Why are XP12 aircraft not showing up en masses?

[VirtualAviator]

If you're like me, you have probably been wondering why are the X-Plane 12 aircraft taking so long to come out. The answer is, every developer must now pay Laminar Research a developers fee of $659.00US to produce or upgrade XP12 aircraft.  Just kidding.   Seriously though, I recently read that LR has been upgrading their SDK kit and it will be releasing it soon (if not already). If I recall correctly I believe the new version is 4.0 (why recall when I can look it up? I couldn't find where on x-plane.com I read it. It was mentioned in the developer's blog, somewhere). Anyhoo, that, my friends, is why I believe we have not been seeing a flood of aircraft updates or new XP12 aircraft.

OR? Perhaps I completely missed the boat plane and there's an entirely different reason.

[Ben Russell]

X-Plane 12 is in early access.

It's a public beta. There will be many changes, some minor, some major.

Laminar have had a private developers chat channel for months already. We've helped them work through a lot of bugs already.

Opening the product to the public will find many more.

When X-Plane 12 settles down and exits "early access" you're likely to see more products officially updated.

[VirtualAviator]

2 hours ago, Ben Russell said:

X-Plane 12 is in early access.

It's a public beta. There will be many changes, some minor, some major.

 

When X-Plane 12 settles down and exits "early access" you're likely to see more products officially updated.

Now that makes a lot of sense.  Thanks Ben.

[InitiatedAunt74]

One thing to point out here.  Xp11 aircraft are about 99% compatible,  out of 100  or so I have tried, 99 fly, some have warnings about sound errors, some have dataref warnings, but most operate and fly fine.

 

[VirtualAviator]

10 hours ago, InitiatedAunt74 said:

One thing to point out here.  Xp11 aircraft are about 99% compatible,  out of 100  or so I have tried, 99 fly, some have warnings about sound errors, some have dataref warnings, but most operate and fly fine.

 

I believe the XP11 aircraft requires tweaking to be librain compatible - that is, to see the rain droplets on the windscreens. I assume other tweaks would make aircraft behave more "XP12 natively" versus XP12 compatible.  I moved a copy of all my XP11 payware aircraft to XP12. I wound up deleting the X-Aviation folder ( I organize my payware by dev or source) because I am not sure how the Gizmo plugin works. I feared that it might flag me as sharing aircraft and lock me out of both. I'm still testing and deleting payware that is not compatible.

[Ben Russell]

11 hours ago, VirtualGAaviator said:

I believe the XP11 aircraft requires tweaking to be librain compatible - that is, to see the rain droplets on the windscreens. I assume other tweaks would make aircraft behave more "XP12 natively" versus XP12 compatible.  I moved a copy of all my XP11 payware aircraft to XP12. I wound up deleting the X-Aviation folder ( I organize my payware by dev or source) because I am not sure how the Gizmo plugin works. I feared that it might flag me as sharing aircraft and lock me out of both. I'm still testing and deleting payware that is not compatible.

Gizmo is unaffected by how many different copies of X-Plane you have installed.

The Gizmo machine-id is generated using OS install markers.

 

[mjrhealth]

17 hours ago, VirtualGAaviator said:

I believe the XP11 aircraft requires tweaking to be librain compatibl

Rain effects have nothing to do with Librain. I believe its laminars ver. I stand to be corrected.

[daemotron]

Laminar based their new windscreen effects on the pioneering work Saso has done with librain. In one of the interviews Austin (or Ben?) gave a few details, and it sounded to me like they used his open-source implementation, adapted it to Vulkan, and embedded it within their rendering chain. One of the improvements pointed out in that interview was that now it was embedded, it could make use of all physics data, including prop wash etc. to natively couple effects with XP's physics calculations.

[KPDover]

This is helpful to know. I didn't realize the SDK for XP12 wasn't available yet. I would have thought it was available during the alpha so that devs could use the beta to beta-test their planes, so that upon XP12's release there would be finished and mostly-bug-free 3rd party planes to choose from.

I can be patient (sort of! ), but it would be a shame if they release the fancy new game and one of XP's greatest assets over MSFS (its wide variety of quality 3rd party aircraft) wasn't available at the time a lot of prospective buyers are hearing about the game.

[VirtualAviator]

From what I can ascertain, they are updating the SDK's periodically. They did have an SDK available when XP12 was released, however, it has been updated since. I suspect it'll see a few more iterations to stay current.

[daemotron]

The current stable SDK is v3.0.3, which fits with 11.5x. There is also a beta version of the v4.0 SDK available (cf. https://developer.x-plane.com/sdk/plugin-sdk-downloads/), which is the one fitting for 12.0. The API documentation is however not yet updated to incorporate all the XPLM400 changes. So in short, if a plugin builds without issues against the XPLM400 API, there's a good chance it will simply work without problems. If it fails to build and the reasons aren't obvious, it'll depend on the developer's patience digging into the header files and resorting to try & error troubleshooting. In both cases though chances are that SDK changes down the road entail further changes to the plugin code.