A Slow Motion Car Crash

I'm driving at 55 mph on the highway. I drive over a nail, lose a tire, skid off the road, crash through the guard rail, plunge off a cliff, and die. That's not much fun. But when you get to the accident site, you'll probably be able to piece together what happened. The skid marks, the nail, the hole in the guard rail, the car wreckage below - you can connect the dots.

Now...let's say I'm driving 500 mph. Same nail, same out of control crash. But this time it's going to be a lot harder to tell what happened. Lord knows where the nail ends up, the distance from the nail strike to exiting the highway is going to be a lot bigger, and the car is going to be in smaller pieces scattered over a wider distance. It's going to take a lot longer to piece together what went wrong.

That, in a nutshell, describes the motivation for an X-Plane beta with all of the debug and safety checks on. X-Plane's normal operation is like the car doing 500 mph - when it crashes and dies, there's very little left that can be used to figure out what went wrong. When there is a bug in the code that destabilizes the sim, finding it via crashes in release builds takes a lot of developer time and slows the whole beta down.

With the safety checks on, X-Plane still crashes when something goes wrong - but the bodies and wreckage are all a lot closer to the scene of the crime, and the evidence left around is in much better shape.

One of the side effects of the safety builds is that they catch "harmless" coding mistakes - (harmless in quotes - the bug might seem harmless but who knows if that will always be true). XSquawkBox now quits the sim with an ugly alert box because it reads off the end of a piece of the airplane data structure via the plugin system. This hasn't hurt things in the past, but it's not really correct. Beta 5 should fix the underlying problem, letting you run XSquawkBox again. (The fix will be in X-Plane, not XSquawkBox.)