When To Cut a Beta

Cutting the next beta is a double-edged sword:

• Any beta that doesn't have known bugs fixed is just not as good as it could be, and is putting buggy code in the field, where those bugs take away from testing.
• Sometimes bugs are severe enough that they occlude other testing (particularly if there is a crash bug).

X-Plane 930 Beta 3 will be out fairly soon.  The biggest thing that is not fixed is the weird lighting on GeForce 6/7 hardware with pixel shaders on.  It's just my luck that we'd have a hardware-specific shader bug on the one chipset I don't have right now.  (I could pull my 9700 from the PC, but then I won't be able to reproduce the evil "framebuffer incomplete" bug.)

We did find an intermittent crash during scenery load while flying - that's the kind of thing we need to get into a new beta; we can't tell what else is a real crash until that one gets cleared out of the way.

There is a crash bug that we haven't fixed in beta 3: Austin and I have both seen a single, unreproducible crash during startup on Windows.  If you have a crash during startup on Windows, please send a crash_log.txt with your bug report!