Hi,

As stated L/R just released 12.4.0-r1.

Weird. The release notes I see are for 12.4.4-beta3 not 12.4.0-r1.

Probably b3 is the latest beta, which went directly into r1...

Looking fwd for 12.5 and the flightmodel updates !

"X-Plane 12.4.0-r1 (Release Candidate 1) is an update for X-Plane 12 released in February 2026 that brings major performance optimizations, multi-threading capabilities, and stability fixes."

XP12.4.3 is rolling out as released now with the beta at 12.4.4b3.

Does Laminar Research use two different numbers? One for their installer and one for X-Plane 12?

If that's the case, I can't understand why the auto update notice from XP12 popped up today when starting XP12 when I had the latest beta yesterday.

It looks like 12.4.0-r1 is for their installer and the beta3 is for X-Plane 12 itself.

That's strange. So my installer has version 5.4.0r1 dated 6/25/2026.

Release Notes :

NOTAMs

⚠️ Danger: This is an UNSTABLE release (Beta)

This release CAN and WILL contain VISUAL ERRORS and may cause INSTABILITY or CRASHES. The purpose of this release is to help us discover them and fix them. Please report those using the Bug Reporter. Social media or forum reports will be ignored.

⚠️ Please remove XA-Snow and other related snow plugins before using 12.4.4

X-Plane 12.4.4 now features persistant and regional snow placement in live-weather mode!

This means by default, you can visibly see different variations of snow-depth throughout the landscape. However existing snow-addons tamper with this, by setting the whole scene to draw snow, thereby obscuring the realtime placement of snow.

Downloads & Documentation

XLua 2.0.0 – Beta 3

Download

Documentation

X-Plane SDK 440 – Beta 3

Download

Documentation

Version History

Release Date: October 1, 2026

General

Fixed the broken installation for Steam users on macOS

Graphics Core Engine

Fixed numerous errors to improve stability

Graphics

Fixed trees behind the camera being drawn at full detail in the shadow pass, which cost GPU time for shadows the user couldn’t see

VR

Fixed lights appearing in a different spot in each eye in VR. This affected the built-in flashlight and plugin lights placed with xplm_CoordSpace_Camera (XPD-18465)

SDK

Breaking change: XPLMDrawCalls no longer applies a hidden window origin. Vertices and scissors are now plain panel coordinates under the current transform, like every other Panel Graphics primitive. Plugins must apply translate(left, top) and scale(1, -1) before drawing, the inverse of what their mouse handling already does. This also fixes retained ImGui drawings staying where the window was when they were recorded. XLua applies the transform itself in EndFrame, so XLua scripts need no changes. The SDK sample plugins have been updated

Panel Graphics and ImGui

Nested scissors now work: an ImGui draw call’s scissor combines with any clip already in force, such as an enclosing XPLMScissorSet, instead of replacing it

ImGui textures can now be created and destroyed at any time, including during a draw callback, and retained drawings can be recorded outside a draw callback

Fixed a crash when drawing a retained drawing and destroying it with XPLMDestroyRetainedDrawing in the same callback

Fixed ImGui windows ignoring all clicks after a click on empty space. ImGui windows now claim every click. This affected the SDK sample plugins and XLua ImGui windows, including avionics screens

Browser functions

Fixed a crash when a browser callback returned its result other than through XPLMReturnString, for example as a string literal or NULL. The error is now reported to the plugin’s error callback and Log.txt, and the JavaScript Promise resolves to null

Fixed valid results being rejected when a plugin reused a pointer from an earlier XPLMReturnString call. The result must now be returned during the current call

Invalid JSON from a browser function is now reported to the plugin instead of silently becoming null. Parsing is stricter: trailing content, comments and trailing commas are rejected, while bare strings, numbers and booleans still work. Very deeply nested JSON resolves to null rather than failing the Promise

Lua browser callbacks that raise an error now resolve to null instead of crashing. The error appears only in the Lua error log

Corrected the docs: browser callback results must go through XPLMReturnString and must not be NULL. Registering an AddBrowserFunction name a second time is rejected and reported; the old docs said it replaced the earlier callback, which it never did