X-Plane Developer News September 29, 2023

From the News Desk of the X-Plane Developer website, with the titel: “Two Pain Relief Fixes Coming Soon” written by Ben Supnik.

The next X-Plane update will focus primarily on flight-model and systems, plus external-visual networking and some ATC features. While that update is in beta, we can work in parallel on real weather and graphics.

But there are two graphics bugs we already have fixed in-house which should relieve some 12.06/12.07 pain:

• Running out of memory mid-frame. Turns out if you got into a fairly tight situation VRAM wise (and we try to do that to max out the texture res you can have) then X-Plane might run out of memory trying to draw trees and…melt down like a toddler who can’t have any more candy.
  
  We have an interim fix: allocate memory statically so we always have it. In a future update we’ll reuse memory from other parts of rendering to be more efficient.
• Popping out a window causes a big slow-down. When the arrangements of windows changes, we might need to allocate more VRAM for rendering. This is not a fast process – we have to halt all rendering, throw out the old memory, compact things, allocate new memory, and if a DSF is loading while this happens, the DSF loader is using up memory as we are trying to reallocate the windows, which can mean compacting memory again, paging down textures…you get the idea.
  
  The fix is pretty simple: don’t do this if the popped out window doesn’t require more VRAM. Most of the time, this is the case, so this is an easy fix for a silly bug.

Integration work for the next update is going on now and I’m hoping it will be done next week. More details soon! As posted also here.