Beta
From X-Plane Wiki
There is now an X-Plane 10 patch: 10.04B4 available for download.
About Patches
How Do I Get a Version 10 Patch
If X-Plane 10 does not prompt you to update automatically, pick "About X-Plane" from the About Menu. If your copy is out of date, X-Plane will prompt you to update.
How Do I Update X-Plane If X-Plane Crashes On My Computer?
Even if you cannot run X-Plane (for example, if it crashes due to an incompatibility with your graphics card) you can still download the X-Plane installer application directly and run it to update X-Plane. Here are the download links to the installer apps:
Full version:
Demo:
Download, unzip, and run the installer application. Pick update and it will prompt you to select your copy of X-Plane 10 to update.
Do I Have To Re-Download The 2 GB Demo To Get The Patch?
No!!!!!!! You can update X-Plane in a number of ways.
- From the about box, you can automatically update to any new final patch (or newer beta if you have a beta).
- If you have the full sim, the latest installer has an "update" option for full installs.
- If you have the demo, the latest demo installer has an "update" option for demos.
These updates are always incremental demos and are often < 30 MB total; only the files you need are downloaded, and they are downloaded in compressed format to save bandwidth.
How Long Will The Update Take?
The download time depends on the size of the patch, how long it's been since you've updated, and how fast your net connection is. Generally, it should be a lot faster to update than to download the demo; the updates are usualy less than 150 MB.
Release Notes
X-Plane 10.05 Release Candidate 1
10.05 is a minor patch from 10.04 to fix a few key bugs.
- Carrier landings now work correctly.
- The camera no longer goes through walls in 3-d cockpit mode on the Cirrus Jet and others. (ATTR_solid_wall now works again.)
- The warning message for 32-bit versions of Windows has been moved to the first time you pick rendering settings, and the language has been edited for clarity.
X-Plane 10.04r3
- V10 airplane electrical System and Bus Specs are now read correctly from airplanes. This was broken in later 10.04 betas.
- V9 airplanes electrical systems are read in correctly.
This build is the final build of 10.04.
X-Plane 10.04 Release Candidate 2
- Manifold pressure works the way it did in 10.03. We'll revisit better manifold pressure indications in a future beta when there's more time to get it right.
- Trim setting labels in Plane-Maker's control tab fixed.
X-Plane 10.04 Release Candidate 1
- Bug fix for ATC issuing altimeter on descent.
- Fixed pilot-heading dataref to put sim in command-look mode.
- Fixed parsing of OBJs with hard surfaces.
X-Plane 10.04 Beta 7
Beta 7 is out now. Note that to get it you need the new 3.1 installer. If you try to run the old installer, it will give you an error; if you simply update from the "about box", the new installer will be downloaded for you.
With this new installer, the installer and updater are one program. See here for more info than you ever wanted to know.
Lots of new art!!!
- The C-130 is included!
- Lit textures on cities and more city facades.
- Tuning of spill lights in the airport library to improve fps.
- Tuning and revision to natural terrain textures and forests.
- For users with the X-Plane 10 Global DVD, you will get Aerosoft's European airports if you install scenery for those areas, or if you update and have those areas already installed.
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed crash when loading airplanes or quitting, introduced in beta 6.
- Fixed crash at EDDM on Linux (due to ATC taxi layout autogen running off the rails.)
- Fixed missing sky and clouds with P180, x737 and other wide panels when 4x SSAA and HDR are in use.
- Fixed the nasty bumps that airplanes were seeing when taxiing on runways at high altitude airports.
- Fixed multithreaded scenery load on Windows. This may help some users with flashing triangles.
Rendering Engine & Scenery
- Object exclusion zones now also exclude autogen, so scenery packs that get rid of default buildings now get rid of the v10 default autogen. There is not going to be an "Exclude autogen" - just use the objects exclusion zone!
- Objects placed at high altitudes should now be at the correct location.
- Latest apt.dat data from Robin included.
Plugin bug fixes, included in this beta:
- XPLM returns a version with an extra digit, to match v9.
- XPLM load/save data file APIs fixed.
- De-icing failure datarefs fixed.
- Datarefs.txt now matches the sim.
Refinements:
- Manifold pressure model and Real-Weather reading are all improved... Now the manifold pressure model is based on real physics just like the rest of X-Plane (instead of just following the values entered in Plane-Maker) and the Real-Weather reading is refined to work with more accuracy and read reports in more countries, where formats can vary somewhat.
X-Plane 10.04 Beta 6
It's just like X-Plane 10.04 beta 5, but with the texture files back! See below for the fixes!
X-Plane 10.04 Beta 5
Note: Beta 5 was pulled due to missing texture files.
Clouds:
- Cloud performance has been tuned. The cloud slider is not calibrated the way it was in 10.04b4; please don't worry about the number you see. Tune the slider to get the trade-off of quality and performance you want on your computer. The "100%" mark represents what we think a high-end system might show; you can go past this if you really liked the older high settings from previous betas, but realistically there's no need to do this.
- The far view clouds should look less strange from orbital altitudes.
ATC:
- Controllers now issue altimeter settings to aircraft on handoffs, on descents OUT of a flight level and every 50nm when appropriate.
- Controllers now expect aircraft to fly with the correct altimeter setting and also properly monitors aircraft at flightlevels expecting them to be flying at a PRESSURE altitude (with their altimeters set to 29.92). At this moment, the transition level for the WORLD is set to 18,000 feet as it is in the USA. In the future, this will vary based on region.
- AI aircraft are spawned at more appropriate speeds. In the past, they were spawned too slowly which caused them to stall and lose altitude which caused ATC to constantly nag them to regain their altitude. This was the primary cause for radio congestion!
- Improved taxi routings across the world so they're a bit smarter.
Rendering:
- The 3-d cockpit draws correctly for multi-monitor configurations with offset views on the side.
- Our low-level OpenGL setup on Windows is now done a little bit differently; this change was recommended by people at NVidia who are very smart. But if you are running on Windows and you _can_ run 10.03 but you cannot start up the new beta at all, please file a bug!!
- ATTR_draped now works with objects that do not have any LOD statements! There was a previous bug in X-Plane so that if you used ATTR_draped and did not have ATTR_LOD anywhere, the sim would not draw the draped geometry. This is now fixed, so ATTR_draped really does work as a drop-in replacement to ATTR_poly_os. Docs coming soon!!
Scenery:
- Fixed facades in the airport library that were generating errors on load.
- The roof edge of urban downtown facades should look correct.
DRM:
- We are reworking our installer and DVD detection. If the sim won't go out of demo mode, but 10.03 works correctly, please be sure to file a bug!
MORE COOL NEW STUFF:
- Compressor stall failures are refined, and can be solved by pulling fuel to the engine to shut it down.
- Aircraft icing is now a bit more aggressive and realistic, and flexible with the ability to add 2 switches for AOA heat,
pitot heat, static port heat, engine inlet heat, prop heat, and wing heat! This lets you control these systems more precisely... and expect the correct results from their operation in flight!
X-Plane 10.04 Beta 4
ATC:
- ATC checks aircraft altitude less frequently being a little more patient with pilots.
- New aircraft spawn "silently" which should drastically improve radio congestion.
- ATC should properly inform pilots of their expected approach and runway upon giving the pilot their FIRST vector for the approach.
Scenery:
- Latest version of KSEA demo area has variable density of objects with the rendering settings. If you have a lower performance computer and run at medium object settings, the demo airport should have better framerate.
Weather:
- Fixed black sky and broken transition from near to far terrain when flying over overcast cloud layers.
- Fog coloring tweaked in the clouds a bit... The color should be more realistic INSIDE of the clouds!
- More improvements in the read in of Real-Weather files... now handling more cloud types and report-types, including ones found in Europe!
Joystick:
- Left and right brake BUTTONS should always work, as long as you do not have joystick AXIS assigned to left and right brakes!
- Joystick can now over-ride autopilot, as in reality. BUT, beware! The autopilot will be fighting you with the servos, and the trim as well, and in some airplanes, the trim is stronger than the flight controls themselves!
Misc:
- Fixed white triangles in sky when looking straight up.
- Temporarily disabled alerts for illegally used ramp starts.
- Transition to supersonic engine dynamics a hair more realistic... applies to engine DRAG as well as thrust!
- Spherical and cylindrical projection corrected... See if you like it more! (If you have a pro-use key!)
- (real) Garmin430 and Garmin430 WAAS driven more perfectly now, with the ability to set the OBS on the Garmin unit or the X-Plane panel.
X-Plane 10.04 Beta 3
Beta 3 contains a few fixes to bugs introduced earlier in the beta, as well as some experimental stuff.
DRM: X-Plane 10.04 beta 3 will remember that it has seen a DVD for 24 hours, alleviating the need to keep the DVD in the drive all of the time. Chris will blog about this in more detail later.
Rendering artifacts: X-Plane 10.04 beta 2 introduced a bug where the internal visibility could become a negative number. This introduced a ton of weird artifacts, including missing pieces of runway and broken lighting. Beta 3 fixes this. Please read the following carefully.
- If you reported a rendering artifact bug for X-Plane 10.04 beta 2 _and_ if that bug was _new_ to X-Plane 10.04 beta 2 _and_ if the bug is not fixed in beta 3, please re-report the bug.
- Please do _not_ re-report rendering artifact bugs that were also in beta 1. We already have those bugs in our database; we only want to see how many of the new beta 2 artifacts were fixed by this single change.
Other Fixes:
- Beta 2 was overly sensitive about misplaced airport beacons and windsocks. At this point you should be able to load any custom scenery that loaded in previous versions of X-Plane 10. If your apt.dat contains misplaced beacons and airports you will get a log warning.
- Facades that consist of one floor plus an angled roof should now work like v9.
- The internal version for .sit and .rep has been incremented because the formats are changed slightly.
X-Plane 10.04 Beta 2
- All buttons on the FMS's should work properly even if there are two different FMS's in the airplane.
- Wind-shear and turbulence model refined a little more to be more complex in it's randomness, and not always quite so strong in what are requested to be moderate conditions, and to change in a reasonable way with altitude. This should help improve wind and turbulence modeling, especially with Real-Weather turned on.
- X-15 drop and Space-Shuttle-carry missions should work properly now.
- Right-mouse drag to look around in 3-D cockpit command-look view, and mouse scroll wheel zooms. This is a pretty convenient way to look around the 3-D cockpits. (This works in "command" look mode, not mouse look mode! So when you are not right-mouse dragging, the view stays still and you can manipulate the 3-d panel.)
- Track-IR functions in ALL 3-d cockpit views now... It has WORKED for years, but is now easier to find since it engages in ALL 3-d cockpit views, not just one.
- Cool new feature for QuickTime movies: Movie quality! Set it high or low depending on how good you want it to look... and how much disk space you want to burn!
- External visuals should sync-up faster in the multi-machine setups, which should save some time in real flight-training scenarios.
- Landing lights, spotlights, and spotlight aiming-angles all go from master machine to external visuals now.
- Plane-Maker system screen: Option to auto-load with current values, or not, airspeed, vertical speed, and altitude when a new autopilot mode is engaged.
- Visibility tuned to change with altitude in a more accurate way to follow the reported weather more closely.
- AI planes should be better about holding desired altitude now, resulting in less annoyed air traffic controllers.
- Fixed: incorrect warnings about missing scenery
- Fixed (partly): the ocean shading should have fewer sharp lines on it. Far view shading of the ocean is still a work in progress...more color tuning in a future beta.
- Fixed: wing flex now works - X-Plane was incorrectly zeroing out wing-flex on some v10 planes.
- Fixed: sharp turns in taxiway lines now render correctly at KSEA and other airports.
- Fixed: right button on Linux is now the "right" button, not the scroll wheel itself.
- Fixed: plugins won't crash if they try to read the weather from XPluginStart
Facades:
- Roof behaviors now match v9 for legacy facades
- A bunch of new features to control the exact appearance of facade-attached objects - docs coming soon!
- New facade features: attached objects on facades appear and disappear with "objects" rendering setting for better performance.
X-Plane 10.04 Beta 1
ATC:
- AI Aircraft now climb/hold altitude better dramatically reducing the frequency of hearing ATC yell at them.
- Protect against aircraft doing something WAY out of bounds like departing instead of taxiing or holding short.
- Stability improvements
- Step descents dramatically improved
- ATC should now tell the user what approach they're setting them up for
- ATC "Radio" box text color tweak
- Fixed AI aircraft names
Lots of tuning and tweaking to make everything just right here in this release:
- Plane should be able to hold still quite a bit better during runup, and not slowly drift with the brakes on!
- Manifold pressure model is now improved to be more like real planes.
- French and Spanish translation improvements to make the menus a hair more accurate in those languages.
- Better vertical resolution of the NMEA strings for newer (real) moving maps that plot vertical paths as well.
- More resolution in the FDR replays, so even little RC drones with small movements can have their paths recorded perfectly.
- Cylindrical projection should be able to handle changing the screen-res on the fly with no problem now.
- Better metar parsing: X-Plane should not be confused over various comments in the metars about the wind.
- As well ATIS should report the visiblity accuratley in all cases. Earlier versions did not report the very low-vis cases correctly.
- And, an option to re-scan real-weather to go along with re-download.
- The heat-blurr rendering effect is now offset by the exhaust offset specified in Plane-Maker, which is useful.
- As well, the heat blurr now draws for ALL planes, not just the one you are flying.
- As well, you can specify the exhsust offset PER ENGINE!
- Proper cloud textures used even if you have both cumulus and cirrus layers at the same time.
- The yaw-string is visible for the gliders and helos.
- A-I airplanes should be a bit more robust, really adding power if needed to get out of ditches or up hills, and not having systems break, rendering the plane stopped or otherwise motionless.
- TCAS system should only call out guys with their transponder on...and the AI should only turn on their transponder for flight, not taxi! This is getting down to a pretty crazy level of realism, here.
- New failure: brown-out! In the upper right of the first page of failures.
A pretty nice failure for helos, added for use in real military training now!
Aircraft and Attached Objects:
- Aircraft can now have any number of attached objects; the interface is revamped to show this.
- Attached objects now have per object control over LOD, shadowing, and pre-fill. These options let you tune your plane for maximum performance. Click the "More Info" button in the Plane-Maker screen to view a description of what the settings do and how they should be used.
- The 747 and CirrusJet now have some of the pre-fill and shadow options set to improve 3-d cockpit framerates; we'll work through the other planes during beta.
- Wing flex for v9 planes now defaults to off; this prevents graphic errors when the attached parts aren't authored to flex with the wings.
- Plane-Maker taxi lights don't shine into the interior of the P-180.
- Fixed culling and drawing of OBJ-based weapons in the sim and Plane-Maker
Other random stuff:
- The fps test is fixed to not sit in the joystick calibration screen.
- New smoke puff artwork
Baron: Fixed the altimeter needle. King air: Multiple flight model / engine enhancements. (Per Jan Grundke / Twinpropflyer ) input.
X-Plane 10.03 Release Candidate 2
ATC:
- Bug fix for crash when flying approaches into untowered fields.
- Fixed other crash in ATC
Rendering:
- Fixed corrupt geometry at KBTR and other locations. (These were facade roofs being stretched off into space!)
- Sim will refuse to run with a clear error message for old non-supported hardware.
X-Plane 10.03 Release Candidate 1
Performance:
- Framerate improved for 2-d panel views and forward-no-HUD, particularly with HDR enabled.
Rendering:
- Clouds look better.. best yet!
ATC:
- Fixed some minor crashes
- Improved approach altitudes slightly
- Fixed step descents and made the descents a bit shallower.
Linux:
- Fix crash when XRANDR is not installed.
- Replay mode slider restored.
X-Plane 10.03 Beta 10
- Fix for hang while flying with AI planes or on startup
- Fix for missing DSF tile on really heavily loaded machine (this is a really rare bug)
X-Plane 10.03 Beta 9
Beta 9 is a quick fix to beta 8. Beta 8 was removed from distribution due to a fatal crash; all of beta 8's bug fixes are of course included in beta 9, as well as:
- Fixed a Windows crash bug in beta 8.
- Fixed missing runway and city lights at some monitor settings.
- Restored framerate with clouds visible.
- Fixed crash in ATC system on startup.
- Fixed missing sunlight in planet-wide view.
X-Plane 10.03 Beta 8
NOTE: Beta 8 has been removed due to crashes on Windows. Beta 7 is available. A new beta will be out shortly with the features listed below and a fix to the new crash.
Coolness:
- City lights are better tuned to look nice at a wide variety of resolutions and fields of view.
- Cloud lighting is more accurate, which is really nice, especially for overcast and stratus clouds.
- Aircraft lighting is a hair nicer in cloud shadow.
- Rendering options are streamlined and organized a hair better... with "one-push to set to max frame-rate" button.
Flight-Control:
- Joystick should now be more responsive! You should see a more instant and accurate response.
- You now get help with joystick calibration on your first start-up.
ATC:
- Fixed stability issues in ATC system
- Fixed step descents
- Fixed problems with controllers that had multiple frequencies
Plugins:
- Fixed weather datarefs when real weather is in use
- Fixed airplane loading by plugins on Windows
Weather:
- Fixed disappearing objects when Real Weather is in use
Rendering:
- Fixed diseappearing horizon artifacts
- Tuned shadow options - hopefully they should be a bit less blurry and a little bit faster
- Improved GPU fill rate a little bit in 3-d cockpit view with HDR on
Bug-Fix:
- Now you can take screenshots even if already recording a quicktime movie or sending imagery to EFIS-App.
X-Plane 10.03 Beta 7
ATC:
- Fixed bug sometimes causing the wrong controller to be assigned during a taxi reroute (gnd vs twr)
- Fixed bug preventing Delivery from giving clearances to people who were given gate holds for weather.
- Runway Flow changes less unstable
- AI Flies Plane now picks less silly destinations
- ATC works properly with --no_sound options now
- File Flight Plan menu item now properly disabled when necessary
Weather:
- No more seeing the inside of the clouds
- No more seeing stars from inside the clouds
General:
- When you create a navaid in the editing screen in the map page, you CAN see that navaid, making it easier to edit
- Replay mode shows properly in IOS
- A little more room for airport data in the low enroute map when you click on an airport... leaves room for frequencies with longer descriptions
- Slight speed improvement when world level of detail is turned down and autogen is turned up
Aircraft:
- Weapons now move with wing flex
- Wing flex a hair faster and tighter
- More runways displayed in the map, if there is room based on your texture resolution
- 172 starter dialed down a hair
- Tire puffs from other planes should always be at right elevation
- Custom prop discs aren't used for AI planes
For this build, if you are running a 32-bit version of Windows and have not set up your computer to allow 3 GB of virtual memory per process, X-Plane will detect the virtual memory limit and suggest this page: Running_Out_of_Memory
X-Plane 10.03 Beta 6
ATC:
- Fixed bug preventing lowercase routings from working
- Fixed numerous crashes in the ATC system.
- Fixed bug causing AI planes to suddenly taxi through a hold short line wildly.
- Fixed bug causing the view to change while using the arrows to navigate ATC menus.
- Adjusted timers to let users communicate with ATC more easily.
- Adjusted "off course" tolerances to make it less annoying.
- Improved automatic layout generation at KTCM (and hopefully other airports that are long and thin)
Aircraft:
- CRJ and other aicraft cockpits should work at night in HDR mode on OS X Lion.
- Sim is more tolerant of missing textures - the rules now match v9 for OBJs.
- Slight improvement to braking model to aid in erroneous aircraft drifting.
- Baron 58: Added cockpit night lighting. Use the four lighting knobs under the copilot yoke to adjust.
- F4 Phantom: Adjusted the flight model for better in-flight handling and more reasonable manners on approach and landing.
- Fixed seg fault in weight/weapons window.
Rendering:
- Fixed cut-off global lights on ATI hardware.
X-Plane 10.03 Beta 5
Rendering:
- Fixed cut-outs in rain when HDR mode is enabled.
- Fixed square white runwy lights in heavy Cat-III IFR when HDR is disabled.
- Fixed corrupt drawing on UFMC when HDR mode is enabled.
ATC:
- Fixed a bug causing bad taxi routings which may have caused ATC to constantly issue new taxi clearances.
- Joystick General Command Up/Down and Contact ATC key assignments now work with the ATC menus.
Instruments:
- FMS should now operate normally.
X-Plane 10.03 Beta 4
Scenery:
- Custom scenery packs with legacy file organization now work
- Fixed crash for RealScenery Oahu (and any DSF with car-only road networks)
- Restored some v9 library paths for overlay scenery
- This update should install the bug fixes to Paris, Denver, and a few other tiles if you have them installed from DVD.
Aircraft:
- Fixed erroneous FMS clear
- Fixed Auto-throttle auto-engage
- Prop disc plugin override is not reset when the flight is restarted
- Fixed out-of-order key-frame tables for generic rotaries
- Fixed black area in 3-d cockpit of P180 and other planes with HDR on
- Temporarily removed generic map instrument - we'll put it back once it's fully finished
ATC:
- Fixed a common ATC related crash due to weather changes
- Fixed common ATC related crash due to an audio issue
- Corrected Heading/Altitude Rounding
- Improved efficiency and quality of ATC taxi routes
Misc:
- Removed 16-bit color option from monitor-res popup. 16-bit color is not supported!
- Fixed ghosting on NVidia cards
X-Plane 10.03 Beta 3
This beta adds Plane-Maker and Airfoil-Maker back to the beta - sorry about that!
ATC:
- Fixed crash when taxi routings were short/zero (like being next to the runway)
- Fix to improve reroutes
X-Plane 10.03 Beta 2
Aircraft:
- Vectored thrust and rocket powered aircraft should have their thrust-vectoring and rockets engines working properly.
- Situation replays should work, even if they are based on a different type of aircraft that you are flying at the moment you load.
- Baron - Enhancements to the textures and new normal maps for exterior included.
- Baron - Flight model tweaks and some cockpit functions calibrated to operate properly.
ATC:
- Improvements to how "AI Flies Plane" works
- Disable ATC voice when "All Sound" is off.
- Fix for crash caused by moving the user's plane from one region to another while communicating with ATC
X-Plane 10.03 Beta 1
Aircraft
- Forward-no-panel views now never show random parts of the airplane. This may help some users with performance in that view.
- Fixed a number of rendering bugs with HDR mode and weapons, including weapons with missing or pixelated fuselages.
- Steerable landing light goes in the right direction.
- Fix for v9 aircraft crashing when saved in v10 format.
- Fixed needle deflection generic instrument to actually deflect.
Updater
- When this beta is updated to the next, restarting X-Plane on Mac/Lin won't fail with a UDP socket error.
- Web update URL fixed - this may help with some ISPs.
General Data
- Updated Nav and Airport database to 2011.13 to correct problems with incorrect/impossible controller comm frequencies e.g.(109.60)
Scenery/Rendering
- V9 DSF roads with duplicate points will load correctly.
- Fixed black spots in KSEA demo area.
- Stars dimmed slightly.
ATC
- Fixed issue where going to some remote untowered airports would cause the AI aircraft to spawn and be destroyed repeatedly.
- ATC now continues to function even in special situations e.g.(Tow/Shuttle/Carrier etc.)
- Fixed several smaller stability issues related to active zones.
- Fixed broken runway phrase during takeoff/landing clearances.
- ATC now properly stops running when the sim is paused, in replay mode or in a modal dialog.
X-Plane 10.02 Beta 2
Artifacts:
- Fixed triangle artifacts in the sky on some cards
- Fixed "missing engines" on some jet aircraft
Stability:
- Fixed numerous ATC related crashes
X-Plane 10.02 Beta 1
Hardware Support:
- Fixes crash with Intel GPUs on Windows.
- Fixes fatal error message with ATI Radeon X1000-series GPUs on all operating systems.
Performance:
- Rendering settings will default based on category of hardware - in some cases this should give better fps on default settings.
- X-Plane now detects cards that advertise instancing but don't have native hardware support; avoiding software-emulating instancing may help fps with heavy objects and moderate world level of detail. This affects the GeForce 8800, 9400, 9600, and 330M on OS X.
- Smoke puff code is optimized - this can help fps with AI traffic enabled.
Stability:
- Fixed numerous ATC related crashes
- Fixed background ATC audio problem
Artifacts:
- A number of artifacts in HDR mode are fixed.
Plugins:
- Non-fat Linux plugins will now load.
- Some plugins that had drawing problems in HDR mode may now work.