State of CRJ plugin compatibility issues and how you can help

[philipp]

Hi folks,

I want to give you a quick update from the development.

The most annoying issue of compatibility is, as you all know, the CTD that occurs when XPUIPC is used with the CRJ.

We had an intensive debugging session together with Torsten "Spyy", the developer of XPUIPC. We found that the underlying issue as a problem of XPUIPC, not of the CRJ.

In short, XPUIPC is doing something that is illegal in the first place, but as long as there is little load to X-Plane, it still works. So nobody ever noticed XPUIPC is doing something illegal. Now the CRJ exploits X-Plane's limits in various ways. It stays within what is legal, but to its maximum extend. And now the error in XPUIPC is revealed and leads to the crash.

Think of it like a street with cars parked at the streetside. There is a white line on the concrete separating the road from the parking cars. This white line is clearly specified by the X-Plane SDK. XPUIPC is parked slightly across this line. If you drive a Beetle through the street, nothing happens. If you drive a big truck through it, XPUIPC gets bumped and scratched badly although the truck doesn't touch the white line.

As soon as there are more projects in X-Plane behaving like big trucks, more errors like these are going to surface in software you now believe works perfectly.

We provided Torsten with all the necessary information to fix this issue, along with a developer copy of the CRJ to test things. I'm sure he will come up with a solution soon and park XPUIPC again in the right place.

But that shows we need the developers to collaborate.

We mailed the Conex Sound engine developer twice, but got no answer.

If you want plugin conflicts to be solved, write to the developers and urge them to contact us. We can provide with free copies of the CRJ for testing, and also we are very good providing debug information that helps them.

If you are developer working on new stuff, make sure you obey to the guidelines for X-Plane plugin threading. And by obey I do not mean fire up X-Plane, see that it doesn't crash and assume everything is right. Multithreading doesn't work like this. Bugs surface under high load and tight timing conditions.

All the best and have fun "up there",

Philipp

[Kesomir]

Very glad to hear some movement on the XPUIPC issue.

This is a major plugin on the windows side of things, enabling access to a vast swathe of 3rd party apps for x-plane.

I'll be very glad to be able to use the CRJ on our hub-hop event so long as a solution is out before it finishes in September.

[philipp]

Good news!

I met Torsten Spiering, developer of XPUIPC at FsWeekend, and he has his bugfixed XPUIPC almost ready. I have received a beta of XPUIPC that works perfectly with the CRJ.

Philipp

[Kesomir]

AWESOME! (too excited for lowercase)

Then we just need the mac server component and then the extras like joystick handling (Don't ask for much do I )

Edited November 10, 2011 by Kesomir