3102
  • New airports with 3-D scenery since the 10.45 release: 626
  • New Features & Improvements:
  • New U.S. city autogen.
  • Improved Baron & King Air.
  • Global winds aloft files.
  • Better AI airplane flight… they now fly a bit more realistically.
  • When you enable a net connections usage, we now auto-select a beacon to use if possible (rather than giving you the default, raw IP).
  • Added support for autoconfig of Control Pad and Xavion.
  • Stratus clouds look better from above.
  • Better randomization of AI parking spots.
  • Added “engine” notifications, so that sim components have access to all the same hooks as the plugin system via XPLMEventHook().
  • We can now separate Steam from non-Steam users in our analytics data.
  • Particle emitters now take rulers. This makes it unnecessary to put static animations around most emitters. This also fixes a bug where particle physics on the airplane OBJs was run at 2x speed.
  • New prompts to complete installation and/or scenery with authorized sim.
  • New meta-data key/value pair code. It also provides a new meta-data key to force flattening on a per-airport basis.
  • Updated credits & improved layout.
  • Swapped the order of the aircraft in A/B testing & added sample size analysis.
  • Auto-tuning when using Nearby ATC box can now be turned on and off.
  • Much better real weather diagnostics, and also we now scan through the TIME of the MDEG metar report, as should always have been there.
  • Much faster (about 1000x faster) sorting on the commands list in the key-to-command screen, which takes the UI from annoying to smooth.
  • Settings screen is no longer deleted on hide (makes for faster re-opens).
  • On-screen notification if download of real weather fails.
  • We can also steer tv-guided bombs and missiles with a joystick axis, cool!
  • Airfoil maker allowed to have smaller linear range, as needed to simulate iced or damaged foils, for example.
  • For Carrier Ops, LSO calls are a little more accurate, with phraseology that is now official standard, and based on angles of attack that are appropriate for the airplane (but be sure to set the stall warning angle of attack in Plane-Maker in the viewpoint screen!)
  • Strobe lites in the clouds set now to only happen when totally IN the clouds, so it does NOT affect scenery at nite when turned on like is used to. Break-out to visual at the cloud bases, as we needed all along.
  • Now we don’t delete the global wind and turb files, and we have then named in a way that makes sense for others to write to them as desired.
  • We load the afl every time we load the acf because the afl might have changed along with the acf!
  • Safe save – keeps old ACF around.
  • Removed ground targets on the HUD.
  • Limit thrust to 0, not below 0, to keep things from getting crazy when we fly jet engines into orbit.
  • Labels for movies and other warnings are now much easier to read, the movie messages are centered, the pulsing text easier to read.
  • Crash limit set from 20 g to 10 g.
  • No-op manips can take dateref and tooltip for training purposes.
  • New command to download all weather files.
  • Trimming out actual elevator deflection in pitch, not just the autopilot deflection. This will give slightly more accurate pitch trim, which will not fight with the elevator deflection in planes with art stability.
  • Joystick not applied to flight controls if user not flying cause ai is flying! Joystick calls not needed in that case.
  • Effects like prop disc now behave as expected in replay mode.
  • We now load the mouse cursor bitmaps all at once and cache them for future use (XPD-6181).
  • Slightly more data logging for net-tracking.
  • Plotting aircraft now in the slightly tilted attitude needed by the nearby coord-system origin.
  • Now the glideslope info for the profile view on the IOS as sent across the net by nav ID, not index! This allows us to have the profile work across the net with different apt databases!
  • When calculating string tiles, the LAST slop gets skipped since we can’t actually overlaps the tile.
  • Changed the way prop discs are loaded. They are now on the aircraft’s veh_prop_class so that they are accurate PER ENGINE. This also means that texture’s can be shared in memory if 2+ engines have the same prop. Lastly, it allows for goofy configurations like a gyrocopter that has a rotor and a propeller.
  • Stall warnings a little more accurate: do not depend on avionics switch, and reed switches do not depend on battery.
  • Planes now go around if a crash is imminent, and are also better about not kicking in rudder at low altitudes, which will crash an airliner.
  • Updated beacon port to 49707 by default, split the receiving sockets, clarified the error messages and updated the documentation.
  • New hint messages during loading screen.
  • Minor serial-port PFC hardware improvements.
  • FDR (Flight Data Recorder) window tracks monitor res to let you see a lot more on larger monitors.
  • Various bis of frame-rate improvement here and there, to increase frame-rate overall and also reduce pauses!
  • Fixes for Airplane Authors & Developers:
  • New datarefs:
  • sim/operation/override/override_airport_lites – int y boolean overrides when the airport lites go on and off.
  • sim/graphics/scenery/airport_lights_on – int y boolean Are the airport lites on? set override_airport_lites to 1 to write this.
  • sim/private/controls/puff/terrain_dust_ratio – 0 is none. 1.0 is X-Plane default. and also
  • you can add… MORE!
  • sim/cockpit2/weapons/gun_offset_heading_ratio – float y ratio Heading offset of the gun from within its maximum heading range
  • sim/cockpit2/weapons/gun_offset_pitch_ratio – float y ratio Pitch offset of the gun from within its maximum pitch range
  • Datarefs now available to control volume of each radio… You can now use a generic rheostat assigned to the dataref to set the volume of any radio!
  • X-Plane will provide the current world model-view, projection, and aircraft model-view matrices to plugins via datarefs.
  • We resize the property table in the lower left when an animation model is changed on a group.
  • Fixed instrument selection and list change in Plane Maker.
  • Fix memory scribble when deselecting generics in Plane Maker.
  • False alarm in debug code for instrument save: instrument save code would alert if a non-custom unused drag radius was saved on a non-draggable needle or pointer (XPD-6056).
  • Fixed bugs tabbing between instruments in Plane Maker.
  • We were not showing fuel on the right side of the plane in the load0out screen! Now we are!
  • Panel animation IO code permanent and not conditional. This way if you save a group-animated panel in regular X-Plane you DO NOT LOSE your data!!
  • Better alert messages for demo users–can use digital download, installer or buy DVDs to get scenery.
  • Wrek works about as well as one might expect in replay without having to work backwards or use more ram.
  • USB key is re-checked at start before demo warning.
  • Added autopilot basic mode to hold a rate of turn.
  • Global plugin tropopause values are now read/writeable to plugins. Tropopause variables allows to squeeze or stretch the stratosphere depending on where the the troposphere actually begins. Tropopause altitude and troposphere temperature allow a much better weather depiction in non-mid latitudes (polar and tropical regions).
  • New autopilot axis options: default to pitch or roll or none at all!
  • Added wreck flag to Plane Maker.
  • Engine screen in Plane-Maker: New field for thrust reverse area, for more accurate thrust reverser drag!
  • Airfoils are now loaded whenever you load an aircraft, even if it is the same aircraft you already had open.
  • This is in case you changed any airfoils in the background while X-Plane was still flying.
  • Weapon systems improvements:
  • Weapons systems improved quite a bit, with some passable precision-guided weapons delivery now possible!
  • WEAPON-SELECTION: Choose individual weapons or weapon type. The display is much better now, and clearly shows the selected weapon as flashing.
  • CAMERA: There can be up to ONE camera on the airplane, which may be steered with a joystick! Simply get a SECOND joystick, and assign the axis to camera steering and zoom to steer and zoom the on-board camera! On-board camera is one of the instruments you can drop in the plane in Plane-Maker.
  • GUN: Aircraft can have one gun. It MAY be steered, if desired, by joystick. Simply get a SECOND (or THIRD!) joystick, and assign the axis to gun/bomb steering to steer the gun!
  • AIR TO AIR MISSILES: The [ and ] key target other airplanes for missile guidance. Up to 24 total weapons may be carried (some or all of which may be missiles) and a dataref will be provided to re-load the craft in flight if you ever want to re-stock in flight.
  • UNGUIDED ROCKETS: For the unguided rockets, they live in a pod, invisible until fired, and up to 99,999 rockets may be stored in the pod. A dataref will be provided to re-load the craft in flight if you ever want to re-stock in flight.
  • UNGUIDED BOMBS: Up to 24 total weapons may be carried (some or all of which may be bombs) and a dataref will be provided to re-load the craft in flight if you ever want to re-stock in flight.
  • TV-GUIDED AIR TO GROUND GUIDED BOMBS AND MISSILES: TV-guided missiles require constant steering by the pilot with the mouse by dragging around the + icon on the camera… very very tricky to do… nearly impossible when flying an airplane or helo. AND I added something REALLY COOL: The GUN/BOMB STEERING ALSO steers the TV-guided bombs and rockets! If you have a joystick axis assigned to the gun/bomb steering, then it will steer the TV-guided bombs as well!
  • LASER-GUIDED AIR TO GROUND BOMB: There will be a targeting reticle in the middle of the camera. Any laser-guided bomb will go for that target!
  • GPS-GUIDED AIR TO GROUND GUIDED BOMBS AND MISSILES: There will be a targeting reticle in the middle of the camera. When a joystick button is pressed (joystick buttons screen, around the middle, labeled Target camera pointer in GPS) or command is sent in (sim/weapons/GPS_lock_here), whatever the targeting reticle was looking at at the moment is LOCKED IN as the GPS destination for future bombs and missiles! When desired, let them fly!
  • Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed for RC 3:
  • Take AG fix for buildings (XPD-6529).
  • Fix backward control surfaces when a third party aircraft uses the wrong control surface (XPD-6591).
  • Updated METAR URL to new address (XPD-6450).
  • Added copy ctor to dout_lines object to avoid writing COM radios into wrong temp memory (XPD-6539).
  • Updated earth_fix.dat and earth_nav.dat.
  • Now the stall warn test works.
  • Fixed crash with G1000.
  • Do not allow commands to be run inside an alert box. Fixes crash when pressing movie record twice in a row when EFIS app is up (XPD-6532).
  • Hid pylon column from failures (XPD-6536).
  • We have to restore the diffuse material every time we change the shader (XPD-6527).
  • Fixed for RC 2:
  • Updated translations for new DRM dialogs, and added TRAN() to region alerts (XPD-6209).
  • Removed long function ptr type in event hook, which wasn’t safe for passing string ptrs to the XPLM in scenery hook.
  • Fixed C-130 taxi and takeoff.
  • Now we don’t clear avio bus bits in plane load. This should fix weird power draws on planes that incorrectly have the avio bus src unchecked but do have a load and have some kind of avio usage on the panel (XPD-6502).
  • Art control timeout for run loop set to 5 ms. This prevents missing runways for users.
  • Includes art fixes for King Air, Baron & KLAX scenery.
  • Fixed random resets of systems in plugin-driven aircraft when AI aircraft crash.
  • Fixed max deflection of low speed nose wheel when not using a hardware tiller.
  • Fixed automatic cursor selection on new knob manipulators when two of the same manipulator are used in different parts of the OBJ file.
  • Fixed for RC 1:
  • Plane Maker & Desktop PDF manual updates for 1050 (XPD-5840).
  • Fixed water reflection offset in normals (XPD-6484).
  • Fixed goofy use of asymmetric dual window IOS for PFC (XPD-6482).
  • New data refs and version bump (XPD-6409, XPD-6453, XPD-6455).
  • Includes latest King Air with fuel flow fix (XPD-6479).
  • Turned off “fat edges” of click zones in 3-d (XPD-6390).
  • Fixed incorrect width check for AI and static aircraft (XPD-6475).
  • Restored prop datarefs from mobile. Fixes dead prop power knob in ATR-72 (XPD-6420).
  • Phase alpha and beta out to 0 at 0 speed – this prevents jitter of alpha and beta when plane is not flying.
  • Take off distance accuracy improved a little bit for ATC.
  • Fixed for Beta 7:
  • Support for latest version of Xavion.
  • Fixed missing normal maps on airplanes (XPD-6456).
  • Fixed airport lights randomly flickering on and off at EGLL and other airports (XPD-6412).
  • Fixed normal and night textures from liveries being ignored.
  • Fixed Z-thrash between objects in the roads group and draped roads, e.g. at EDDP custom scenery (XPD-6412).
  • Fixed rare crash when reloading scenery due to settings change.
  • Fixed crash when a custom third party DSF contains invalid .ags polygon parameters.
  • Fixed AI Aircraft taking off into the user’s aircraft when the user is on a runway and not talking to ATC (XPD-6452).
  • AI Aircraft won’t land or be created at airports that don’t have gates big enough to accommodate them (XPD-4408).
  • Command list for Plane-Maker updated to include all 10.50 commands.
  • French translation updated.
  • Searching in the airport window won’t match city names and other meta-data unless they are an exact match (XPD-6464).
  • Removed on-screen warnings when internet data output is disabled (XPD-6411).
  • Fixed for Beta 6:
  • Select more reasonable range for AI airport selection so we don’t revert to planet-wide search when local search fails.
  • Winds.rwx no longer downloaded, though we still scan it (XPD-6450).
  • Tweaks to AI flying.
  • Updated extra runway lights (XPD-6434).
  • We don’t drop unbound key handlers – x-assign uses them (XPD-6438).
  • Fixed crash in .grib load. We now explicitly check for null file handle and also set the path to full.
  • Lock semantics on all art assets were WRONG. This attempts to fix race conditions in obj-load and obj/tex/art asset release.
  • Reverse thrust & beta fixed (XPD-6435).
  • Fixed crash due to no airports. If you let the AI fly the X-15 and it flew too far from other airports the sim could crash.
  • Fixes black textures in A-310 and crashes. This should cover crashes changing airports, “negative ref count” errors,
  • and any black textures on airplanes, including crashes loading the JAR A-330 on startup.
  • ATC crash fixes: filing flight plan to seaport or helipad, crash in flight route handler (XPD-6399).
  • Livery substitution does subdirectories (XPD-6194).
  • Makes green button zoom and not full screen on OSX (XPD-6158).
  • Fixed crash when starting at scenery pack that has the Nimitz due to cull sphere changing (XPD-6437).
  • Updated earth_fix.dat and earth_nav.dat.
  • ATC controller cab build-up is double-async…fixes some pauses while flying. This is a perf improvement to avoid pauses due to AFTC while flying.
  • Fixed for Beta 5:
  • Fixed LODs on Gateway airports (XPD-6325).
  • Typo fix for hints screen (XPD-6424).
  • Flight director bars appear in C90B artificial horizon (XPD-6413).
  • C400 oil pressure gauge fixed.
  • Fixed crashed due to bogus road data. Filter tries to fix input road data from w2xp_net.
  • No longer look for Zulu time in Mdeg & alert for scanning weather.
  • Author window back in Plane Maker.
  • Fixed bad ref counting on untextured objects. Fixes black airplanes and crashes changing planes.
  • Fixed out of bound memory read to fix crashes in autogen ATC layout system.
  • Fixed XPLMCountPlanes API to fix warning about number of multiplayer planes in XSB.
  • Fixed AI plane descent to be smoother.
  • Removed internet data output warning when there’s no receiver.
  • Fixed reverse thrust.
  • Fixed duplicate command names.
  • Winds no longer plotted on the weather screen.
  • Fixed log.txt file creation.
  • Log book writes when file is erased but does not self-erase on auto-update (re-fixes XPD-6141).
  • Mouse wheel zooming isn’t eaten by manips it crosses (partial of XPD-5161).
  • Better defaults for video recording.
  • Don’t issue same-name nearby fixes twice. Prevents colocated points when PILUN is in route (XPD-6235).
  • Fix for crash in airport picker if meta-data is filled in (XPD-6433).
  • Fixed for Beta 4:
  • Fix for crash on start due to missing object.
  • Fix for AI aircraft flying too slowly.
  • Layer order was unstable between default .pol and base taxiway when collector was in use. Fixed by forcing pol to be 1 lower than taxiways (XPD-6407).
  • Fixed for Beta 3:
  • ADF fixed in B-58 (XPD-6375, 6380, 6383).
  • Stall warning alpha corrected in B-58 (XPD-6374).
  • Object on C90 door removed (XPD-6402).
  • B-58 instrument panel shadow is now solid (XPD-6384).
  • Better scaling of weapons console.
  • Make sure primary monitor on Windows is always main display (XPD-6393).
  • Access to CG and mass of all weapons.
  • Fix memory scribble when extruding scenery (XPD-6405).
  • Removed last squawk about missing lights from log.
  • Capped taxi speed at 25 kts.
  • Toned down MDEG to log error and not quit sim. People would get booted out of their flight because an add-on delivered OOB weather. (XPD-6391).
  • Fixes the bug where the beta would say “authorization is successful” and then be stuck in demo mode.
  • Fixed crash on road drape if there are cracks in the DSF mesh. We also use the DEM in 64-bits for much faster draping (XPD-6398).
  • Fixed plane falling through solid objects onto roads (XPD-6396).
  • Fixed broken lights on all airplanes. Light init must be AFTER plugin load so that data refs for lights can be resolved (XPD-6387).
  • Better macibm alerts.
  • Fixed crash with no GRIB.
  • Progress bar no longer off screen.
  • Fixed for Beta 2:
  • Fixed crash when starting Plane-Maker on Windows with an aircraft with attached objects.
  • Fixed crash on startup of X-Plane with plugins that load objects, e.g. SeaTraffic, GroundVehicles.
  • Fixed missing static aircraft on gateway aircraft.
  • Fixed missing new autogen city scenery – the new autogen was accidentally not included in beta 1.
  • Fixed crash when third party scenery contains un-textured objects.
  • Fixed objects floating in the sky.
  • Fixed missing taxi lines on airports.
  • Fixed overlapping items in basic joystick button setup screen.
  • Fixed for Beta 1:
  • We no longer nag the user about single engine planes pulling left if they aren’t in the C172 (XPD-6354).
  • Fixing dout_line com radio problems. This refactors the way read-only and empty dout lines are handled to fix com radios and make things more readable (XPD-6268).
  • Fix for hitting dev assert when you open-close-reopen the interaction recorder window.
  • Disabled the floating windows’ popout button (XPD-6342).
  • Changed layer order to prevent non-flush approach lights at KSAN 27 (XPD-6346).
  • Instancing state could get borked if an obj’s LODs were not all the same instance-able.
  • Stop inet listening on ALL modals. This fixes a bug where snap recall is called re-entrantly when the missing scenery modal is up due to a snap recall. Fixes bug where IOS hangs if no scenery at location of master machine.
  • Collector takes object param – fixes broken PAPIs.
  • Fix for infinite wait in crash reporter due to attempting to write to debug log.
  • Fixed shading of local maps.
  • Turned off auto-initialializing a flight once again.
  • Fixed crash when showing non-instance light-only OBJs with collector.
  • Fixed overlap in GPS (XPD-6179).
  • Track previous state so assertions are valid. Fixes load of Carenado C90.
  • After a custom light, ATTR_lit_level change need to be deferred, not immediate, because we don’t have a shader changed.
  • Fixes crash in Carenado C90, and is faster too.
  • Weather downloading not turned on when you only hit the button to SCAN weather.
  • Fix for the way we jump straight into the sim (old way could give us a null texture).
  • Restored functionality of “external visual tracks view” check box.
  • Fixed uninited var that could cause seg fault on OS X.
  • Do not let FM run before the plane is loaded – but DO let it run when the IOS is up.
  • No more crash when you hit the scan real weather lots of times really fast.
  • obj plot callback was ignoring model view changes, and thus obj culling wouldn’t work when transform was applied.
  • Ground lights moved into collector to fix bug with black quads at LOWI in non-HDR mode
  • Fix clipped generic instrument preview in PLN (XPD-6290).
  • Fixed messed up wire frame in plane-maker (XPD-6287).
  • If you’re running an authenticated demo download, we *always* pop up the nag to complete your install (XPD-6285).
  • Fix for missing break, resulting in wrong error message when checking sim version.
  • Fixed internet-output-disabled warning messages on the data output system when not called for.
  • road bug fixes:
  • Interpolation of Y when rebuilding roads is linear in world space,
  • not parameter space. This prevents us from making S curves when we
  • didn’t mean to.
  • Clusters of ramps connected to other ramps on the ground are
  • treated as draped – this makes ramp clusters look less silly.
  • Fixed pointers to transient locals in dout, fixing a crash when we attempted to write to invalidated pointers (XPD-6271).
  • Fix for crash caused by no-machine-ID alerts at an inopportune time (XPD-6277).
  • We now go straight to the sim after the XDD grace period message, instead of showing a confusing “Authorization Successful” message (XPD-6264).
  • A command received over network acted differently than a command received from a joystick. This fix solves the asymmetry and makes sure commands work the same regardless their origin being joystick or network.
  • We no longer disable ATC when there is no FP and no AI planes.
  • CMND packet handles third party commands and aliases too.
  • Lat and long corrected in data output.
  • Fix for global USB key not exiting the startup-time DRM modal dialog (XPD-6274).
  • Uninitialized variable used (XPD-6302).
  • Bug fixed where fuel flow on multi-engine planes was too low.make clicking in buy button for proj key work (XPD-6263).
  • Fixed illegal access to geoid in threaded park proc.
  • DRM visibly doesn’t request re-auth after 11 days when in grace period (XPD-6264).
  • Modal windows aren’t visible (XPD-6260).
  • Fixed broken lower right corner of round rect (XPD-6233).
  • Click on the map to place an airplane on the IOS and it works properly.
  • The glide-slope profile plot on the ios works for p==0 even if there are other planes as well.
  • Fixed regional DRM.
  • No more cockpit window coming up on IOS when a new airplane is loaded due to a situation file being chosen.
  • Fail at speed, alt, and time all work when controlled by IOS.
  • Now we see the word PAUSE on the master when paused on the IOS!
  • Road bug fixes (XPD-6132, XPD-5313, XPD-5945).
  • Fixed screwed up airplane starting.
  • Fix for “can’t get MID” messages appearing on setups where the MID isn’t essential (XPD-6245).
  • Fix for dev_assert caused by attempting to use the log system before it’s been initialized (XPD-6244).
  • Arrows work immediately to control the camera after closing the map window with the return key (XPD-5145).
  • Don’t dev assert on bind from worker thread -this is legal now (XPD-6236).
  • We now use overcast clouds in our QFL storms (XPD-6175).
  • Fix for self-tests that crash when you have custom commands defined (XPD-6162).
  • ATC will not vector a go-around aircraft until it clears 400 feet AGL…this prevents it from encouraging the AI to make dangerous steep low turns (XPD-6115).
  • Ramp starts had uninitialized data if we hit the “there are no ramp starts at all case.”

New in X-Plane Update 10.45 (Feb 29, 2016)

  • New Features:
  • Features for RC1:
  • More updated nav data from Robin.
  • Features for Beta 2:
  • Excluding objects by airport ID
  • Features for Beta 1:
  • Updated nav data from Robin
  • Vertical offset ratio available for external visuals
  • The “demo expired” popup now gives much more relevant advice. We look at what DRM sources you’ve unlocked from in the past (DVD, XDD, or USB stick) and tailor the “unlock the full version” message based on that.
  • Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed for RC2:
  • Fixed changing aircraft from the IOS screen.
  • Fixed crash when dragging AI planes in IOS screen.
  • Fixed for RC1:
  • Save at least one snapshot for situations and replays so we have all the data for file-open (XPD-6201).
  • Slung load does not start from flight location start (XPD-6197).
  • Airport search string for normal airport window is now totally separate from the map/IOS search string (XPD-6138).
  • More robust fix for the crash-when-no-NICs-found (XPD-6196).
  • G430 CLR button cancels procedure selection (XPD-6180).
  • Can now select a new approach in G430 (XPD-6178).
  • Fixed airport map overlap in GPS (XPD-6179).
  • Do not zero throttle on beta if plugin has taken over (XPD-6174).
  • Don’t reset previously-in-inet overrides on flight reset (XPD-6173).
  • Copy-paste on windows would truncate the last selected character.
  • Restored v8 aliases of transponder commands in an attempt to make PFC plugin work.
  • Aerosoft nav data missing the IAF flags (XPD-5872).
  • Always save user edits to navaids and fixes to the Custom Data folder (XPD-6167).
  • Keep current local map type and zoom setting when the weather menu is opened (XPD-5202).
  • Junction matching was using the wrong bones, causing some non-composite junctions to be ignored. This makes slightly better variety in the autogen road intersections in cities.
  • Fixed for Beta 2:
  • Overriding throttles on p0 no longer overrides ALL aircraft (XPD-6154).
  • XPCreateWidget and XPLMSpeakString work when starting “cold and dark”. Refactor of text to speech API so that plugin and misc speech is not muted when avio bus is off (XPD-6145).
  • Taxi sign errors in log.txt (XPD-6147).
  • Scissors error on scrollers and text fields in plane-maker (XPD-6155).
  • Fix for period in the wrong place in DRM error message (XPD-6124).
  • Fixed for Beta 1:
  • C400 and C172 use new torque fix
  • AGBs:
  • Random spelling choice caused the shortest spelling to be picked, leaving blocks mostly empty
  • Neighbor-tile clip had wrong expression, causing trees to leak out
  • much better diagnostics and debugging
  • Selecting AI planes lets user pick livery (XPD-6090)
  • Synchronized all clutches if a pre-rotate button is present on the panel (XPD-6083)
  • Transponder does not blink when transponder powered off or broken (XPD-6062)
  • Autogen trees are varied (XPD-4742)
  • If the pilot log file is never loaded due to an early exit due to an update, do not write the pilot log out on quit or we lose all pilot log entries (XPD-6141)
  • Fix GPS teardrop holding entry into left-hand (non-standard) holdings when inbound course (XPD-6142)
  • Prop torque was doubled in all propeller airplanes (not helos or vtols)
  • We now advise the user to check their net connection where appropriate (XPD-6124)
  • On first launch of the map window, we now show the current airport ID (XPD-6138)
  • Massive performance improvement with GPS map display: For anything else but the default 35nm range, the airspace warning would trash the airspace cache of the map. Now we cache up to four bounding boxes full of airspaces. That allows for two screens with different size settings, and two airspace warners.
  • Wrong heading cue from G430 (XPD-6041)
  • Airport sorting performance in GPS (XPD-6131)
  • Using a separate IOS with AI planes enabled no longer resets user’s aircraft randomly
  • Require an object to be reloaded with dynamic polygons if client requests it and the object cache has no dynamic polygons. This ensures the if the scenery engine gets to the Nimitz before the boat code does, we get our hard triangles when we need them. (XPD-4844)
  • Fixed demo timing out immediately
  • Plane-Maker finds the objects/ folder for airplanes in a case-insensitive manner
  • Manual extension pump gear and flaps were mixed up

New in X-Plane Update 10.45 RC 1 (Jan 29, 2016)

  • An update to the global airports.
  • The global airports won’t conflict with custom scenery – new exclusion technology prevents overlapping buildings.
  • Nav data has been significantly updated – lots of bug fixes are in 10.45.
  • The GPS data for the G430 now contains IAFs, so you can fly GPS approaches with proper transitions.
  • Proper prop torque for aircraft that opt in.

New in X-Plane Update 10.32 RC 1 (Jan 7, 2015)

  • GNS map settings on the new GPS-units are now persistent per unit between X-Plane sessions
  • Fixed waypoint ID autocompletion not working after direct-to on new GPS
  • Added airports from the X-Plane airport scenery database to the new GPS – this allows for selection of small and grass airfields that have no instrument procedures
  • Fixed depiction of airports with soft/gravel/grass runways on the new GPS
  • Fixed avionics fan and warning systems working without electrical power
  • Fixed ATIS text-to-speech audible without electrical power
  • Fix crashes of ATC/AI system at airports near seaplane bases (notably PANC)
  • Fix crashes of ATC/AI system at airports with broken taxi networks
  • Fixed AI being unable to taxi some taildraggers or planes with swivelling nose wheel
  • Fixed AI being unable to restart engines after flameout
  • Fix crashes when spawning AI aircraft near water
  • Fixed unwanted repositioning after loading a different aircraft through a situation file
  • Fixed special situations (glider winch, tow) starting at the wrong airport after loading a situation file
  • Fixed loading glider winch from a situation file
  • Fixed unwanted repositioning when loading a new plane (runway selection is memorized now)
  • Fixed LOD settings for time demo – this fixes wrong benchmark results with nVidia hardware
  • Fixed crash with autogen buildings with more than 255 floors
  • Changes to navaids through the local map can now be permanently saved from there
  • Fixed glowing selection on Quick Flight window not working reliably
  • Improved simulation of engine start on fuel-injected recip engines. Now the typical “Lycoming” start procedure using the boost pump to prime and crank the engine with the mixture closed can be used to start an engine.
  • Added dataref sim/flightmodel2/engines/engine_fuel_in_intake float[8] to observe priming
  • Improved simulation of glider launch by a winch: The physical model of the winch now has a limited power output defined by cable speed and pulling force which is more realistic than an indefinitely strong winch
  • Added dataref sim/world/winch/winch_max_bhp float to set the maximum available winch power. Note that this is power at the cable, behind the wheel and all the transmissions and clutches, so it will be a lot lower than the raw engine power the winch is marketed with!
  • Added roll stabilization in the initial phase of the winch launch – that simulates the helpers running with your wingtips on the first few meters
  • Added an audio feedback on tow cable release (thanks to R.C. Simulations for providing the sound file)
  • Corrected groundspeed data-output to take pitch angle into account
  • Fixed data-input of brakes not working
  • Allow override of toe-brakes by plugin/data-input when no rudder pedal hardware is attached
  • Fixed replay of planes with fixed gear
  • Several improvements in ADSB-output for apps like X-Avion, Foreflight, FlyQ, WingX Pro, etc..
  • Support for the latest version of X-Avion
  • Fixed altitude datarefs of other planes not working in multiplayer mode
  • List of datarefs cleaned up a bit – more explanations added and typos fixed
  • Removed integral padding warnings from Log

New in X-Plane Update 10.30 Beta 1 (May 26, 2014)

  • NEW GPS NAVIGATORS X-430 AND X-530:
  • Select the new GPS/FMS system in the Systems screen of Plane Maker to get it into your aircraft. Two slots are available for pilot- and copilot side. New instruments are available in the panel editor to enable screens of the 430 and 530 for 3d-cockpits.
  • The old GNS430 instrument is very small, so it is treated based on the size in the panel:
  • If the instrument is given a REALLY SMALL spot (e.g. 62 pixels tall) it draws a compact display with just frequencies – not realistic, but at least readable.
  • If the new instrument is given a BIGGER spot (The cutover is 96 pixels vertically, but authors SHOULD give it the full 240) you get the full instrument layout, and how sharp it is will be a function of the spot size – at 240 pixels tall you get the ideal look.
  • At all times, at any size, you can click on the NEW instrument’s screen in 3-d or 2-d and get a POPUP that runs at full size and full sharpness.
  • The new GPS navigator reads instrument approaches from a database with near-worldwide coverage which is provided by Aerosoft. Subscribe to Aerosoft Navdata Pro to get monthly updates for all instrument procedures world-wide!
  • The new GPS navigator also provides a better interaction with HSIs and CDIs in the panel, and allows for more realistic autopilot set-up.
  • PLAYBACK AND ANALYZE YOUR REAL FLIGHTS IN X-PLANE:
  • Xavion is now a Flight Data Recorder!
  • With ZERO input required from you, Xavion records every flight you make.
  • Then, with X-Plane you can simply go to the File menu and select IMPORT XAVION FLIGHT to see your real flight… in X-Plane!
  • This brings flight data recording and visualization from the test pilots and professionals right to you, with a very easy user interface in X-Plane to get and display the data! Fun!
  • CLOUD AND ATMOSPHERE CHANGES:
  • Cloud code has been bug fixed a bit. Notable bug fixes:
  • Fixed the “white-out” bug – no more loss of visibility when near clouds.
  • The transition out of the bottom of clouds should be consistently close to the bases set in the weather screen when you set up a non-stormy stratus system; this is good for practicing ILS break-outs at a specific elevation.
  • Transition into clouds should be less visually jarring.
  • Lighting calculations for cloud puffs rebuilt to look better.
  • Textures shuffled to save VRAM.
  • This patch changes the scaling of the cloud rendering slider, so you will want to re-tune your cloud rendering settings for optimal framerate on your hardware.
  • A few notes for cloud-tweakers:
  • The texture layout for clouds may be further juggled during beta; I’ll post notes on the new layout of the textures when they’re finalized.
  • The cloud lighting constants will almost certainly be tweaked.
  • Clouds will be affected by fog changes, which are not complete as of beta 1.
  • The white band of fog in high-altitude views has been fixed.
  • Please note that as of beta 1, not all fog-related changes are in the sim yet; TBD whether these make it into a later beta or become their own release as soon as they are ready.
  • There is now an official override for clouds (sim/operation/override/override_clouds) – setting this to one gets rid of all cloud puffs and white-out; it is no longer necessary to use art controls to replace X-Plane’s built-in clouds. Using this override saves CPU time that would have been spent building clouds and VRAM that would have been spent storing cloud meshes.
  • CONTROLS FOR NETWORKED EXTERNAL VISUALS:
  • The options for controlling networked computers for multiple visuals have changed in 10.30:
  • 1. In the External Visual tab of the networking setup, there is now just one checkbox to make this machine a networked “slave” and enter the IP address of the master. The controls to make it an extra visual, extra cockpit, or extra anything are located elsewhere.
  • 2. In the External Visual tab of the networking setup, each entry for the IP of an extra visual has a checkbox to determine whether the external visual tracks the view of the master. If this is off, the views are controlled on the slave machine. If this is on, the view is set to be the same as the master, but modified by the view offsets in the Rendering options.
  • 3. The Rendering Options have three choices for the Default view. (The Default view is what you get with the “w” key and is the view that you first get when you load the aircraft.)
  • 4. - forward view with panel (X-Plane’s default)
  • 5. - forward view with scenery only (no HUD)
  • 6. - forward view in the 3D cockpit (with 3D view controls active)
  • 7. The Rendering Options menu has a new checkbox to lock the view to the default. If set, the view will always be the default cockpit view and cannot be changed by view controls or the network master machine.
  • 8. lateral offset can go -9.99 to 9.99, as per customer request
  • NEW ART ASSETS:
  • Several enhanced and 38 new textures: an extended set of tropical ones, providing more climatic nuances, enhanced cold-dry regions and some special landuses for HD-sceneries.
  • Autogen library tweaked to avoid having tall buildings on approach paths to airports. For example, KBOS 22L is no longer blocked. This fixes the case where the autogen is “medium density” but the art asset being mapped via the library was incorrectly a tall building.
  • Tweaks to urban terrain textures.
  • A number of DDS files have been re-ground from their PNG sources to improve color fidelity.
  • AIRCRAFT CONVERSION FROM V9:
  • The interpretation of the trim setting datarefs changed from X-Plane 9 to X-Plane 10. The datarefs in question are
  • sim/cockpit2/controls/elevator_trim
  • sim/cockpit2/controls/aileron_trim
  • sim/cockpit2/controls/rudder_trim
  • In X-Plane 9, the values returned by the datarefs were the trim setting as a fraction of total control surface travel, corresponding to the way trim range was declared in PlaneMaker. In X-Plane 10, the values of the data refs are the trim setting as a fraction of total trim range, meaning the range returned is always +1.0 to -1.0. To compute the actual control surface deflection in degrees, multiply the trim setting by the trim range in degrees.
  • FUSELAGE MOUNTED SPEEDBRAKES – CHANGE IN FLIGHT MODEL:
  • There is a minor change in the flight model for fuselage mounted speedbrakes. Prior to 10.30, only positive extension angles caused drag. As of 10.30, drag is based on the net extension angle, meaning the difference between the current speedbrake angle and its retracted angle. This means that speedbrakes with negative retracted angles (for example, to match a tapered fuselage) will create more drag than they used to. To get accurate drag on deployment, it is important to specify an accurate retracted angle. (You get one degree for free to allow retracted speedbrakes to hide in the fuselage.)
  • NEW PARAMETERS FOR STEERED AND CASTORING GEARS:
  • Better support for castoring versus steered gears and better tail-wheel lock function:
  • If you enter a steering angle in Plane-Maker for a given gear, then that gear is considered to be a wheel that can pivot, not a fixed wheel like a main gear.
  • If you enter a wheel as CASTORING in Plane-Maker for a given gear, then that gear is also considered to be a wheel that can pivot… not a fixed wheel like a main gear.
  • Once a wheel has been defined as one that can pivot (either by entering a steering angle or checking the box that the wheel is castoring), then:
  • If the tailwheel lock is engaged or nosewheel steering is on, that gear will move through the steering angle (which may well be zero for a castoring gear, which simply locks that wheel at zero).
  • If the nosewheel steering is off or the tailwheel lock is off, then the wheel free-castors.
  • So, simply put, by entering a steering angle or “this wheel castors” checkbox in Plane-Maker, you define that wheel as being able to pivot. If the tailwheel lock is on or or the nosewheel steering is on, it will do so through the commanded steering angle… very possibly zero for castoring gear! And once the nosewheel steering is off or tailwheel is unlocked, all such gear will castor.
  • PLUGINS AND DATAREFS:
  • As we modernize X-Plane’s use of OpenGL, the plugin system will start to catch illegal drawing – that is, drawing outside of a drawing callback. If your plugin is drawing at an illegal time, you may see a message in the log with your plugin’s name (and the OpenGL code will not be executed). If you see these error messages but believe your plugin is operating according to spec, please contact us.
  • Bug fix: Custom operating-system-provided cursors work for plugins. (This feature worked in X-Plane 10.10 and was broken in 10.20.)
  • Datarefs:
  • The second GPS unit is available – virtually all GPS datarefs have been cloned for GPS2
  • 8.33 khz tuning is available on all COM radios
  • All sound preferences are available as datarefs – see sim/operation/sound/.
  • The winch default parameters can be customized – see sim/world/winch/
  • Rotor brake strength can be customized – see sim/cockpit2/switches/rotor_brake_ratio
  • sim/flightmodel/position now has angles both in OpenGL coordinates (useful for drawing, available since X-Plane 6) and in a coordinate system relative to level flight (new to 1030); therefore you can use these new angles to create custom instruments without “jumps” when X-Plane loads scenery.
  • X-Plane’s built-in clouds can be disabled with sim/operation/override/override_clouds
  • CORRECT BLENDED DRAWING IN THE 3-D WORLD:
  • A new dataref lets 3-d drawing callbacks differentiate between the solid part of drawing (where OBJs can be rendered with correct shadows) and the translucent part of drawing (where alpha effects can be over-drawn without HDR artifacts). See this technote.
  • sim/graphics/view/plane_render_type
  • PLUGIN-ADDED FORCES:
  • New datarefs let your plugin add arbitrary forces to the aircraft – see this technote for more info on how to write them and how to share them.
  • sim/flightmodel/forces/fside_plug_acf
  • sim/flightmodel/forces/fnrml_plug_acf
  • sim/flightmodel/forces/faxil_plug_acf
  • sim/flightmodel/forces/L_plug_acf
  • sim/flightmodel/forces/M_plug_acf
  • sim/flightmodel/forces/N_plug_acf
  • PLUGIN-ADDED ELECTRICAL BUS LOADS:
  • Plugins can add custom electrical loads to any of X-Plane’s 6 buses via a new dataref:
  • sim/cockpit2/electrical/plugin_bus_load_amps
  • Please note that this dataref is not meant to be shared – only a plugin installed with the dataref can write to this because there is no provision for coordination between plugins.
  • MISCELLANEOUS NEW FEATURES:
  • New view commands: direct selection of all 8 view directions. Assign these to an 8-way hat switch.
  • Increased limit on lateral view offset in the rendering options for offset monitors.
  • Commands to control APU bleed air.
  • Commands to toggle DME audio.
  • Commands and plugin datarefs to enable/disable TrackIR.
  • Option to automatically dismiss error messages for extra visuals and aircraft under control of an IOS.
  • Added commands for setting the directional gyros:
  • “sim/instruments/DG_sync_down”
  • “sim/instruments/DG_sync_up”
  • “sim/instruments/copilot_DG_sync_down”
  • “sim/instruments/copilot_DG_sync_up”
  • Added commands for helo governor and clutch:
  • “sim/engines/governor_on” ,”Throttle-governor on.”
  • “sim/engines/governor_off” ,”Throttle-governor off.”
  • “sim/engines/clutch_on” ,”Clutch on.”
  • “sim/engines/clutch_off” ,”Clutch off.”
  • Dome projection EXPERIMENT allowed without key. You can test dome and cylinder projection for your setup before buying a Pro Key.
  • Added commands and datarefs to control carriers and frigates from plugins better.
  • Added command for carrier cat-shot
  • Carriers are not replaced when they are under plugin control
  • Added internet output option for SkyDemon
  • Added FlyQ as a supported iPad app for X-Plane data output
  • Planet textures receive a one-notch resolution increase. This will help the look of the planet at a relatively low VRAM cost for most users.
  • NEW FEATURES FOR AIRCRAFT AUTHORS:
  • New equipment option in the special equipment in plane-maker: fire warning bell equipped! check this to get the fire bell. NOTE: previous versions of x-plane ALWAYS gave you a fire bell if there was an engine fire. Now, you must check this box to get that warning!
  • New Plane-Maker feature to not draw the OBJs, but draw the ACF flight-model geometry when editing so you can edit the acf and see what yor are doing without having the flight model geometry hidden by OBJ
  • Updated propeller control for turbo props: prop can now go into beta when pulled to idle, as real props do! Then, the prop goes into reverse when pulled aft over the gate. This is activated by a checkbox in Plane-Maker that must be checked in order to simulate that behavior of PT6-like turbo props.
  • Autopilot can now track nav courses based on GPS, LOC, OBS setting or heading bug, depending on type of autopilot. See the technote on autopilot sources for more info!
  • See the technote on HSI sources for more information on how to get the new GPS in your plane, and the new GPS technote on how the new GPS will interact with the autopilot.
  • Plane-Maker and Airfoil-Maker are available as 64-bit apps for Linux users.
  • Generic lights numbers 16-63 can now be used, for up to 64 generic lights on an aircraft. (In X-Plane 10.25 only the first 16 were independently controllable.)
  • Generic needle instrument can now take deflection sources for pitch. This lets you build a crude mechanical artificial horizon strictly out of generic instruments.
  • Attached objects have a new mode: “prefill only”. If all of the objects in your aircraft are too ‘heavy’ to do efficient cockpit prefilling (e.g. they have too many vertices or too many animations), you can make a new dedicated object that will be used only for prefill and crudely mask out most of the cockpit without users seeing it. The existing mode (object is used for prefill and drawn) is still available, and existing planes do not need any modifications.
  • The texture resolution check-boxes for attached objects correctly reflect how objects will be loaded when there is texture sharing between objects. If you set the “high res texture” option for one object, all objects sharing the texture receive the same setting.
  • GLOBAL_cockpit_lit now works with panel regions that are not a power of 2 or do not cover the entire 3-d panel. This was a screwy case for 3-d cockpits and did not work correctly in 10.25. If your panel’s UV map seems screwed up in 10.30, please contact Ben for advice on how to fix your aircraft.
  • NEW FEATURES FOR SCENERY AUTHORS AND MODELERS:
  • The “frame rate” data output now contains two fields: CPU and GPU. These times show the time the CPU and GPU spent drawing one frame (on average) in milliseconds. This means that not only can you tell whether your framerate is CPU or GPU limited (the larger number is the limiting factor), but you can tell the relative loading of the CPU and GPU, and you can measure improvements in CPU or GPU use even if they are not the dominant factor. GPU time on OS X is only available in OS X 10.9 and later.
  • There is a new art control “hdr/debug_lights” that, when set to 1, will show you the cone area of all spill lights. The cone area of the spill lights on screen is a good indicator of how much GPU power the spill light is taking. If your scenery or airplane is very slow at night in HDR mode, turn on light debugging and look for huge, wasteful spill light cones. If you can make these smaller you may improve GPU performance.
  • The road.net file format has a new directive LOCKED_POWERLINES – if put on its own line, it indicates that X-Plane should not attempt to “optimize” power-line tower placement for this road network. Instead, power line towers will be placed in every junction and vertex from the original data (in the DSF, with no extras added). You can use this directive if you want to cleanly control powerline tower placement when you generate your custom scenery.
  • DSFs now support multiple road.net files, including different road.net files in different overlay layers.
  • Autogen blocks contain a number of new features, including selectable sub-grids, to support development of the next update to the urban autogen art assets.
  • MISCELLANEOUS BUG FIXES:
  • Individual prop pitch controls (Prop1, Prop2, etc.) control only the prop they are assigned to.
  • Joystick centering logic handles joysticks with an offset center so they still have full control input.
  • Autopilot course tracking on VORs with an offset magvar now works correctly.
  • Accuracy improvements in long range VOR and glideslope tracking.
  • OBS knob operates the correct HSI when used with a fixed source HSI (e.g., HSI to Nav 1 only).
  • HSI source selector is reset to Nav 1 when a new aircraft is loaded.
  • Local map retains its zoom level when you use the weather menu.
  • “Show our ILS” and glideslope display in the local map identify the approach more reliably.
  • “Shutdown tailwind ILS” now works reliably in gusting crosswinds and doesn’t switch ILSs on and off every other second
  • Joystick buttons are now numbered consistently in the Basic and Advanced button assignment menus.
  • Save Situation and Save Replay work when “Save Preferences on Exit” is disabled.
  • Turning off “Save Preferences on Exit” no longer causes a crash warning on the next startup.
  • Aircraft count is automatically adjusted when you add multiplayer aircraft.
  • Multiplayer aircraft are removed from the environment when you turn off the IP connection.
  • Networked IOS now reliably loads aircraft and airports on the student machine.
  • Space Shuttle: Initial speed for the final approach is set to the correct 300 kias.
  • Custom chord offsets in V9 aircraft import correctly into V10.
  • Trim speed in V9 aircraft imports correctly into V10.
  • Retracted angle setting for fuselage mounted speedbrakes is back in PlaneMaker.
  • Brake response more realistic, with the whole plane not being held back by just a smidgeon of brakes if the craft was stopped before
  • The FCU (fuel control unit) of turbo props now takes the highest of throttle and backup throttle, like it does on a real PT-6
  • The sync real-time checkbox is no longer required for Xavion
  • Corrected depiction of landing gear deflection in Plane Maker
  • Changed a constant to get the transonic drag down just a hair, as it needs to be according to testing with the citation X, and a (real) F-18 pilot testing with the falcon 7-X indicates that this is needed for the high-subsonic aircraft
  • Joystick UI shows that null zone applies to toe brakes and it does indeed apply to toe brakes
  • Reverse thrust sound variation much reduced, as per notes from numerous real pilots
  • Manual weather-dragging scaled better now, you can get levels of thunderstorms and clouds much more readily
  • Planes used to lean off to the right ever so slightly. It turned out this was due to an error in the computation of flow along the spar direction in cases where wings had dihedral – Some component of this lateral flow took an axial component after sweep was applied, so the right wings were moving slightly slower than they should have been the effect was a fraction of a knot, but till just enough to lean the plane to the right a hair. That is now fixed!
  • Turn coordinator now reflects bank rate as well as turn rate to give a more immediate response, as does the real one
  • The data output was not showing the total bus amperages correctly since it was displaying the data while it was still in the process of being summed. Now, we show the total bus loads in the data output
  • Logic error fixed on when to apply rotor dynamics
  • Foreflight output is now working at 1 hertz like it should
  • Improved response of external visuals on network computers
  • Fixed saving situation files from the map screen
  • Plane-Maker VIEWPOINT, ENGINES and SPECIAL EQUIP screens re-organized
  • Mouse-dragging of the throttle now syncs for beta and reverse according to the settings in Plane Maker
  • Fixed circle camera view jerks when a new scenery tile was loaded
  • Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and XAvion recorded flights can now be up to 4 hours long
  • Fixed X-Plane going into replay mode when you just opened the FDR window without actually selecting a file.
  • Fixed the virtual cockpit viewpoint of the Avanti
  • Raised max wind speed enterable in the weather window to 150 knots – winds aloft can really be that strong at times!
  • Made over-wing condensation effect stronger by just a hair
  • Fixed X-Plane hang when ADSB weather out is selected. Improved output for XAvion to correctly emulate a Sagetech Clarity ADSB receiver.
  • Added nominal bus voltages to the Flight Data Recorder so we can see what the plane is doing
  • Improved eagle claw gears to look better, considering the pitch of the aircraft, and to handle the inverted eagle claw case as well
  • When running a REAL Garmin GPS and NAV/COM hardware unit from X-Plane, failures now are properly labelled, and functional in the way you would normally expect. Also, the setting of the left input to go into COM or VLOC is now available as a dataref
  • Fixed pro-use key mis-match message across a network to indicate what PC has a key, and what one does not, to help debugging what machine needs a key
  • Set visibility lower limit to 100 meters, as per the minimums for a Cat-3 approach, and the lowest vis that you can encounter in clouds
  • Failure screen shows only air inlet heat failures for engines that we actually have, and put them in engines: de-ice where they belong
  • Fixed a bug in anchoring sea-planes: the anchor was not always dropped where the flight was started. Now the anchor should go to the right place when seaplanes start (no matter how they start: placed by menu, dragged on the map, whatever)
  • Ice now accumulates mass on the aircraft with something closer to surface area than aircraft weight, so that is more realistic
  • New METAR-interpretation engine from Xavion: It is now much much more robust, and capable of handling online weather data from European and Russian reports just fine as well!
  • Flap handle and flap surfaces now follow the Flight Data Recorder properly now, so you can analyze accidents caused by flap failures properly in replay.
  • Transmission temperature comes up at a more realistic rate, getting to terminal temperature in a reasonable time-frame
  • New variable added to the electrical accessors to let people add their own bus voltage if they like, as per various requests.
  • The new dataref is: sim/cockpit2/electrical/plugin_bus_load_amps float[4]
  • this is bus load that a plugin can add to the total loads, if desired
  • If an electrical bus is down due to failure or under-voltage, then it will not build up amperage, which should be more realistic
  • A new dataref sim/cockpit2/switches/rotor_brake_ratio float is now avail to control the amount of rotor brake being applied
  • Clarified the various settings for FADEC and critical altitude in Plane-Maker
  • Commands to move prop governor #1 no longer affect all props by mistake
  • Datarefs added for winch control, to control the line length, ramp-up time, and speed
  • ATIS works even if both com1 and com2 audio monitor are selected, as it should in the real plane
  • Improved simulating the physics of VOR needles and flags better, especially visible when switching between sources for a mechanical HSI
  • Added command to bring up acf load menu
  • Fixed the autopilot and instruments and added datarefs to make the GPS 2 (co-pilot GPS) useable.
  • Direction of heat blur is fixed! You don’t need to change your aircraft; the heat blur will simply be drawn in the expected direction of exhaust.
  • VRAM optimized for non-power-of-2 3-d panels.
  • CDI deflection range on needle generic instrument fixed.
  • Fixed black line in the center of the screen when HDR is enabled and the window is an odd number of pixels tall.
  • Lit level on generic triggers now work.
  • CPU type is correctly logged for OSX.
  • AI airplanes should pick different start locations at gate. Warning: if your airport layout has too few gates, the airports will stack up. You may need to add more gates to the airport. This fix will only work when there are enough gate slots.
  • If an airplane fails to load, flight parameters are reset – avoids some rare crashes.
  • Reading of manipulators used to take place between the solid and blended phase of darwing; this could cause animations to appear out of sync between parts of the plane in the 3-d cockpit. Animations are now always in sync between the different parts of the plane.

New in X-Plane Update 10.25 RC1 (Nov 23, 2013)

  • BUG FIX: fixed crash when disabling plugins like XSquawkBox when AI planes are enabled.
  • Tweaked urban terrain textures
  • Updated LOD settings for urban terrain textures and autogen.
  • Restored library.txt to KSEA to fix compatibility with YSSY scenery. (Made library private)
  • Removed decals from far view of composite shader. (This helps urban terrain.)
  • Removed log warnings about unknown tree layers.

New in X-Plane Update 10.25 Beta 3 (Nov 7, 2013)

  • This fixes a missing file at KSEA in 10.25b2.

New in X-Plane Update 10.25 Beta 2 (Nov 6, 2013)

  • This build adds art file updates.
  • Global natural terrain improvements.
  • New urban textures added for dry climates.
  • Bogus library entries removed from KSEA demo area.
  • Global airport taxi sign typos fixed.
  • 3WO renamed to KEZS.
  • Bug fixes:
  • This build uses more modern code to launch the installer. The old code only crashed inside the installer itself, but we are trying to use the latest code everywhere. IF the app crashes trying to launch the installer (to check for updates) please let us know.

New in X-Plane Update 10.25 Beta 1 (Oct 18, 2013)

  • New Stuff:
  • This update contains 3-d buildings for over 250 airports, contributed by the X-Plane community. This is our first update to ship community-built airports using the X-Plane 10 airport building library. We will continue to ship updates to these airports as more contributions come in.
  • A large number of natural terrains are updated. There are 103 new textures (+30%), which now represent tropical, partly subtropical and many other landclasses entirely new. This comes along with a great number of improved, enlarged or changed former textures. V10 has now a consistent look around the globe.
  • New urban base terrain for wet climates. We are working on dry climates and may have them for a future beta, but for the wet climates this should make a nice improvement in views of cities from the air.
  • Airport library and art decals have texture updates.
  • The default libraries have paths marked as deprecated or private where appropriate; when using WED 1.2.1 beta 1, old and private library paths are hidden, simplifying the library.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed network data output to ForeFlight.
  • Fixed scroll wheel operation on Windows.
  • Fixed ACF panel import in Plane-Maker.
  • Datarefs:
  • New datarefs to control the aircraft carrier and frigate with an override.
  • Cinema verite can be set by dataref.
  • Read-only access to whether HDR is on.
  • Airports:
  • 08R 0B7 0B8 1B9 28M 2B2 3WO 40N 4B6 4B8 4V8 6B0 6B9 6D6 6S8 7B9 8D4 9WN1 BGBW BGGH BGKK BGMA BIAR BIBA BIBD BIBF BIBK BIBL BIBR BIBV BIDV BIEG BIFF BIFL BIFM BIFZ BIGH BIGJ BIGR BIHK BIHL BIHN BIHU BIIS BIKL BIKP BIKR BIMK BIMS BIOF BIPA BIRF BIRG BIRK BIRL BISF BISI BISL BISR BISS BIST BITE BITH BITN BIVI BIVM BIVO CYJN CYQT CYRO CYXY D25 E70 EDHM EDHS EGYP EHTE KABE KACK KALS KAPA KAQO KAST KATL KATW KAVX KBAZ KBDL KBGM KBID KBOS KBST KBTV KCDA KCEF KCEZ KCLI KDDH KEEN KEFK KEGV KETB KEVW KEWB KFLD KFLL KFMH KFMN KFSO KGCN KGFL KGON KGPI KGRB KGSP KHFD KHVN KHWY KHZL KIJD KIZG KJMS KLDM KLEW KLUF KLVK KMAL KMDS KMKE KMKG KMMK kmpv KMRY KMVL KMVY KOQU KOWD KOXC KPAE KPBG KPKF KPNE KPSO KPTN KPVC KPVD KPYM KRHI KRKD KRME KRUT KSAW KSBA KSFF KSFZ KSKX KSLC KSLH KTAN KTCY KTOA KTTD KUUU KVSF KWRI KWST KXLL L52 LFHN LFHS LFLY LGKR LNMC LSXB LXGB MKJP N82 NY54 NZAR OR10 S83 SA07 SA7Q SA9E SAVD SAZY SBAR SBBP SBCO SBFN SBIH SBNT SBPA SBPC SBPK SBPR SBRP SBST SC1A SCAK SCAP SCAS SCBB SCBI SCCC SCCM SCCR SCCU SCCY SCDQ SCFM SCFT SCGA SCGB SCGY SCHR SCIH SCII SCKO SCKT SCLB SCLD SCLY SCMF SCML SCNM SCOH SCOL SCON SCOO SCPC SCPF SCPH SCPI SCPK SCPL SCPQ SCPU SCPV SCPY SCQC SCQI SCQK SCQY SCSH SCTA SCTN SCTO SCTR SCVI SCVL SCVO SCXR SDCR SDIM SDOB SDTB SDVH SJRG SMTO SNDV SNEJ SNFL SNGX SNJK SNJM SNKF SNKI SNMF SNOF SNQV SSCC SSMW T82 UGSB VT46 W23 Y55 YARM YAYE YBAS YHOT YMAV YTDN YTNK YTWB ZSPD

New in X-Plane Update 10.22 RC2 (Jul 6, 2013)

  • Fixes indexes on the SETI network packet.

New in X-Plane Update 10.22 RC1 (Jun 24, 2013)

  • Fixes compatibility with ForeFlight.

New in X-Plane Update 10.22 Beta 2 (Jun 21, 2013)

  • Fixes a crash on startup that some users experienced with beta 1.

New in X-Plane Update 10.22 Beta 1 (Jun 20, 2013)

  • Landing gear saving fixed in Plane-Maker.
  • X-Plane provides Lua allocation for 64-bit Windows/Linux plugins.
  • Running out of Lua memory on Mac is no longer a crash.
  • Copy protection bug fix: users can fly using their DVD _even_ if the copy protection code cannot save DVD information to their local machine.
  • X-Plane supports the latest version of Xavion.

New in X-Plane Update 10.21 RC2 (Apr 25, 2013)

  • Reverted change to light sizes when monitor resolution changes. This means airplanes look the way they did X-Plane 10.5, 10.11 and 10.20.
  • Fixed pitot heat switch on new C172 in 3-d cockpit.

New in X-Plane Update 10.21 RC1 (Apr 24, 2013)

  • Updated Cessna with new, improved art files and flight model tuning.
  • Fixed dim airport lights when using 4x SSAA - HDR SSAA no longer affects light brightness.
  • Fixed crash on start-up on Japanese Macs.
  • Fixed edge cases where facades could draw junk or incorrect paths.
  • Fixed OBJ accuracy for scenery where 0 AGL is very close to Y=0 in the local coordinate system. This fixes bad object placement at KROC.
  • Joystick tracking cross matches mouse location when flying with the mouse, even when joystick curves are applied.

New in X-Plane Update 10.21 Beta 2 (Apr 13, 2013)

  • Fixed crash on Mac when running the CRJ plugin or resizing the window. Other plugins may have crashed too due to this bug.
  • Fixed curved non-closed facades to not loop back on themselves.
  • Fixed brightness of custom light billboards when HDR is on - they now match non-HDR.
  • Included 2013.04b data cycle, which puts back DMEs.
  • Fixed landing gear rendering in Plane-Maker.
  • Fixed visibility in hard-ball IFR to be a little bit higher.

New in X-Plane Update 10.21 Beta 1 (Apr 13, 2013)

  • Latest (April 2013) airport and navaid data included. This data fixes a number of navaid bugs inclusing the KSFO glideslopes.
  • Kingair windshield wiper animation fixed.
  • Cockpit-object attached spill lights now light up only the inside or outside depending on the cockpit object lighting mode; this matches the behavior of all other plane-maker-attached objects.
  • Default heavy-metal compass backgroudn art realigned.
  • Frigate ILS and VOR are displayed on the local map screen.
  • Autopilot disconnects completely if the airplane has no flight director switch.
  • Knots/mach mode is reset to knots on loading a new airplane - just in case the airplane has no mach/knots switch.
  • MTBF frequency fixed - it was previously misinterpreted to fail at 10x the rate displayed in the UI.
  • Magnetic heading for glide-slope fixed in the navaid editing window.
  • Fuel consumption correctly decreases when flying with an external instructor's station.
  • Fixed wind interpolation from NNE to N to circle through NNW.
  • Changed default number of flight models per frame to 2 to improve aircraft flight dynamics.
  • Improved wording on rendering settings screen.
  • Autogen in rural towns remapped to houses and not warehouses.
  • Fixed error in scenery shift that caused the airplane to move 4 feet and crash when landing at KGDM runway 36.
  • Added aliases to the audio monitor commands - this will allow v9 plugins to continue to control the audio monitoring system.
  • Moved libfreetype for OSX back to 2.2.1 - fixes font spacing on Mac, which was too wide in 10.20.
  • Fixed default gear light instrument to not light up when bus power is off.
  • Fixed AI aircraft to not reset AI planes when a plugin overrides the AI autopilot.
  • DSF allows facades and bezier control handles to hang outside the DSF box a little bit.
  • Fixed memory scribble when apt.dat contains an ICAO code longer than 4 characters.

New in X-Plane Update 10.20 RC 3 (Feb 28, 2013)

  • This patch fixes the hole in the fuselage of the Kingair, and adjusts the taxi light on the Baron. No changes to the code.

New in X-Plane Update 10.20 RC 2 (Feb 25, 2013)

  • The Kingair and Baron have both been updated again.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Airports with invalid runway configurations no longer crash ATC - instead the error is logged so authors can fi the airport data.
  • Lua memory management interface changed for Windows and Linux
  • Fixed crash on GP60 RC plane - airplanes with very, very, very small wings were crashing.
  • Automatic crash reporting improved; in a few cases where X-Plane would have said "please report this to Laminar" it now bring up the automatic crash reporter so we can more easily collect the data. This only happens for cases where something has gone horribly wrong in the sim (typically due to an X-Plane bug, driver bug, running out of memory, or an invalid third party add-on).

New in X-Plane Update 10.20 RC 1 (Feb 7, 2013)

  • The Kingair and Baron have both been updated.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Waste-gate has been fixed for turbo-charged recip airplanes with a waste-gate. For example, the Carenado Mooney will now develop 190 HP on the runway, not 40 HP.
  • X-Plane won't recommend safe-mode just because Plane-Maker is open.
  • French translation updated.
  • Fix for crash in custom scenery when using library objects on sloped terrain.
  • Fixed crash when using ppjoy virtual devices with analog hat switches. (We do not support analog hat switches, so do not set one up. But now they won't crash the sim.)
  • The installer will re-launch the sim in the same mode (64-bit or 32-bit) as you had before when auto-updating. Note that this will only work on the first update _from_ rc1 to a new update.
  • Worked around black sky on Intel HD GPUs in HDR mode. Note that these GPUs aren't very powerful, so we recommend running with HDR off.
  • Worked around shader compile fail on Intel HD 4000 GPUs.
  • Fixed nav-aid saving to not write out bogus NDB.
  • Fixed crash on Mac with PS3 controller over blue-tooth.

New in X-Plane Update 10.20 Beta 11 (Jan 15, 2013)

  • Kingair Fixed
  • autopilot buttons for Flight Director, Autopilot on, yaw damper and pitch control added.
  • Rudder pedals animated
  • Several texture refinements / enhancements
  • Added stall warning annunciator
  • New plugin system build for Linux/OS X avoids junk in the log.
  • Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed missing gravel at 70S airport.
  • Turbulence turned down for some METARs.
  • MP pressure fixed on helicopters
  • Reduced network bandwidth for multiplayer.
  • Map placement bug fixed where the plane was not set up at the right speeds when clicked in the upper right corner of the iOS window
  • Holding down AP knobs while sim paused still selects AP at high speed
  • Mach-IAS button picks right mach number.
  • Missing wings fixed for RC planes
  • Safe mode starts with global shadows off.
  • Fixed loading of BK117 plugin on Linux.
  • Fixed crash on Linux with VirtualGL.

New in X-Plane Update 10.20 Beta 10 (Jan 3, 2013)

  • This build features a new plugin system DLL:
  • bit Plugins that incorrectly link against common static libraries will generate log warnings.
  • Plugin-induced crashes are listed against a specific plugin; crashes in X-Plane's threads are no longer attributed to plugins.
  • Calling XPLMRemoveMenuItem on the plugin menu works reliably.
  • XPLMGetNthAircraftName works during airplane unload message and airplane plugin unloading.
  • This build includes a few more global terrain textures.
  • Bug fixes:
  • Fix for missing base loads in electrical system.
  • Some keys fixed on German keyboard layouts.
  • Fixed incorrect layout of some autogen blocks.
  • Fixed broken 32-bit QuickTime record.
  • Foreflight output rate changed.
  • Cloud puff bases adjusted again.

New in X-Plane Update 10.20 Beta 9 (Dec 20, 2012)

  • Fixes missing library paths in the autogen (again).
  • Runway lights tweaked slightly.

New in X-Plane Update 10.20 Beta 8 (Dec 20, 2012)

  • New tropical terrain textures
  • Beta 8 works with the newest update to Xavion iPad apps.
  • Bug fixes:
  • King-air 3d cockpit fixed
  • Windows XP machines should get their IP address without failing.
  • Fixed METAR parsing with time-stamped winds.
  • Fixed reversed scroll wheel for plugins.
  • Fixed by missing line segments at EHAM custom scenery and others.
  • Fixed keys not working with Romanji keyboard layout.
  • Fixed height of type 1 facades.

New in X-Plane Update 10.20 Beta 7 (Dec 10, 2012)

  • Bug fixes:
  • Fixed crash on scenery load when runways were set to 'flattened'.
  • Mac & Linux: Re-exported libpng to the 32-bit builds of X-Plane
  • Missing library paths: this wasn't actually fixed in beta 6 due to a source control mistake; should be fixed now.
  • Kingair switches fixed.

New in X-Plane Update 10.20 Beta 6 (Dec 10, 2012)

  • Usability:
  • Livery is saved as a preference - when you reopen a plane if there is no option to pick a livery, the last one you used is opened.
  • New button in Open Aircraft dialog box to just change the livery.
  • Plugins:
  • Fix for LuaJIT compatibility on 64-bit Mac integrated - see here. Plugin authors working on 64-bit Mac plugins should be able to continue with development without any special test builds.
  • libpng, libcurl, and libfreetype2 symbols have been stripped out of the Mac and Linux versions. Please test your 32-bit Mac/Linux plugin; if it will not load, please report this ASAP! (The problem might be with your makefile.)
  • Fixed system_window dataref. This should fix the 32-bit TrackIR plugins.
  • Airplanes:
  • Prop heat and inlet heat expanded to up to 8 engines, with new datarefs. This should not affect existing airplanes, but please recheck your icing switches.
  • Custom prop disc cross-fades fixed. If you use the prop disc override please confirm that your add-on works!
  • Eagle claw landing gear dataref added.
  • Fixed RGB light field in Plane-Maker exterior lights screen.
  • Fixed IAS indicator showing airspeed when a plane is flying backward or stationary in a tailwind.
  • Scenery:
  • Fixed incorrect library paths in autogen - this should fix a bunch of custom scenery packs not loading.
  • More new terrain textures from Albert.
  • Fixed texturing of type 1 repeating fence faces. If your facades still have texturing problems but used to work, please file a bug ASAP!
  • Helipads like NK39 don't float in the air when sloped runways are turned off.
  • Bug Fixes:
  • Fix for some Intel HD GPUs causing the sim to quit with an error.
  • Fixed crash on Mac with Chinese input methods.
  • Fixed hang when filing certain ATC flight plans.
  • Bottom of cloud puffs should be closer to assigned bases.
  • New commands for directional gyros.
  • AI planes keep igniters on to avoid flame-outs.

New in X-Plane Update 10.20 Beta 5 (Nov 26, 2012)

  • New autogen from Alex. This is not the complete autogen work he has done; it is an interim step.
  • New terrain textures from Albert.
  • Bug fixes to the Kingair and KSEA from Tom.
  • New 3-d exterior on the Harrier from Javier.

New in X-Plane Update 10.20 Beta 3 (Nov 23, 2012)

  • OpenAL sound is now initialized before any plugins are loaded. This changes which OpenAL implementation will be loaded for globally installed plugins. Please see the OpenAL technote for details. This fix should conflicts between Gizmo-enhanced and SASL-enhanced airplanes.
  • OS X 64-bit: the app's zero page and base address have been modified. This allows LuaJIT to function on 64-bit OS X. Please note that LuaJIT will still fail frequently with out-of-memory errors once the sim is running. If you are working on a plugin that uses LuaJIT and have not contacted Ben, please do so.
  • Vsync now functions on OS X. The vsync setting now takes effect immediately, without restarting. Please note that on ATI Windows hardware with the Aero theme enabled, Vsync locks to half-refresh rate; we think this is a driver bug.
  • A bunch of features relating to airport ICAO IDs now work on 64-bit. This fixes real weather and the FMS/GPS ICAO entry on 64-bit.
  • Multiple identical devices now supported properly on Mac.
  • Native TrackIR fixed on Windows. Plugins that use TrackIR are not yet fixed, due to a plugin SDK bug.
  • Log correctly identifies 64-bit versions of Windows.

New in X-Plane Update 10.20 Beta 2 (Nov 16, 2012)

  • Fixed unresponsive keyboard and mouse on OS X when X-Plane is started in full screen.
  • Fixed fatal shader error on older Nvidia cards on Windows and Linux.
  • Fixed spinning ball cursor on Windows.
  • Fixed OpenAL 64-bit library on Windows.
  • Fixed a number of log warnings.
  • 32 vs. 64-bit build is shown in the about box and startup screen

New in X-Plane Update 10.20 (Nov 15, 2012)

  • The 747 plugin is not 64-bit safe yet, so some 747 nav systems will not operate in 64-bit mode.
  • The current installer is not updated for the new file naming convention and will always launch the 64-bit app (Windows/Mac), or fail to relaunch the app (Linux). You can simply restart X-Plane from your desktop after updates.

New in X-Plane Update 10.11 (Nov 5, 2012)

  • Fixed intermittent bug on Windows where some objects would randomly generate LOD warning and not hit the fast hardware path.

New in X-Plane Update 10.11 RC3 (Oct 29, 2012)

  • Fixed intermittent bug on Windows where some objects would randomly generate LOD warning and not hit the fast hardware path.

New in X-Plane Update 10.11 RC2 (Oct 25, 2012)

  • Bug Fixes:
  • The constant hail from rc1 should be fixed.
  • sRGB disabled for ATI Catalyst 12-10 drivers - it works in some cases but washes out the UI with HDR on.
  • Put up error alert when x-Plane runs with Gallium drivers on Linux - we only support the proprietary ATI and NVidia drivers on Linux.
  • Disabled HDR when the GPU can't support it _even_ if prefs have HDR enabled.
  • Bumped version on situation format - the 10.05r1 situation format does not work with 10.10 and 10.11; this version change stops the files from being loaded in a corrupt manner.

New in X-Plane Update 10.11 RC1 (Oct 24, 2012)

  • Updated car generation pattern - traffic should be more even and levels should be higher on high settings. Remember: traffic really hits CPU, and it takes a few minutes for X-Plane to generate the full traffic you have requested with your rendering settings, so turn the setting down if fps get bad.
  • New German translation.
  • Bugs:
  • Fixed missing runway through 747 windows.
  • Fixed corrupt landing light after livery change on C400 Corvalis.
  • Fixed corrupt cloud geomtry with HDR and ATI Linux drivers (by disabling pinned memory optimization). We'll work with ATI to see if we can get pinned memory working on Linux.
  • Fixed shadows out the window for the C172 with shadows on "3-d on aircraft".
  • Fixed squashed preview icons in airplane chooser dialog box.
  • Fixed possible corrupt geometry in low level weather code.
  • Turned down maximum brightness with HDR mode slightly.
  • Fixed ejection seat camera sequence.
  • Fixed export airplane to .OBJ in Plane-Maker on Windows.
  • Fixed broken materials with shadows on Falcon 7x.
  • Fixed inability to refile a flightplan after cancelling IFR
  • Decreased nag timer on ATC handoff checkins

New in X-Plane Update 10.10 RC3 (Sep 22, 2012)

  • Updated car generation pattern - traffic should be more even and levels should be higher on high settings. Remember: traffic really hits CPU, and it takes a few minutes for X-Plane to generate the full traffic you have requested with your rendering settings, so turn the setting down if fps get bad.
  • New German translation.
  • Bugs:
  • Fixed missing runway through 747 windows.
  • Fixed corrupt landing light after livery change on C400 Corvalis.
  • Fixed corrupt cloud geomtry with HDR and ATI Linux drivers (by disabling pinned memory optimization). We'll work with ATI to see if we can get pinned memory working on Linux.
  • Fixed shadows out the window for the C172 with shadows on "3-d on aircraft".
  • Fixed squashed preview icons in airplane chooser dialog box.
  • Fixed possible corrupt geometry in low level weather code.
  • Turned down maximum brightness with HDR mode slightly.
  • Fixed ejection seat camera sequence.
  • Fixed export airplane to .OBJ in Plane-Maker on Windows.
  • Fixed broken materials with shadows on Falcon 7x.
  • Fixed inability to refile a flightplan after cancelling IFR
  • Decreased nag timer on ATC handoff checkins

New in X-Plane Update 10.10 RC2 (Sep 17, 2012)

  • Fixed complete anarchy in the electrical system file-io code. Believe it or not, this fixes the roll in the 747 and other airplanes! Authors using 10.10, check the electrical system pages in Plane-Maker carefully in 10.10r2! See more here!
  • Fixed import of v9 airplanes made on a PPC mac into v10.
  • Fixed unclickable P-180 cockpit panel.
  • Runway lights are visible when off-axis, e.g. on base.
  • Fixed shadows disappearing in flight when set to "3-d on cockpit" for the P-180 and other planes.
  • Fixed disappearing spill lights (when made by an OBJ and attached to an airplane).
  • Fixed black boxes around LIGHT_CUSTOM lights in HDR mode.
  • Electrical systems such as the Hydraulic, Vacuum and Gyro systems no longer "overspeed" when the bus voltage is over nominal (ie. a charging bus).
  • Changing Axis assignments in the Joystick dialog, no longer throw away calibration data.
  • EGT fixed to be scaled properly based on the appropriate N1 or N2 speeds.
  • Command-line framerate test fixed
  • We have disabled the wing import function in Plane-Maker - it can crash Plane-Maker (causing you to lose your work). We may put it back in a future update if enough users want it. As a work-around, you can copy wings with a text editor in X-Plane 10.
  • Fixed ATTR_diffuse_rgb when used with global shadows.
  • Fixed pre-fill optimization on NV Mac drivers.
  • Fixed pre-fill for non-shadow objects.
  • Fixed spill lighting on runway lights.
  • Fixed anti-ice system failure labels in Plane-Maker.

New in X-Plane Update 10.10 RC1 (Sep 7, 2012)

  • Aircraft Changes:
  • Default Aircraft startup times drastically improved! Sometimes on piston engines, you may even need to crack the throttle to get the aircraft to start...just like real aircraft!
  • Starter:
  • The starter has been changed quite a bit; airplanes from v9 and 10.05 should now start as expected. See this post for details.
  • Bug Fixes:
  • METARs with variable winds no longer create wind-shear/turbulence for low wind speed conditions
  • Slung Loads are no longer defaulted ON...this was preventing the B-52 from flying properly!
  • Mouse wheel scrolling now works in the Aircraft Livery panel
  • Weapons drawn correctly in Plane-Maker
  • Plane-Maker can import .inst instrument files.
  • Light billboard color-space fixed; the runway lights should be quite a bit more visible now.
  • Fixed misaligned roads.
  • Fixed road bridges crashing into each other.
  • Improved ramps going into road junctions slightly.
  • Fixed P-180 panel going black when P-180 is used as an AI plane or HDR is turned on and off.
  • Fixed missing landing light in 2-d cockpits and forward views.
  • Jets will hot-start if __N2__ is below indicated value in Plane-Maker. Plane-Maker used to use N1 for jets, which was difficult to work with.
  • No more crashes or other odd behaviour when you run the battery down to nothing

New in X-Plane Update 10.10 Beta 11 (Sep 3, 2012)

  • It's just like beta 10, but with the 'extra aircraft' folder properly included (this is where some of the old v9 aircraft and experimentals now live) and with code signing hopefully fixed.

New in X-Plane Update 10.10 Beta 9 (Aug 28, 2012)

  • Supersonic engine thrust model improved to go from total pressure recovery to normal-shock recovery as you move towards the max inlet efficiency, and pass air subsonically to the compressor behind the inlet. This is still not a perfect inlet model since different inlets work in totally different ways, but this is the best superonic inlet model we have ever had, and the supersonic drag is now the best we have ever had as well. The supersonic drag model looks at each polygon of the acf model, finds its' normal vector and area, and treats it as a plate with a compression or expansion fan, and should now do a perfect job of tracking every single poly in the airplane.The new supersonic model, like ALL of the dynamics in X-Plane, considers all of the various bodies that you have created for the airplane. That is: ALL of the fuselage, misc bodies, nacelles, etc, are considered to be exposed to the airflow. This means that if you have multiple bodies one inside the other, the aero effects will be DOUBLED compared to reality! Also, if you have one body hiding right behind another, or behind the fuselage, then the drag effects will be DOUBLED compared to reality! This is why with the latest beta, some planes are not going supersonic that should: We are now computing the drag more accurately on each body, and having multiple bodies one behind the other simply add up the drag based on the frontal area of EACH BODY! A very simple case of this is an F-104 Starfighter model that uses a fuselage for the FRONT of the plane, and a misc body for the BACK! In this case, the front of the misc body is acting like a big flat-plate exposed to the air.. surely enough to keep the plane subsonic! So, to design a plane properly, do NOT use misc bodies and fuselage and nacelles stacked inside each other, or behind each other in a row. This will simply erroneously add up drag! When designing a plan e for X-Plane, the rule is really very very simple: Each fuselage, misc body, and nacelle has the local air aciting on it. That's it! So it is actually really simple. Now, there is ONE exception: Engine nacelles for jets. Engine nacelles for jets are assumed to NOT produce any drag. This is because the thrust for the engine that you enter in Plane-Maker is considered to already be based on installed thrust losses. So, if you want your ACF model to be accurate, then do not have hidden-away misc bodies with frontal area inside another body, and certainly do not have 2 bodies one behind the other to make a long body... the frontal area of the aft body will still be exposed to the air in X-Plane! If you want really detailed geometry (read: more than you can get out of a body in X-Plane, so you want to hook multiple bodies together) then it is time to build an OBJ for your airplane!
  • ForeFlight support! Grab ForeFlight version 4.7 and you can now use X-Plane as a "GPS" to practice your flying.
  • New commands: Spot lite on, off, and toggle... kind of sorely missing before!
  • Helo rotor rpm trim runs 0 to 1, so it is an interpolation between the lo and hi rotor rpm trim. This way, motion of the trim always DOES something, even if only a high OR lo rotor rpm trim is entered in Plane-Maker!
  • Automatic crash reporter no longer catches crashes that occur because of plugins. This is important so that plugin authors can get crash data from their users without us stealing it from them.
  • UI Buttons in all products have been improved to be...well...like every other button you've ever used outside of X-Plane. Actions happen on the up-click, not the down-click giving you a chance to change your mind while also giving you visual feedback of the press itself.
  • Aircraft
  • Fixed Vacuum pressure and Oil Pressure gauges in the default C-172
  • Fixed SR-71 flight model
  • Shadows
  • This build should fix the bug where the shadows would jitter and shake wildly with HDR enabled; the shadows should now be about the same with HDR on or off. (Global melt your GPU looks better with HDR on.) Some airplanes that previously did not shadow properly are now fixed. I am still working on shadow tuning.
  • Bug Fixes
  • Joystick Dialog now consolidates axis display so more device axis are visible. Important for people with many devices.
  • Joystick calibration ranges from 10.05R1 are now blown away to prevent corrupt axis on an update. NOTE: This will require EVERYONE to recalibrate their devices on updating.
  • Fixed broken "alt" button on Windows
  • Fixed buttons on some home-cockpit devices such as the MJoy16-C1
  • You can now save a situation and then load it again without exiting X-Plane to re-scan the file list.
  • Landing lights and all other lights should go across to the external visuals now.
  • Much less turbulence in light to moderate precip... but same trubulence in major (red) precip
  • QuickFlight startup does put you on the ramp now, if set up as such in Operations and Warnings window.
  • Weather goes to ALL the external visuals now, not just a random ONE of them! ;-P
  • Right Click/Zoom no longer control the sim from IOS station.
  • Fixed bug in planemaker causing resource copying to create invalid files on Windows.
  • Fixed dlerror __stack_chk_fail_local on Linux machines. Ideally, plugin authors should be compiling with -fno-stack-protector but in the meantime, this will let them run again.
  • Roads shouldn't cut into buildings at low view angles.
  • Fixed crash when starting up with IOS enabled and quick flight showing on startup.
  • Fixed cursor being hidden in joystick calibration wizard.
  • Fixed cut-off object names in Plane-Maker main screen.
  • Fixed prioritization up/down buttons in plane-maker misc objects screen.
  • Added error checking for airplanes whose use of panel texture is inconsistent. You can't mix and match ATTR_cockpit and ATTR_cockpit_region!!!!
  • Plugins are now exempt from breakpad; if a plugin crashes, the normal OS crashes happen so that the user can send a report to the plugin author, rather than the crash going into our database.
  • Fixed camera instrument to not turn green during the day with panel regions.

New in X-Plane Update 10.10 Beta 6 (Aug 4, 2012)

  • Red/White Flashlight added!
  • "Mouse-Look" Re-implemented in a new way...Double right-click and the mouse will lock-in as camera control in any view. Change views or right click again to disable it.
  • Quick-Look view prefs have been renamed from *_prefs.txt to *_view_prefs.txt. If you already had quicklook commands set, they will not be used until you rename them in your aircraft's directory.
  • Additional improvements to terrain textures. Albert hopes to have these finished by the end of the beta run.
  • WE ONLY CALIBRATE JOYSTICKS WHEN THE JOYSTICK WINDOW IS UP NOW! So, to calibrate your joysticks, you have to go to the joystick window... you cannot just wiggle your joystick around to let X-Plane automatically find the joystick extrema... you have to be in the joystick window!
  • Flight model refined a hair: There will be no measurable difference for any reasonably conventional flight, but now we handle sideslip angles of even 90 degrees, or backwards flight, on wings with crazy dihedral and sweep and incidence angles,with more geometric perfection... even though this does not represent a flight regime where you ever operate in a conventional airplane, we still nailed the theoretical geometry down just get mathematical perfection there.
  • Also, the supersonic dynamics improved a hair in computing drag over the fuselage.
  • My Evo is now in the EXPERIMENTAL folder. There s no external model, and the panel is a joke, but it FLIES right. Of course, we will improve this over time to be a good model of the aircraft!
  • Bug Fixes:
  • Fixed quick-look views so they no longer reset back to "center" when changing views in cockpit
  • Fixed a bug causing ATC to crash if "AI Flies Plane" is selected
  • Fixed a bug causing ATC to crash if an airport without a proper flow was selected.
  • Scroll wheel now works in all sections of the quick-flight and open aircraft dialogs.
  • Fixed powerlines that fly up at DSF boundary near EHRD.
  • 747 airspeed indicator fixed.
  • Sectional map shading and water fixed.
  • Water fixed in HITS instrument.
  • Camera instrument fixed.
  • Datarefs for object drawing location are now in OGL coordinates. This fix makes v10 work the way v9 did.
  • Control-click acts like right click for Mac users with old one-button mice.
  • Fixed jitter and shake of cloud shadows when HDR is enabled.
  • Fixed ATTR_lit_level to properly scale lights during the day.
  • Aircraft Authoring:
  • Plane-Maker now has a popup UI to show/hide objects and the visualizations of interior and exterior lights. Since the exterior lights are now drawn as cones (with small discs at their source point) the 3-d view can get messy. Simply turn off the visualizations you don't want to see, or hide your objects to get a better view of what is going on.
  • ATTR_cockpit can be used in any attached object. This has always been true (despite warnings in the docs) but the implementation only worked some of the time.
  • The cockpit object can now be marked as glass, as well as interior or exterior. Mark it as glass if you need to use panel texture in your windows. X-Plane will attempt to guess whether the cockpit object should be glass on older airplanes to maintain compatibility.
  • Spill lights only affect the interior if they are attached to an interior object; they only affect the exterior and world if they are attached to an exterior object. Use this to fix problems like landing lights flooding the cabin or cabin lights illuminating the runway below the airplane.
  • Beech Baron 58 Fixes/Improvements:
  • Wing landing lights added with independent control switches for left/right
  • Revised Autopilot and annunciator panel so all modes work, including APPR
  • ADF 1 added
  • HSI now uses Nav 1, Nav2 and GPS
  • Nav 2 VOR added
  • Flight model improved
  • Wing Ice light works
  • Clock added to yoke
  • Instrument night lighting fixed to work. No more lit instruments when power is off.
  • Avionics fun doesn't come on when power is off.
  • Dash annunciators improved and work properly
  • Taxi light added to nose gear, aligned and working properly.

New in X-Plane Update 10.10 Beta 5 (Aug 1, 2012)

  • 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.
  • For seaplane starting locations, X-Plane should pick the closest seaport it can to the airport you have selected in quick-flite, if you do not select a real seaport

New in X-Plane Update 10.10 Beta 4 (Jul 24, 2012)

  • 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.

New in X-Plane Update 10.10 Beta 3 (Jul 19, 2012)

  • 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.

New in X-Plane Update 10.10 Beta 2 (Jul 16, 2012)

  • 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.

New in X-Plane Update 10.10 Beta 1 (Jul 13, 2012)

  • 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.
  • X-Plane won't reset your livery choice if you turn HDR mode on and off.
  • 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, and always remembers what was the last livery used for each airplane, which is kind of convenient.
  • 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

New in X-Plane Update 10.05 r1 (Mar 31, 2012)

  • Carrier landings now work correctly.
  • The camera no longer goes through walls in 3-d cockpit mode on the Cirrus Jet and others. (ATTR_solid_wall now works again.)
  • The warning message for 32-bit versions of Windows has been moved to the first time you pick rendering settings, and the language has been edited for clarity.

New in X-Plane Update 10.04 r3 (Mar 19, 2012)

  • V10 airplane electrical System and Bus Specs are now read correctly from airplanes. This was broken in later 10.04 betas.
  • V9 airplanes electrical systems are read in correctly.

New in X-Plane Update 10.04 r1 (Mar 8, 2012)

  • 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.

New in X-Plane Update 10.04 Beta 6 (Feb 29, 2012)

  • 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!

New in X-Plane Update 10.04 Beta 4 (Feb 22, 2012)

  • ATC:
  • ATC checks aircraft altitude less frequently being a little more patient with pilots.
  • New aircraft spawn "silently" which should drastically improve radio congestion.
  • ATC should properly inform pilots of their expected approach and runway upon giving the pilot their FIRST vector for the approach.
  • Scenery:
  • Latest version of KSEA demo area has variable density of objects with the rendering settings. If you have a lower performance computer and run at medium object settings, the demo airport should have better framerate.
  • Weather:
  • Fixed black sky and broken transition from near to far terrain when flying over overcast cloud layers.
  • Fog coloring tweaked in the clouds a bit... The color should be more realistic INSIDE of the clouds!
  • More improvements in the read in of Real-Weather files... now handling more cloud types and report-types, including ones found in Europe!
  • Joystick:
  • Left and right brake BUTTONS should always work, as long as you do not have joystick AXIS assigned to left and right brakes!
  • Joystick can now over-ride autopilot, as in reality. BUT, beware! The autopilot will be fighting you with the servos, and the trim as well, and in some airplanes, the trim is stronger than the flight controls themselves!
  • Misc:
  • Fixed white triangles in sky when looking straight up.
  • Temporarily disabled alerts for illegally used ramp starts.
  • Transition to supersonic engine dynamics a hair more realistic... applies to engine DRAG as well as thrust!
  • Spherical and cylindrical projection corrected... See if you like it more! (If you have a pro-use key!)
  • (real) Garmin430 and Garmin430 WAAS driven more perfectly now, with the ability to set the OBS on the Garmin unit or the X-Plane panel.

New in X-Plane Update 10.04 Beta 1 (Jan 26, 2012)

  • ATC:
  • AI Aircraft now climb/hold altitude better dramatically reducing the frequency of hearing ATC yell at them.
  • Protect against aircraft doing something WAY out of bounds like departing instead of taxiing or holding short.
  • Stability improvements
  • Step descents dramatically improved
  • ATC should now tell the user what approach they're setting them up for
  • ATC "Radio" box text color tweak
  • Fixed AI aircraft names
  • Lots of tuning and tweaking to make everything just right here in this release:
  • Plane should be able to hold still quite a bit better during runup, and not slowly drift with the brakes on!
  • Manifold pressure model is now improved to be more like real planes.
  • French and Spanish translation improvements to make the menus a hair more accurate in those languages.
  • Better vertical resolution of the NMEA strings for newer (real) moving maps that plot vertical paths as well.
  • More resolution in the FDR replays, so even little RC drones with small movements can have their paths recorded perfectly.
  • Cylindrical projection should be able to handle changing the screen-res on the fly with no problem now.
  • Better metar parsing: X-Plane should not be confused over various comments in the metars about the wind.
  • As well ATIS should report the visiblity accuratley in all cases. Earlier versions did not report the very low-vis cases correctly.
  • And, an option to re-scan real-weather to go along with re-download.
  • The heat-blurr rendering effect is now offset by the exhaust offset specified in Plane-Maker, which is useful.
  • As well, the heat blurr now draws for ALL planes, not just the one you are flying.
  • As well, you can specify the exhsust offset PER ENGINE!
  • Proper cloud textures used even if you have both cumulus and cirrus layers at the same time.
  • The yaw-string is visible for the gliders and helos.
  • A-I airplanes should be a bit more robust, really adding power if needed to get out of ditches or up hills, and not having systems break, rendering the plane stopped or otherwise motionless.
  • TCAS system should only call out guys with their transponder on...and the AI should only turn on their transponder for flight, not taxi! This is getting down to a pretty crazy level of realism, here.
  • New failure: brown-out! In the upper right of the first page of failures.

New in X-Plane Update 10.03 Beta 10 R2 (Jan 12, 2012)

  • ATC:
  • Bug fix for crash when flying approaches into untowered fields.
  • Fixed other crash in ATC
  • Rendering:
  • Fixed corrupt geometry at KBTR and other locations. (These were facade roofs being stretched off into space!)
  • Sim will refuse to run with a clear error message for old non-supported hardware.

New in X-Plane Update 10.03 Beta 10 (Jan 9, 2012)

  • Fix for hang while flying with AI planes or on startup
  • Fix for missing DSF tile on really heavily loaded machine (this is a really rare bug)

New in X-Plane Update 10.03 Beta 9 (Jan 5, 2012)

  • Fixed a Windows crash bug in beta 8.
  • Fixed missing runway and city lights at some monitor settings.
  • Restored framerate with clouds visible.
  • Fixed crash in ATC system on startup.
  • Fixed missing sunlight in planet-wide view.

New in X-Plane Update 10.03 Beta 8 (Jan 4, 2012)

  • Coolness:
  • City lights are better tuned to look nice at a wide variety of resolutions and fields of view.
  • Cloud lighting is more accurate, which is really nice, especially for overcast and stratus clouds.
  • Aircraft lighting is a hair nicer in cloud shadow.
  • Rendering options are streamlined and organized a hair better... with "one-push to set to max frame-rate" button.
  • Flight-Control:
  • Joystick should now be more responsive! You should see a more instant and accurate response.
  • You now get help with joystick calibration on your first start-up.
  • ATC:
  • Fixed stability issues in ATC system
  • Fixed step descents
  • Fixed problems with controllers that had multiple frequencies
  • Plugins:
  • Fixed weather datarefs when real weather is in use
  • Fixed airplane loading by plugins on Windows
  • Weather:
  • Fixed disappearing objects when Real Weather is in use
  • Rendering:
  • Fixed diseappearing horizon artifacts
  • Tuned shadow options - hopefully they should be a bit less blurry and a little bit faster
  • Improved GPU fill rate a little bit in 3-d cockpit view with HDR on
  • Bug-Fix:
  • Now you can take screenshots even if already recording a quicktime movie or sending imagery to EFIS-App.

New in X-Plane Update 10.03 Beta 6 (Dec 27, 2011)

  • ATC:
  • Fixed bug preventing lowercase routings from working
  • Fixed numerous crashes in the ATC system.
  • Fixed bug causing AI planes to suddenly taxi through a hold short line wildly.
  • Fixed bug causing the view to change while using the arrows to navigate ATC menus.
  • Adjusted timers to let users communicate with ATC more easily.
  • Adjusted "off course" tolerances to make it less annoying.
  • Improved automatic layout generation at KTCM (and hopefully other airports that are long and thin)
  • Aircraft:
  • CRJ and other aicraft cockpits should work at night in HDR mode on OS X Lion.
  • Sim is more tolerant of missing textures - the rules now match v9 for OBJs.
  • Slight improvement to braking model to aid in erroneous aircraft drifting.
  • Baron 58: Added cockpit night lighting. Use the four lighting knobs under the copilot yoke to adjust.
  • F4 Phantom: Adjusted the flight model for better in-flight handling and more reasonable manners on approach and landing.
  • Fixed seg fault in weight/weapons window.
  • Rendering:
  • Fixed cut-off global lights on ATI hardware.

New in X-Plane Update 10.03 Beta 5 (Dec 22, 2011)

  • Rendering:
  • Fixed cut-outs in rain when HDR mode is enabled.
  • Fixed square white runwy lights in heavy Cat-III IFR when HDR is disabled.
  • Fixed corrupt drawing on UFMC when HDR mode is enabled.
  • ATC:
  • Fixed a bug causing bad taxi routings which may have caused ATC to constantly issue new taxi clearances.
  • Joystick General Command Up/Down and Contact ATC key assignments now work with the ATC menus.
  • Instruments:
  • FMS should now operate normally.

New in X-Plane Update 10.03 Beta 3 (Dec 12, 2011)

  • This beta adds Plane-Maker and Airfoil-Maker back to the beta - sorry about that!
  • ATC:
  • Fixed crash when taxi routings were short/zero (like being next to the runway)
  • Fix to improve reroutes

New in X-Plane Update 10.02 Beta 1 (Nov 29, 2011)

  • Fixes crash with Intel GPUs on Windows.
  • Fixes fatal error message with ATI Radeon X1000-series GPUs on all operating systems.
  • Performance:
  • Rendering settings will default based on category of hardware - in some cases this should give better fps on default settings.
  • X-Plane now detects cards that advertise instancing but don't have native hardware support; avoiding software-emulating instancing may help fps with heavy objects and moderate world level of detail. This affects the GeForce 8800, 9400, 9600, and 330M on OS X.
  • Smoke puff code is optimized - this can help fps with AI traffic enabled.
  • Artifacts:
  • A number of artifacts in HDR mode are fixed.
  • Plugins:
  • Non-fat Linux plugins will now load.
  • Some plugins that had drawing problems in HDR mode may now work.