X-Plane 930 Beta

X-Plane 930 has a lot in it - I will try to cover some of the details of the new features soon, but some immediate thoughts:

• X-Plane betas are open to anyone who wants to participate. You don't have to sign up, you don't have to be approved.
• If you would not be happy with a buggy, broken, weird, freaked out version of X-Plane, do not get the beta! Just wait and enjoy 922 - when 930 is debugged, it will be free for everyone.
• If you make a third party add-on for X-Plane and 930 breaks it...report it, don't fix it! Give us a simple report about how your add-on used to work in 922 and is hosed in 930, and show us where to get the add-on. None of the new features in 930 should break 922 content. Pretty much all of them do nothing until you choose to use them.
• If you make a third party add-on, get on the new betas early; the earlier you report it, the earlier we can fix it.
• Don't release third party add-ons for 930 until 930 goes final. Until 930 is final, all datarefs, SDK features, etc. are subject to change.
• Keep a copy of 922 around if you want to fly during early betas.
• Don't use early 930 betas on critical files - make backup copies!

The first few betas are usually pretty rough...the main reason is that Laminar Research is a small company, and therefore we have a small number of computers; even though I have five machines in my office now (and I think 12 operating systems) there are plenty of combinations of software, hardware and drivers that our users have that we don't have.

So if you try the beta and it just blows up...don't panic! Report a bug, and we'll try to get it working for your machine. The pixel shaders and low level video driver setup code have changed, which means working out the kinks on every hardware configuration out there. (Programmers sometimes call this "write once, debug everywhere".)

With that in mind, there's a lot of cool stuff in 930. Better 2-d panel filtering and per-pixel lighting should make the sim look better for just about everyone; other features like 3-d cockpit lighting will be of interest to airplane authors. I will be updating the X-Plane wiki to document how to use some of these new features over the next few days.