Second Patch (v1.0.2)
2018-10-01
- Fixes debriefing issue (thank you, shaja, for finding and fixing it!)
Some people are seeing an issue where the Takeoff centerline deviation and landing centerline deviation are wildly off. This is caused by add-on airports, or an updated apt.dat, which moved the runway locations.
Since X-Plane does not give plugins information about the locations of runways, the Mission Generator has its own database of runway locations, derived from X-Plane's default apt.dat. Thus, if an add-on moves the runway locations, the Mission Generator won't know about it, and will assume you landed in the wheeds.
To fix this, I will add a new menu option to rebuild the scenery database in a future update. But this is a bigger undertaking, and will take a few days.
As a nice side benefit, this will make completely new add-on airports available as mission targets as well.
I just uploaded a quick bug fix for the most important issues in the release. This bug fix release contains:
There is still a known issue with add-on airports that change the runway layout of default airports. In this case, you might get an incorrect landing centerline deviation. I am working to fix that, but it is a major undertaking which will take a while.
If you find more bugs, please post them to the Mission Generator forum topic.
The Mission Generator for X-Plane has been released on the X-Plane.org store! You can buy it now for $15!
Additionally, we now have a forum topic for release announcements, discussions, and bug reports, which is exciting!
Thank you very much for your support during the development of this plugin. In particular, I would like to thank the beta testers, whose comments improved many aspects of the plugin. And I would like to thank all the nice commenters on the forums. You have no idea how motivating a few positive remarks can be!
The last few days I spent cleaning up the Mission Generator's code, and documenting it thoroughly. One could argue that no-one will look at the code of an X-Plane plugin, anyway, so why document it?
But I plan that the initial release of the Mission Generator will only the first step in a long development. Which means that I will work with this code for a long time. Spending some effort now to help future me, who will have forgotten half the intricacies of the Mission Generator, is time well spent.
But beyond that, I hope that other people will look at the code, and try to improve things. While the Mission Generator is a commercial piece of software, I give every user express permission to publish improved versions of a few key files. This might, for example, include more varied bonus missions, or more mission templates, or re-balanced versions of the level ups.
I also hope that the Mission Generator will encourage people to develop their own plugins. As it turns out, writing plugins for X-Plane is not hard (if you know programming). There are a lot of intricate and interesting algorithms in the Mission Generator, and all of them are now well-documented for intrepid readers.
And of course, old habits die hard. I always try to maintain as good a code quality as I can in my programming projects.