…are greatly exaggerated.  I was out of the office last week on vacation (for the first time in 2.5 years) and didn’t bother to post first.  Austin and Chris were also out on vacation for at least a week each.

We are not dead, we are not out of business, and we are definitely not stopping development of X-Plane 10!  Austin has been working on X-Plane since approximately 1637 (well, the 90s at least) and he is not going to stop now.

Stuff We’re Working On

I am still working with Alpilotx and others on DSF recuts.  This work is moving forward, but my side at least is going slowly because I am also working on other features that are pre-release and have not been announced.

I also had some time to do some OpenGL modernization over the last two weeks before vacation.  This code does not directly improve X-Plane, but it sets us up to improve performance: once we have more modern code we can get access to newer GPU features.

Upcoming Releases

At this point I am looking at two releases:

• Some kind of short-beta release to roll out new terrain textures, some of the userr-submitted lego-brick airports, and possibly a few small bug fixes.
• Then a long-beta release, where we could put a major feature or two, and also ship code that needs more serious testing (e.g. the OpenGL modernization).

Over the last few years that I have been working on X-Plane, the time between major patches has been steadily increasing.  Back in X-Plane 7 or 8, we might have a major patch every three months; with X-Plane 10 that interval is more like six months.  I think this longer time between major betas is good for X-Plane 10:

• It lets us run longer 8-week betas without being in beta perpetually.  This gives third party developers more time test.
• Fewer larger patches means less work for third parties, since a major patch means retesting add-ons.
• X-Plane 10 is a much bigger product than X-Plane 6 – it needs a longer development cycle.

Still On Fire?

The other factor making it seem quiet around here (besides slower major betas and the occasional time off is that we are finally moving out of fire-fighting bug-fix mode into doing structured development.  When we were fixing bugs in X-Plane 10.0 as fast as possible, a bug fix was followed by a beta and announcements as quickly as possible.

Now that we have a stable 64-bit build out, we’re writing code that looks to build the future of X-Plane, rather than just fixing its past.  So the quiet you hear now should hopefully turn into good features in the future.

Already posted in the thread below yours around 30mins ago. :lol:

Glad to hear something positive from LR. Good news has been thin recently. I am looking forward to the continued growth and improvement of X-Plane 10 and successors.

"we are finally moving out of fire-fighting bug-fix mode into doing structured development"

 

This is great news, something I was hoping to read eventually.