Anatomy of a graphics driver bug

Published on . Filed under debugging x-plane

X-Plane’s plugin systems allows authors to load models in two ways: Asynchronously and Synchronously. Most plugins tend to use synchronous loading, but since all plugins run on the main thread there is a need and desire for some to use asynchronous loading. Up until now, the latter was broken however, and plugin authors complained about invisible models. From what I understand Pilot Edge were the first to complain, but they want to use async loading to dynamically load in models of planes that flew in via multiplayer, which makes it non-trivial to debug. Read post

Investigating a X-Plane plugin's crash to desktop

Published on . Filed under debugging x-plane

This post is about a crash to desktop that I investigated in a popular plugin for X-Plane, X-Assign. This happened in my free time, although I had the advantage of having the X-Plane source code at hand. Git bisect My new favourite tool on earth is git bisect, which I used to find the offending commit rather quickly. At this point I wasn’t sure who was at fault for the crash, X-Plane or X-Assign, since the issue only showed up with the update to X-Plane 11. Read post