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X-Plane Beta Release : Beta 10.40b2 First look


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X-Plane Beta Release : Beta 10.40b2 First look

 

Laminar Research have released their new Beta series for X-Plane in 10.40. We very quickly went to vb2 as b1 had some start up issues with crashes on Linux and Windows with AMD processors. A few years ago beta releases were a few a year in around 2 to 3 versions, but the last few years in v10.30 and lately 10.40 the releases are more spread out and we seem to get now only one a year (but I have a feeling we will have two this year).

 

The bad in that is that you don't get as many changes to the simulator, or a faster progression forward. But the benefits of these more spread out changes are that they are more rock solid out of the box, and you can feel they have been more extensively tested. They always now feel good to use straight away, and if any misdemeanours have slipped through, then they are usually corrected quickly because the underlying code is rock solid.

 

On the surface 10.40 looks a little benign as there is no bright lights flashing in your face new feature like last years new Garmin G340/350 gps. But in reality 10.40 is quite a hard hitter and more yet may come as the beta is rolled out.

 

So let us start a quick look at v10.40 with the banner feature.

 

Extended DSF

One thing that I have griped about and complained about more than anything else in X-Plane is the view from altitude. Let us be really frank...  It sucked! Big time.

For all the long haulers out there it was not a great experience when you flew above 25,000ft... You made up for it by turning up the weather and just not looking at it, usually for ten or so hours. It annoyed me more because it was the one thing that X-Plane should have done really well, and any one who bought the simulator or tried out the Demo, it would be an instant turn off. More annoying is that it took so long to fix.

 

In Laminar's defence it is not an easy thing to actually fix, as you add more DSF (distribution scenery format) tiles the multiplication of the area is x larger in all directions and triples the amount of data your computer has to absorb, and on top of that you have to load more DSF tiles to fill out the same extended area. To make it work the DSF system had to be completely redesigned from scratch and made far more efficient in operation.

 

The results are excellent and not only do you now get that long view now from altitude but there is now also new DSF loader that is multicore, but is noticeably smoother in operation and taking out those nasty freezes as the system loads in a new set of tiles...  it is quicker in loading as well, but don't expect a totally completely clean load, as some tiles are still very full and complex like I have in the South-East of the UK that is very heavy in data. It loaded very well considering the extended areas it had to cover with only a blip to note the changes. A feature of the new "extended" feature is that it is also switchable "on" or "off" on the X-Plane Rendering Options menu, which is great if you don't need that extra view and need to get some processing power back.

 

So what does it look like? I flew from Sicily to the United Kingdom and here over Sardina we have finally reached an altitude of 32,500ft (FL320) to get an idea of the view. First Image is the old view and the second is the extended view...

 

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Originally the old view would mean that the south-east coast is a blur in the distance, but with the "extended" feature the coast is well represented, now sharp and easily defined.

 

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North and the same aspect is the same with the peninsula of Isola Asinara and Porto Torres, before it was a blur, but the extended view is very well defined and if you look on the local map, the whole island is well covered and filled out with DSF mesh.

 

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The 180º view from the aircraft is the same will a full view of this large island from every angle.

 

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The really significant difference is the one you were not expecting? This is the detailing that now comes up at you from the more intermediate view below or along the line. This detailing was there before, but was tightly limited. Now in the view you get the full scope of harbours and sharp coastlines. Any coastline is great now to crossover and mountains and ridges are beautifully represented, you feel the altitude but also the area is now well defined below you...  It really expands out the flying experience. Certainly flying at 10,000ft - 12,000ft were the extended edges of the DSF's are not compromised is simply excellent for GA flying. And I will note that all images here are only the default textures that comes with every X-Plane and no HD textures are shown.

 

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These images are at 12,000ft and are to be honest the focal point of the extended DSF feature and the main reasoning for the changes. Here you can fly GA all day and not comprise your view with any blurring on the edges, it stays sharp right to the horizon. So now there are no more compromises or using your visibility distance (or volumetric fog) to hide the poorer aspects of the horizon. It is not perfect, perfect at this stage, but simply miles better than it was. It is noted that the "fog" line on the horizon has also been adjusted to avoid the "white" artifact in the mid-range view to further tighten up the viewpoint. 

 

All that extended data is going to have an impact. It does of course, but like I have sprouted in the past is that above 20,000ft your framerate goes into overdrive and you have a lot of headroom to absorb this extra data, and so it does work extremely well at altitude. The hitter part is on approach or on the ground, as you have all that data and the extended mesh now filling up your processor including the autogen. So the trick is to find that balance at this low altitude in visual eyecandy and your processor burning up or melting down up in the innards of your machine. You can as noted turn the extended mesh off and go back back to what once was, but that is a pretty heavy handed way to fly. So fine tuning is the way to go, and this is a still a Beta and so you have to note that aspect. Like the waste of framerate at altitude, I ask why we have to waste processing power on items we can't see or use at ground level? You are not wanting the autogen of a town on the other side of Sardina if you are sitting on the runway at Cagliari Elmas Airport. Yes you can adjust the distance now via the world detail distance and Num of objects, but it would be nice if X-Plane could adjust this automatically than having to re-render everything all the time.

 

But my numbers are putting me pretty close to the line (19 Frames) as I get a 8fr-10fr drop with the extended mesh on, so what was a comfortable 35-30 frames with a nice bit of headroom is now with the extended mesh 25-20 frames and that is giving me not of room to move around in? I will note this is a first glance and run, I haven't tried any fine tuning or tricks yet to see what 10.40 can really do and note this is a beta so more yet my come from Laminar, but they seem pretty much in the mind of we have refined this pretty well to the point of "this is best you are going to get", but I think they will get a few more bars out of it.

 

Overall though the "Extended Mesh" will transform X-Plane to the point it is starting to feel more complete than it ever was, or should it have been like this in the first place?   ..."I'll let you debate that.

 

ATC

We were expecting an overhaul of the ATC in X-Plane in 10.40, but that didn't come out in this beta version. But there are hints though that things are actually going on under the radar.

 

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There is a new ATC controllers pop-up window, that shows you nearby Air Traffic Controllers and their Com frequency, if you click on the frequency it will be auto-tuned into the aircraft. The significance of this is not the actual pop-up window or what it does, but in the new X-Plane interface which is very different from the usual panels of X-Plane past. It looks a little out of place at this point, but it points to a newer more modern style of XP interface in the future. 

You can now turn off those taxiway guide arrows if you don't want them. I didn't mind them actually, but it was when they didn't work that drove me crazy...  The "you are still off course" is still in there to drive you to mental distraction, so everything is still quite un-normal in a normal sort of way.

 

Video

Video is back!  Yes you can again record your bad flying habits again. Quicktime is out and has been replaced by a AVI system. As a mac user I don't like avi but the windows users will accept it better than me, personally I don't care if only it is far more efficient than the old system and any video is nice to have...  I missed it badly, but it is 32 or 64-bit and multi-core which sounds promising.

 

Preset Rendering options

You now have new five preset rendering options on the Rendering Options menu, replacing the old "Set all rendering options for maximum speed!" Settings include - Set to Extreme, High, Medium, Low and Minimum.

 

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Certainly aimed at new users and for a quick change in settings...  But really totally useless for everyone else. I checked them all and they don't come even close to my most efficient settings? I would have personally liked a saver preference system were you can save certain snapshot render settings for certain circumstances for a quick change, wasted opportunity really.

 

Windshear - Winds Aloft!

X-Plane METAR downloads will now read winds aloft data for high altitude wind data...  but only if you are flying over the United States, it doesn't work anywhere else. Windshear can give pilot's shivers, now you have that too...  you have been warned.

 

Big Brother Ben is now watching you...

X-Plane can now collect anonymous X-Plane usage information. There is a new checkbox in Operations & Warnings window to allow Laminar Research to collect anonymous usage data on your system configuration and X-Plane usage patterns. You can opt out of course, but I find it interesting that Laminar will try to work out "What hell is his patterns here" when looking at my data, I'm all over the place doing reviews so there is no real pattern to follow. but collectively it may be interesting to see how and why we use the simulator, if not then sell the data to President Putin, I'm sure he would have use for it.

 

Dreaded fac. Crash

Flying the other day I had one...  "Can't find .fac (facade)" and you know what will happen next....  your flight and all your last long hours of hard cockpit work is dead. Your going to crash, and so it did and I "SCREAMED" and hollered at this "Beep, beep, f***, beep simulator"

Now X-Plane’s response to missing art assets has been softened (slightly) of when facades and other critical art assets are missing, rather than quitting (crashing!) the sim, now only the offending DSF tile is skipped... thank "beep. beep" for that...

 

Glider tow

The glider-tow feature has had a few changes in being re-organized internally, Were as the glider tow had a bug in it where the forces for the first frame of the glider tow were wrong, due to the towplane location not being ready. The tow cable is now black instead of grey to make it easier to see,The slung load code also had a bug in it where any cable length less than 1 meter did not compute the loads properly, due to a /0 protection… It has been lowered now to a 1-centimeter minimum cable length.

 

GPS Improvements

There has been a few more tinkles with the GNS 430/530 innards. GNS 430/530 now allows disabling the automatic ILS CDI switching and now by default, the CDI will blend in the ILS signal smoothly beginning 2nm downwind of the final approach fix when the cross track error is 1.2nm or less. When the ILS signal gain is maximal, the CDI indication will change to VLOC and the changeover can always be overriden by manually selecting the CDI to VLOC.

There is an automated changeover that can be configured off for training operations in the NAV menu, along with the map options and the settings are remembered in the per-airplane settings file, like the map settings.

 

Global Airports

The global Airport folder is still growing at a massive rate. In 10.40 another 776 total more airports are available as default, that comes to a total of 1730 new batches of scenery (well done everyone) overall. As noted X-Plane is now getting a solid user base of scenery. I had doubts about this system, but it is working...  but a few airports do creep in under custom scenery were they are not wanted.

 

Swapping art assets

A small but again significant changes is that Library art assets can now be swapped based on datarefs.  This can be used to make seasonal texture add-ons change in the sim. In other words you can now have winter textures change to summer textures without actually going into the resources folders and changing them physically over. The results from this change is not noticeable yet, but it will be very interesting of where it will go.

 

Identifers

Long airport identifiers bigger than the current 4-character identifiers are now supported and so is support for fictitious ICAO identifiers. So X-Plane is moving to prefixing these fictitious identifiers with an X. So that means that German civil airports that have real ICAO identifiers follow the pattern EDxx, while German airports with made-up identifiers will now follow the pattern XEDxx.

 

Flaps in Replay

The flap indicator in the cockpit tracks the flap position on the wings in the replay mode and not by the handle position, as it should have done...  But it still does not work as I checked?

 

Aircraft Improvements and changes

Aircraft systems have had many improvements and a look over. Items include the bus voltages that now ignite properly at flight start, This will keep systems from reporting a no-volt for the first frame.

Hobbs time is now tracked with an aircraft that has a working hobbs meter that notes the total hours flown. Most Hobbs meters shown in X-Plane are usually fake.

If the type of file (airfoil, aircraft, etc) is the same as the last time you did a file-open, the path and folder to that file is left in place. This means that if you are selecting 50 afl files for your airplane, you do not have to navigate right through UI every time down to the same folder, which is real time saver.

A new feature is that 2-d windshield effects can be disabled in the rendering options screen, checking this box causes all 2-d window effects, like rain and bird-strikes can now be bypassed. For people with projector screens, collumated displays or any displays for which the 2-d effects are annoying, they can now be turned off.

The backup manual throttle control does now not over-ride the governor.

Thermometer and fuel indicator failure now functional! These failures were initially designed for the g1000 only, but now I have them working for all instruments

And better compressor-stall modeling. This is based on observation of compressor stall dynamics in a level-D sim.

 

These notes are only the first look at Beta 10.40. Usually Laminar put out a level of the upgrade and then bed that down before looking at more fixes and adding in more features. Like all Beta's sometimes it is not the headliner items that make the biggest changes but the underlying smaller improvement thats are installed but are either not yet implemented or require third party input to make them work.

 

My general feeling on Beta 10.40 is that it is a much more powerful release than it shows on the surface, and being structured under the radar are the more significant changes. One thing that is sure is that 10.40 quite stable and useable straight out of the box, and let's be frank in the fact that at least now we can fly and have really good scenery finally passing by below. 

 

Full Beta Release notes on 10.40 are here : X-Plane 10.40 Release Notes

 

X-Plane Developer Blog notes are here : X-Plane Developer

 

Stephen Dutton

 

14th June 2015

 

Copyright©2015 : X-Plane Reviews

 

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