Installer Chaos

I spent part of the morning tracking down installer issues.  Here are some things I have learned:

1. If you have Windows Vista and User Access Control, there's a good chance that the installer may get caught on permissions problems.  I don't fully understand what's going on, but I don't think it's a coincidence that it is US GraphSim customers who see this.  

   Basically those DVDs, which went to press a little bit early, default to installing X-Plane on the C drive, which is not a generally accessible area.  UAC then makes some guesses and allows some but not all operations (or something equally weird) and the user gets stuck.

   I am still investigating, but I think the fix is to install to your home folder.

2. Some users have bad DVDs.  It happens, and I think it happens more now that we're dual layer.  There's also a variance in the sensitivity of drives - some users send us back damaged disks and they look bad but we can still read them.

   Tech support will tell you this, but if you can't install, one test is to simply copy the entire DVD to your hard drive; if the copy fails mid-way with "I/O error" or some other message about damaged media, call up tech support, they'll swap you a new disk.

   We try to find duplication facilities that do high quality work, but bad disks do happen.  Tech support should be able to make this right for you.

3. I've gotten a wide variety of weird reports on Linux - there are a lot of distros out there, so potentially a lot of versions of the OS code base.  For Linux users I strongly recommend the X-Plane Wiki, where we are trying to accumulate all of the fringe cases.

901 - Stealth Release

901 is out now...basically it's just 900 + French and German localizations. Also a few minor tweaks:

• We added a few datarefs and commands by request - check DataRefs.txt.
  
• The plugin font size is back to 6 pixels, like v8. It looks a bit ugly now, but we'll put a new font in place soon. The important thing is: 6-pixel fonts for v8 and v9, so one plugin can operate everywhere.
• A few plugin bug fixes - see the SDK known bugs page.
• Linux won't complain if your disk is mounted as iso9660. Since the v9 final disks are all mastered as ISOs and not UDF, asking you to mount them as UDF is asking the impossible.
• If you have a demo install, it will add the word "Demo" to its name in the startup screen. This is to help users with more than one install identify which one they are running.
  

If this all seems minor and tweaky, well, it is. The main point of 901 was to get the localizations in. In the future we'll have a feature patch that brings new airplane features in and other cool stuff.

901 is freely available using the X-Plane web updater...the download size is only about 14 MB.

Finally, I've posted all new DVD installer/updater/web demo installer apps - version 2.04 localizes to French and German too.

901RC1 Already? Try it!

Well, the paint is barely dry and we already have an X-Plane 9.01 RC1. Here's what's going on and how you can try it.

9.01 is the first of what may be a few small internationalization and localization patches. 9.01 adds German localization and updates the French strings. 9.01 also has a handful of very minor bugs; Austin will probably post the bug list shortly. 9.01 is already RC because the code changes are really minor.

After 9.01 we'll do another localization patch (probably in the next month) that will include unicode and true-type font support. That build (902? 905? Who can guess what number Austin will pick!) will probably have a formally named beta because the unicode changes are extensive.

900r3 is still the latest final build and it's what you get if you update your copy or run the web demo installer.

To get 901r1, go to the updater options and check "get betas"; update your sim and 901r1 will be downloaded. Please try it!

Release Candidates and Betas

I just added this article on version numbers and betas to the X-Plane Wiki.  A few notes:

• You can select to update to new betas using a check-box in the X-Plane Web Updater. Previously there was a special updater for betas - now it is a preference, to cut down on the number of applications we have floating around.
• Release candidates do not get re-released or renamed when they go final!  A release candidate means "we think this is totally done and can be released".  It is declared "final" when, after letting people use it for a while, we decide that there probably aren't any bugs left that we will fix in this release.  So 900r3 is the final version of X-Plane 900.  

It took us three tries (900r1, 900r2, 900r3) to get the final version of 900 right.  So we will not rebuild the sim just to remove "r3" from the app version...900r3 is the latest - if you have it, there is nothing to update.

And of course, my usual rant about betas: betas aren't free candy, they're an attempt to work the bugs out of buggy software!  If your goal is to enjoy your X-Plane experience, the safest bet is almost always to not download the beta.  (An exception would be if there is a work-around for a driver bug that affects your hardware, available in a new beta.)

If you are a third party developer/author, please do download the betas, early and often!  It is much easier for us to fix bugs early in beta.

Six Or Eight DVDs

I made the mistake of nuking this poor user's comment and I can't figure out how to get it back; it's a question that I think a number of people might have, so:

Ben, I am thinking of buying the dvds. I have heard the new (final)
version fills the whole dvd (6gb) whereas the beta took about 1,5 gb.
What is the difference? If I buy the final version, will I get better
geographic detail (more vectorpoints) or what is the real reason?

First, you will not get more scenery detail (geographic, vector points, or otherwise) in the final than beta. The scenery is the same in beta and final.

Generally speaking, every difference between beta and final is available via web download. In fact, the final DVDs are made by:

1. Installing beta 1.
2. Running the updater to get the final version.
3. Cutting a new DVD off that finished result.

So I am quite sure that the final disks are the same as a beta DVD plus update.

Now the question is then, why did we do eight DVDs before and six now? The answer is two-part:

1. Walmart.
2. Best Buy.

The retailers prefer a six-DVD pack that is commonly used for software; our distributor therefore wanted us to cut from eight to six DVDs. We did this both by using a more powerful compression algorithm on the DSF (7-zip instead of regular zip for DSFs) and by packing the DVDs much tighter. The old DVDs are one continent-per-DVD, plus the sim; the new set is simply a ton of files packed onto 6 DVDs until they're almost full. Since the new installer lets you pick areas to install, the fact that the files are packed is not a huge problem.

So why did Austin have a sim DVD with only 1.5 GB of stuff? Convenience during beta. Austin updated the beta DVDs at beta 11; by having the sim by itself he could make a new sim DVD and not recut all of the scenery DVDs. (Cutting DVDs takes forever; an hour to burn each one, a lot of testing, a few copies, start all over if you find a problem. It can take me a whole long day and into the night to create a master.)

As a final note, there is a difference between the early US retail six-DVD set and the Laminar one; the installers are different. But they are both six DVD packed sets with scenery on the sim disk (disk one). The retail disks had to be finished first; the new installer was not ready. We will be using the new installer from now on.

The operative point here is: it really doesn't matter what you buy; everything we've released can be web-updated to the current version!

No Need to Repurchase

I think Austin has made this clear, but...

IF you got x-plane 9.00 BETA, then you do NOT need buy version 9.00 final... if you just run the updater, then it will UPDATE your beta TO the final version.. there is no need to make another purchase.

BUT, if you WANT to have the FINAL version on DVD for backup purposes, or to get the latest DVD INSTALLER, then you should re- purchase x-plane 9.00 now... though i do not recommend or suggest that at all... you just CAN, if you want the FINAL, NOT BETA, on DVD

The key equation here is:

Beta DVD + Web Updates = Final Sim

Everything that has changed from the beta DVD to the final DVD is available for free using the updater. If you want to buy more DVDs, Austin's not going to stop you, it's a free country. But we made sure that everything that was big and couldn't be downloaded would be there on the beta 1 DVD so that users could buy the beta DVD and have a complete sim.

So if you have a beta DVD, just use the updater to get the latest version (and RC3 is final, so if you have RC3, you're already done) and you're all set.

(Am I beating this to death? Yes...but...people get very angry at the idea that their DVDs are "not the latest" - so we put a lot of effort into making sure that you can buy the DVD early on and still have the latest!)

Updating X-Plane (Take 2)

Now that X-Plane 9.00RC3 is final, we've released a complete set of "next-gen" updaters and installers, identifiable because they run at 800x600. With these new installers and updaters, we've changed the way updating the sim works.

In the past, we had one application (the "net installer") that would:

• Update any existing files it found and
• Get any files that were missing.

This was useful in that you could get a fresh copy of X-Plane or update your existing one.

But it also made life a living hell for our tech support folks; the single biggest tech support item we would get is users who would:

1. Go to update X-Plane using this tool.
2. Pick a new location, not their existing install.
3. Download 700 MB of demo instead of 30 MB of updates.
4. Run the demo and discover they now have no scenery.
5. Become confused and call or email us.

To try to combat this confusion, we've separated the concept of installing a demo from the concept of updating the sim.

The new "web demo installer" always makes a new copy of X-Plane. It will not install into an existing location; if you ask it to install to an existing folder, it will demand you pick a new name. It will always fetch the full 700-MB demo.

The new "updater" always picks from an existing copy of X-Plane (presented as a list of known X-Plane 9 installs, rather than a file picker - one of the big problems was people picking a folder inside the X-Plane folder). It always updates this existing folder, and will thus never fetch a new install or create a new install.

My hope is that users can identify the task they wish to execute (install a demo, or update what they have) and thus use an application that will guide them through a path without pitfalls. Top concern is that the updaters not install second copies.

Advanced users: you can still do anything with these tools that you could before - but the functionality is now split into two apps. The updater will never rename an existing folder name (as this breaks people's shortcuts), and the installer will let you customize both the install name and the install location. You don't have to install "X-Plane 900r3 Demo" to the desktop.

Finally, a note on beta: previously we had a separate set of tools for beta; searching for betas is now a check-box preference that puts nasty red writing up. This is mostly to keep me sane and the number of installer builds down to what I can count on my fingers. So when the next beta comes out, just take your updater and enable "search for betas".

Things That Are Not Jokes

Just to clarify, these things are not April Fools Day jokes.

• RC3 coming out.
• The installer installing to the desktop.

And as always, relax, you will be able to put the install anywhere you want via the "destination" button.

Instaling to the Desktop (Let's Start a Riot)

I am intentionally announcing a decision that might make experience X-Plane users unhappy - my goal here is to solicit arguments against it (if there are any) since it's a sort of a strange change.

The proposal is to make the default installation location for a new copy of X-Plane be...the desktop.

EDIT: to clarify some of the blog comments, this is a default installation location; the user will be able to customize both the folder name that is created to contain X-Plane (default will be "X-Plane 9") and the folder into which this new X-Plane 9 folder will be placed.

The desktop? What are you hacks thinking? Well, here's what we're thinking:

1. Our goal is to minimize tech support calls during installation. This means making an installer where the last computer-savvy users will not get stuck in the installation process. If you know what you're doing, you're not who we're aiming at. (I reiterate, we get a lot of calls about installation problems from users who have never used a computer before.)
   
2. We need a location that the user installing X-Plane has access to, guaranteed. That rules out places like the Applications folder on OS X - we expect the least sophisticated users to not customize the install location, so we need one that will work.
3. We need a location that the user can find. This rules out their home folder (the user may not use their home folder or know it exists) as well as the C drive and the Program Files folder on Windows (both can have their files hidden by default on Windows XP to keep users from breaking tings).

The desktop solves all of these problems. Every user has write-access to his or her own desktop, and every user knows where it is.

If, like me, you don't want X-Plane on your desktop, you can simply click the "destination" button in the installer to put it somewhere else.

As a final note, the strongest alternative to this on Windows was to put the app in program files and build a start menu short-cut. But this starts the sweater unraveling...if we have a shortcut, we need an uninstaller rather than trashing the folder...if we have an uninstaller, how do we cope with multiple installs...by the time you solve these problems you have a huge amount of new untested code.

I'd like to get a more Windows and Mac interface compliant installer, and we'll get there eventually, but the work I'm doing now is aimed at the biggest real problems we face:

• Users not knowing where X-Plane is.
• Errors during the install in its default configuration.
• Problems installing and configuring scenery.
  

Okay, there it is, fire away!

More Threads - the Installer

Nine women cannot have a baby in one month - that's the classic example that gets thrown around computer science for the difficulty of parallelization - that is, just because we have ten times as many resources doesn't mean we're going to go ten times as fast.

Problems of scalability via parallelization have become very important for graphics engines as everybody and their mother now has at least two cores, and users with more serious hardware are going to have four.

I get asked a lot: "will X-Plane utilize X cores..." where X is a number larger than two. My general answer is: sometimes, maybe, and probably more in the future. I can't make strong predictions for what we'll ship in the future, but the general trend for the last 18 months has been us using more cores every time we go into a piece of code to do major architectural changes.

I've been doing a lot of work on the installer this week - the first major overhaul of the installer since we originally coded it all the way back at X-Plane 8.15. And the new installers and updaters will try to take advantage of multiple CPUs where possible. A few cases:

• The X-Plane updater runs an MD5 checksum over the entire X-Plane folder to determine which version of the various file components you have and whether they need to be updated. This s not a fast process. I am working on threading this so that more CPUs can work on the problem at once. It looks like there will be only modest benefits from this because the process is also highly bottlenecked on the disk drive.
• The installation engine from the DVD will use more than one CPU to decompress files. For zip compression this wasn't very important, but the scenery will be compressed via 7-zip compression to get us down to disk DVDs. 7-Zip compresses DSFs about 10% smaller per file than zip, but it's horribly slow to decompress, so being able to throw twice the CPU at it is a big win.

Now on one hand, our top performance goals are for the sim, not the installer. On the other hand, faster installations are good. But my main point here is: when we wrote new code four years ago, we assumed one CPU and a nice graphics card. We now assume at least two cores and possibly more, and that informs the design of every new feature, not just the rendering engine. If we don't create a multi-core-friendly design, we're effectively leaving at least 50% of the CPU on the table.

When Will X-Plane Stop Saying It Is Beta?

If you look at the about box for X-Plane 9 RC1, it still lists itself as a beta.

Here's the thing: that label is dynamic. Right now when X-Plane calls up the server to see if there is a new patch, it notices that its current version (900Rc1) is newer than the latest "final version". (This is because we haven't declared any version of 9.xx final yet.)

So it thinks for a second and goes "oh - I'm newer than the latest final version, I must be a beta." And that yellow beta label appears.

When we finally declare a version final (which involves tweaking the versions listed on the servers) the existing code will then look at the server and go "oh, I'm the latest version" and that beta label will disappear.

Installer Theory

Let me go into the installers in a little more detail before I start a mini-riot. Basically there are three "installation" operations that we (Laminar Research) support:

1. Installing a new full sim from a DVD.
2. Installing a new demo from the internet.
3. Updating any installation from the internet.

The problem with the current installer model is that tasks two and three (get a new demo, update an existing installation) are handled by a single application. This means that the web-demo-installer/updater cannot know which choice (2) or (3) the user is trying to do (since both are legitimate) and therefore user error can result in the wrong operation.

The most common problem we have is users installing new demos when they meant to update a DVD install. The result is an old copy of X-Plane with scenery, a new copy without scenery, and a very confused user who has to contact us for help.

The solution I am working on is simple: provide separate applications for all three tasks.

1. Like before, the DVD installer comes on your DVD. It installs the DVD, nothing else.
2. A demo installer does nothing but install the demo. You get the installer from the web, probably from the "demo" page (which would have to no longer be an "update" page too). The demo installer always does a full install, and will stop you from trying to install on top of existing installations.
3. The updater is always fetched by the app and updates the app. Thus the paradigm is that the app is "self-updating" (even though most of the work is done by a helper application). That updater (fetched by the sim) can only update the copy of the sim that fetched it.

Dealing With Problems

The above work-flow is meant to address most users doing the usual thing without technical problems. We must also consider how we will deal with tech support problems, and finally what the impact is on advanced users. There are two cases where we sometimes have to help users out:

• If the DVD installer for some reason will not work for a user's computer, we usually provide a downloadable DVD installer. You would insert the DVD, run this "DVD installer" and thus install the DVD. This is not the normal case, but we will probably continue to provide DVD installers specifically for users with tech support problems (based on the tech support incident), just like we have been in the past.
• We will provide the updater directly for users who need to update the sim but cannot launch the sim. This is the exception case, so a direct link to the updater would not be globally advertised on the main page of the sim. Rather it would be a support link, again only provided to users who really need it. 98% of the user base will be able to update from the sim.

When you run the updater from the web (the support case) it will prompt you to locate your X-Plane folder if needed.

Advanced Users

Will you be able to keep multiple copies of X-Plane around? Absolutely. But you'll have to manage your operations in terms of the "three operations" (make a new install from the DVD, make a new demo install from the web, update any one version you have laying around).

If you want to get a new web demo, you'll have to use a separate application than you would for an update. I don't think this is a huge problem; generally your best bet for keeping an old copy of X-Plane (when running a new beta) is to simply copy the entire X-Plane folder, rather than downloading the contents from the net.

Fun With Installers

So first, if I promised you scenery tools about now (MeshTool, AC3D, or any of the other things I've been asked for), please wait two weeks and ask again. I thought Austin would be cutting master DVDs while I would have time for tools, but instead I will cut the DVDs, so tools will have to wait until the masters are done.

To calm any fear: if you have X-Plane 9 DVDs, you will not need to buy new ones. We will be periodically updating our master DVDs (just like we always have), but we've taken a number of steps to ensure that everything new since the original "Beta 1" DVDs will be deliverable by reasonably small incremental web updates.

If you are reading this blog, you're probably an advanced X-Plane user, possibly one who makes airplanes or scenery or even plugins, and you're probably comfortable with computers and know a lot about the sim. Please bear in mind as I describe some of the changes we're making in the installer that we have users who have never used a computer before, and purchased their first computer to run X-Plane.

Simply put, the primary goal of the installer is to allow the non-experts to use X-Plane too.

Anyway, with this post I'd like to call attention to a feature that I believe very few people know about (because it was broken for a long time and yet we didn't get many reports).

You can update X-Plane 8 or 9 from the About Box - when you pick "About X-Plane" the sim will check our update servers for new versions, and if one is found, it will give you an update button. This update button will then download the very latest installer and launch it, setting it to update the copy of X-Plane you were running.

X-Plane 9 beta 25 will be out soon; when it comes out, please try updating by using the About Box in beta 24. Let me know if the process works correctly.

(What's so great about updating from the about box? Well, one of the biggest tech support calls we get is users who do not successfully patch their existing copy of x-plane, but use the web updater to fetch a whole new X-Plane, which of course has no scenery. When you get the installer from the about box, you always get the latest correct installer, and the sim tells the installer which copy to live. In the future we'll be removing the "destination" button when you run this way, so it's as simple as "go".)