Now that we have announced X-Plane 11, I can finally post goofy screenshots and videos from v11 development. Sometimes a bug makes delightfully goofy results, and Austin liked this one so much he wanted me to share it.

I am working on 3-d water for X-Plane 11 – we have a working prototype, but I am not sure if this will make the shipping 11.0 product; it still has a lot of bugs and rough edges.

Traditionally in X-Plane if you don’t have terrain installed, you just get water. This isn’t really an intentional design decision; we just defined “no DSF” as “all water” so that we could avoid shipping DSFs for the huge chunk of the Earth’s surface that is covered with ocean.

But we always have airport data, so in X-Plane you would get an airport floating in the middle of the water! While this was completely goofy and is a huge source of tech support calls (which is why X-Plane 10.50 now offers to install scenery whenever you hit this case) you could, if you really wanted to, land at this water-world airport.

Until now. Now that the water is 3-d, the peaks of the waves actually cover the 3-d buildings and make the entire airport as usable as…well, as it really would be if built in the middle of the ocean.

(This is about the point in the post where I would insert a snarky climate change comment, but I’ll let XKCD do the talking.)

Scenery developers might wonder: why is it that when the water level falls the runway lights and signs are revealed – but where is the pavement? The answer is in the comments.