bsupnik

Hi, This is definitely wrong. There is no compatibility problem between X-Plane and SASL. What has been happening is SASL has been crashing X-Plane on El Capitan for --months-- now. This is just the first time we reported this crash for what it is: a plugin crashing the sim. In 10.41 the exact same crash happens, except you get an Apple crash report. If you speak Apple crash dump, you'll see a plugin (that is in fact SASL) on the stack causing OpenAL to abort. The problem is that Yosemite broke X-Plane's automatic crash reporting (via break pad) and with that we lost the code that annotates whether a plugin or the sim was running at crash time. The annotation is now restored (unfortunately without auto-crash reporting for X-plane..that's a much harder thing to solve). For the last few months I have just received a huge number of "bug reports" from users, sending in Mac crash reports that were attributable to SASL. I put the annotator back into 10.42 to stop the torrent. The fix for SASL is already available for freeware aircraft - for payware, the vendor has to roll a patch. Here's the details. http://developer.x-plane.com/2015/11/sasl-crash-fixed-youll-need-a-new-sasl/

Hi Guys, To answer a few question: - No, you don't get a free Steam license if you own the DVDs. (Please note that with DVDs, they don't have to be in the tray all the time - we only check for the DVD every few days.) It is not my expectation that anyone would "repurchase" the product. - As of this time, our plan is to update steam with final versions but not betas, so if you need to run a full version of the beta, you should probably stick with DVD or USB. - The update experience for non-beta users should be VERY similar between steam and LR's own update: you get an auto-updated pushed to you when a full release version is available. So both DVD and Steam customers will get all of the free updates for the entire v10 version run. - The steam product is the same as X-Plane 10 global on DVD - the whole sim, the whole world, and you install what you want. (For Steam, I think you'll be able to download regions later or separately, and for the DVD we've had add/remove scenery and the option to NOT install everything up front for a logn time.) The pricing should be similar. - My understanding is that third party add-ons can be installed into the Steam version just like the DVD version - just drag a scenery pack, aircraft folder, or plugin folder into the right place. For both Steam and DVDs, third parties have to roll their own DRM if they want copy protection; the sim's copy protection is not available to third parties. cheers Ben

The way the density sliders affecft the autogen is currently in a state of transition. In v9 we removed "stuff" when you turned the settings down. This technique just doesn't look that good in v10. Roads are removed by scope, e.g. highways stay the longest, small roads go first. 3-d buildings are removed on a per-entity basis, e.g. one autogen element is removed at a time. This is _not_ what we intend to have for much longer. The new way, which we are working to is: - Autogen elements spawn more or less 3-d over their base lot based on the objects setting. So when you turn down OBJs you'll get a "less 3-d-ish 3-d" with the base ground textures still in place. - Roads will have detail removed but all roads remain. This second idea is going to be tough to tune...because it means a lot of roads even at the lowest setting...we're really going to have to tighten our belts to make it work. But we think it can look good, while removing big chunks of the road grid looks a bit silly. Once we do this, if you _still_ can't run well on the lowest detail settings (low objs, low roads), the next thing to do is to turn down the world detail distance, which means 3-d less far out. One reason why we think we can go to this "simpler 3-d" instead of "less 3-d" is that the actual performance of the autogen is really quite good. I have a Sandy Bridge i5 and I can run with _all_ of the autogen, forests, roads, and world distance maxed out at 30 fps, and have been able to since X-Plane 10.0 shipped. And we do have a few ideas to make things faster. The easiet way to kill autogen performance is to turn shadows and reflections too far up - they're amplifiers on the cost of 3-d. cheers Ben

ATTR_LOD is _modulated_ by "world level of detail". Your obj is guaranteed to be drawn out to the outer LOD distance (in meters) as long as world level of detail is on its "default" setting. The other settings effectively make your LOD distance smaller.

Yeah I know him...he's always Skyping me at all hours and he's like "can we change the water color? Can we use 20,000,000,000,000 triangles in our base mesh? Can we make an add-on that will cause x-Plane to act like a coffee maker?" Sheesh! What does he think the scenery system is? A platform? :-)

LMFAO ... careful Cam, he might find you and smack you silly!

X-Plane has had cloud shadows cast on the ground since at least v7, if not earlier.

That's because X-Plane is way too cheap!!!!!

X-Plane does _not_ tell you how much RAM it uses! It tells you how many bytes of textures it has asked the driver to manage on X-Plane's behalf. This information has in the past incorrectly been labeled as "VRAM" in the past, but is correctly labeled as "Total size of all loaded textures at current settings" in 930 and the last few patches. More than you ever care to know here: http://xplanescenery.blogspot.com/2006/07/x-plane-framerate-and-vram.html In particular, the textures loaded is not the same as VRAM, and VRAM is not a good proxy for overall GPU load! And as a final note: you can set the settings user interface to similar positions in the two products, but this is _not_ the same as asking the rendering engine to do the same amount of work. The very definition of _how_ we render changes between major versions, and settings are recalibrated to better cover the total range of visual output. So...comparing disparate versions of x-plane useally means an apples-to-oranges comparison _even_ if the rendering settings look the same. cheers ben

"Well, when you quit a program prior to running X-Plane, the prior running program still leaves some data in the ram, so when you use this program it gets rid of the previous data that was left in the ram. This of course gives X-Plane a bit more room to work with, not just the load times." This is not really true when you get into the guts of how modern memory management works. IF any pages are left around after a process quits (I do not know OS X's policy on this) they would certainly be unloadable when necessary. The VM system wouldn't put X-Plane into a state of thrash to attempt to save physical RAM for a dead process. /ben

Hi Y'all, I have not seen any performance sampled profiles of X-Plane running on either in-house machines or in the field that would indicate that _any_ of these three apps would improve performance, with the exception of: - Renice if you are CPU bound AND running another app. I have to point out that the best way to improve fps on old machines when running multiple apps is to ... quit the other apps!!! :-) But...run the fps test a few times to get solid fps differentials with these tools. I would expect freeing RAM to improve load times, but NOT to shorten load times more than the time it takes to run the tool that purges RAM. Paging out is paging out. cheers ben