Following on from a very quick and unfortunately unsuccessful Beta 5, Laminar Research has released Beta 6 for X-Plane 11.50.
Laminar Research has released Beta 6 for X-Plane 11.50 which corrects a lot of the instability issues that have been plaguing the releases thus far. Ben Supnik has reported in a post over on the Laminar Research blog that the team has received an unprecedented amount of bug reports, both automatic and manual, since the release of 11.50b1. although the volume has been intense, the amount of information the team has received has been invaluable.
After seeing the amount of data received from the reports from users, the team have put a plan of action in place to gain ground and get closer to a solid release. Firstly, the team want to work on fixing the fatal crashes and bugs that prevent X-Plane from loading and moving forward, they will then look at optimisation in terms of VRAM, and finally look at mopping up any further performance issues.
Ben urges the community using the beta with auto-report enabled, and a windows operating system, to not report the bugs again using manual methods as this doubles the workload for the team and dilutes their focus on progressing with the beta. Ben has also asked that users do not publish any reports relating to broken scenery files or scenery pack issues, this is most likely down to the scenery files not being compatible with the beta and should be reported to the scenery publishers, directly. Publishers are asked to contact the development team at Laminar Research with any issues with compatibility.
If you are a Mac user, unfortunately, the auto-reporting feature will not work with your system and therefore you are asked that you file the bug reports you experience, directly with Laminar Research, be sure to include your Apple Crash Report to assist the team in identifying the issue.
There are certain aspects that have already received fixes such as any crashes relating to the operation of Air Traffic Control have been addressed with further stability when generating preview icons, this attributed to may crash reports in the past, as well as the return of the wireframe in Plane Maker. Developer Sidney Just has also worked on many back-end bugs that causes ‘device lost’ and ‘too many command buffers’ issues, which should make the release even more stable.
Although the focus has been on making this Beta release more stable, there have been advances in making the platform more optimised with the hardware it uses such as allocation of VRAM and the reduction of stuttering along with better CPU usage. Providing Beta 6 is not as unsuccessful as Beta 5, the focus for Beta 7 will be that of optimisation for X-Plane in which we should see even better performance.
If you would like to take part in the public Beta testing of X-Plane 11.50, open the X-Plane installer and head over to the ‘update X-Plane’ button where you can select to install the latest Beta of the simulator.
