Tuesday, July 01, 2008

902 Is Dead (Long Live 920) - Languages

We're about to do something strange: any time now, Austin should announce 920 beta 1.

But what happened to the 902 beta program?

The answer is simple: it turns out we don't need it.

Both 901 and 902 were tiny releases whose sole purpose was to add new languages to X-Plane. (901 added French/German, 902 Russian). The idea was to get our foreign distributors a localized version of the sim faster than we could do the next major patch.

Well, 920 is here, and the Russian port is still being debugged, so 920 will contain Russian and also a huge host of new features. There will never be a 902 final; simply update your beta to 920 when it's out - any tiny changes in 902 are baked into 920.

Don't Panic

As always, my advice for beta 1 is: don't panic. Remember that we are a small company, and thus we have a small number of computers between all of our employees. The first few betas usually involve one or two serious bugs (the sim explodes and sets your computer on fire, etc.) that only happen on the one hardware configuration none of us have.

If you are a user, consider waiting for a later beta, or upgrade a copy of the sim.

If you create third party add-ons, please get a copy of the beta early and start filing bugs! It is much easier for us to fix compatibility bugs when we get the reports early.

Multi-Lingual

A number of users have offered to help translate X-Plane. With 920 we finally have the "new" localization infrastructure in place; I will finally be able to get users started on this process.

1 comment:

MajorFibbs said...

Hello

I did not know about this BLOG. Otherwise I would have asked if you need a translation file for X-Plane? I saw that in 9.2 there is a different way for its definition, but also a lot of the functions are mixed up. I corrected all and added missing strings. For X-Plane I think 95% is translated. Unfortunately, but maybe you know, if anything else than english is selected, there are empty menues in PlaneMaker

Regards - Valentin
v.kaufmann@tino.net