X Plane 10 Digital Download
I have the DVD version of x-plane 10. It looks as though the digital download version of x-plane 11 is an update to xp10. Does this mean that if I download xp11 I will not be able to use xp10?
X-Plane 10.40 beta 6 is out – it took me a while to get the release notes updated, but they are updated now. Beta 6 really isn’t a beta at all – it was an update to enable digital download of X-Plane 10. Laminar Research, creators of the X-Plane flight simulator franchise, is proud to announce that X-Plane 10 is now available as a digital download from the Laminar website at X-Plane.com. In addition to the DVD version of X-Plane 10, new purchasers of the product now have the choice of the digital version. The X-Plane 10 Digital Download version is the full Global X-Plane 10 product, containing all of the same features and scenery areas as the DVD version.
World scenery areas may be added at any time as desired, once the core product has been purchased and additional world scenery areas may be added or deleted at any time in the future. If you have DVDs or the Steam edition of X-Plane, X-Plane will continue to work in almost exactly the same manner as it did before. If you purchase X-Plane 10, Digital Download Edition, the sim will occasionally prompt you for a product key on startup. With the digital download edition, internet connectivity fully replaces DVDs – for installing the sim, adding/removing scenery, and taking the sim out of demo mode.
If you’re waiting on bug fixes, they’re coming in beta 7 – we have a bunch lined up, but we wanted to get the digital download edition of X-Plane out first. Update: just to state the obvious – we are not dropping support for DVDs, we are not ending our use of DVDs, and we still sell X-Plane on DVD. The idea here is to give customers a choice as to how to get X-Plane. If you like DVDs, keep using them!
If you like download, now that’s an option too. That’s not a must-have feature – that’s a must-never-have feature!
Here’s why: 1. Those libraries have some kind of copyright terms and licensing terms, and those terms are probably -not- “copy this stuff INTO your scenery pack.” The whole point of libraries is that you can use other people’s work by reference, without actually copying it. Copying the items would be super-inefficient for performance. X-Plane loads each object once, each texture once. But if you -copy- a texture into another scenery pack, X-Plane doesn’t know that it’s a duplicate, and loads -each- file once.
So if all airports copied the art assets from the packs they used, a user going to an area with a lot of airports would have much higher VRAM use since the library objects would have their textures loaded over and over and over. Cheers Ben. That’s a real shame. I prefer to get my software from there.
It’s convenient, a one stop shop for updates, allows me to install across the Macs I own without being troubled by intrusive DRM, and those restrictions and limitations on how the app is installed that you mention sure do make me feel better about what I allow on my system. If you are considering a tally for those who would like to see it there eventually, please add my name to that list. I’d consider purchasing it outside of Steam just to get away from that bloatware loading every time I open my computer, though. Good on you guys for adding another avenue to purchase digitally. You do not need to insert the DVD every time you run X-Plane – I think the current re-check period is 7 days. (This has been the case for over a year now!) 2. You do not need to be on the internet every time you run with a digital download product key – again, I think the recheck is at least once every seven days.
X-plane 10 Free Aircraft Downloads
It is frequent enough that the digital download version isn’t appropriate for anyone going for an extended off-net period. The digital download product key gets saved to preferences, and if the last check was frequent enough, X-Plane doesn’t even show a dialog box. So users with continuous internet connectivity might -never- see a product key dialog box after the install if they don’t purge preferences. The code is supposed to use multiple techniques to disable the screen saver, hopefully in a way that persists only while the app is running. If you’d like to look at it, I can send you the code to investigate whether there’s a risk that the screen saver disable “persists” when the app is killed.
Or if you have a reproducible case of this, file a bug and I will discuss it with the original author. Having users write a shell script for this is not a great solution – if Linux users are willing to share code that will make Linux have parity with the other OSes in terms of usability, then we should do that. Thanks for the offer to view the screensaver code, I think I’ll pass after doing a quick test although I do admit to being curious. My X-Plane 10 install is still at 10.36r1, so I thought I would try the 10.40 b6 screensaver feature in the demo version.
It does inhibit the screensaver. If I disable the screensaver manually before running X-plane 10 demo, the screensaver inhibitor code doesn’t say it is trying to inhibit Xorg screensaver, which is nice.
It does print a few errors on the console and I’m running Lubuntu 14.04 LTS: sh: 1: xscreensaver-command: not found Error ‘The name org.gnome.SessionManager was not provided by any.service files’ (sourcecode/external/WIN/WINoglwindowx11.cpp, line 2208). Error ‘The name org.freedesktop.ScreenSaver was not provided by any.service files’ (sourcecode/external/WIN/WINoglwindowx11.cpp, line 2282). I can’t say whether Win 10 is going to be a successful OS release for Microsoft, but I think it will work okay for X-Plane. Microsoft generally has very good backward compatibility with OS upgrades.
With that in mind, I continue to be astonished that users choose to upgrade their OS first, rather than waiting and seeing what experience other X-Plane users have had. These days new OS upgrades just don’t offer such amazing new must-have stuff that you can’t wait a week or two to see how the dust settles. This is not a technical limitation – this is a policy decision by Laminar Research. When we launched the Steam edition, we chose to keep the beta program restricted to the global DVD edition to limit the amount of time we spend cutting betas. Basically we would have to produce each beta twice (once for Steam, once for our updater), increasing the amount of time I spend cutting betas and decreasing the amount of time I actually spend fixing beta bugs. So we don’t put the beta on Steam until we have a release candidate.
Laminar’s own digital edition uses the -same- updates as the DVD version, so the betas are automatically available.