Additionally, it includes two minor fixes: You no longer need to set the parking brake in helicopters with skids, and the aircraft description in the debriefing window is improved in X-Plane 12.

This patch adds compatibility with the new scenery organization in X-Plane 12, where all airport data is now stored in the "global scenery" directory, and no longer in the "default scenery".

Thank you for forum member RandomUser for finding this issue and providing a workaround while I was on vacation!

Also, this update is no longer compatible with X-Plane 10.

Additionally, a very rare random number glitch could lead to multiple missions with the same internal mission ID. Accepting one of them would activate both missions. This is fixed as well.

The original release of v1.5.2 shipped with a bug that could lead to crashes on Windows with NVidia graphics. v1.5.3 fixed this issue.

With the gracious help of forum user Gary Hensley, this patch fixes these issues.

Secondly, this update brings VR support out of beta. The VR/XP11 version is now just as beautiful as the legacy XP10 version, but with better window management and VR support. I would now recommend all XP11 users to upgrade to the XP11 version.

The Mission Generator is now available in two versions: One compatible with XP10 and XP11, looking and behaving just as it always has. And a new, XP11-only version, that is VR compatible. The VR version is still a beta version, and not as pretty as the old version: It uses XP11's new and shiny floating windows that can be popped out of XP11's main window, and positioned on VR. The downside is, these windows currently draw a rather big and ugly border around the Mission Generator's windows. That's why it's still a beta version.

But you can now fly missions entirely in VR!

Also, this version fixes a bug that would sometimes corrupt the pilot profile with NaN experience points. This should not happen again.

However, things changed when forum user Luke173 worked with me for several weeks to investigate the issue as it was happening on his computer. And with his help, we finally found a solution: On some installations on macOS, the last entry in the landmarks database could not be read, which lead to an error whenever a sightseeing bonus mission was generated.

Today's patch fixes this issue. Many thanks to Luke173 for his help!

Recently however, the forum user Montag posted a detailed analysis of the problem as it happened on his computer. As it turns out, on some computers, X-Plane would not set the "wheels are on the ground" dataref correctly, which would trip up the Mission Generator when it tried to calculate landing statistics etc.. This patch now uses an altitude-above-ground check instead of the "onground" dataref, which should fix the issue.

Furthermore, this patch fixes a few incorrect speed and distance displays, which were caused by missing or wrong unit conversions.

It also fixes a small inaccuracy in the cruise speed estimation, though this was probably unnoticeable due to the general inaccuracy of those estimates.

This also applies to cruise speeds in missiongenerator_overrides.lua, which were read as knots, so if you had one of those, you should check that they still work correctly.

• If the scenery is part of the base X-Plane scenery, it is a "2D" scenery.
• If the scenery is part of the "Global Airports" custom scenery, it a "3D" scenery. These are the Scenery Gateway, "Lego-Brick" sceneries.
• If the scenery is anything else, it is a "Add-On" scenery.

This information is now displayed in the mission briefing, so you have a better idea where you are going. Even better, the Mission Generator now subtly prefers Add-On sceneries over 3D sceneries over 2D sceneries. This should make for more interesting missions!

This patch also introduces three new entries in settings.lua for tweaking these chances. However, be aware that this does come with a few caveats:
Firstly, the Mission Generator can only generate missions to existing airports, picked at random from the surrounding area. So if there are no 3D or Add-On sceneries available in a region, lowering the chances for 2D sceneries will simply reduce the number of available missions.
Secondly, not every "Global Airports"-Lego-Brick scenery does actually include 3D objects.
So treat these settings with care. Extreme values are probably not what you want.

Thankfully, it seems that the Mission Generator is actually working well for most people! As a result, this update will probably not change anything for the majority of users, but fix a few niggling issues for some:

A recurring theme in bug reports is that the Mission Generator sometimes appears to not know the payload capacity, cruise speed, and landing distance of some aircrafts. And in fact, this is exactly true: X-Plane simply does not expose this kind of information to plugins. Instead, the Mission Generator takes an educated guess, based on the available data. And usually, the estimate is pretty accurate, as estimates go. But of course, some aircraft with unusual combinations of performance numbers are bound to lead to inaccurate estimates.

And there is really nothing the Mission Generator can do about it internally. So instead, it now creates a file missiongenerator_overrides.lua in every aircraft's directory, where you can override the Mission Generator's estimate manually. In this file, you can specify your own cruise speed, payload capacity, and minimum landing distance for every aircraft, and customize it to your liking.

On the same note, due to the variability in guessing the cruise speed, urgent missions actually were impossible to complete in some aircraft. To improve this, the speed requirements for urgent missions were slightly lessened.

And finally, one user pointed me to a rare issue with some third-party sceneries with unusual apt.dat formatting that lead to "not at starting point" errors in the mission briefing. This has been fixed.

However, there is still that one bug that keeps eluding me: A small number of people sometimes get "no landing" or "no takeoff" messages in their debriefing. From what I can tell, this error usually goes away if they rebuild their X-Plane install, and seems to happen more often for small aircraft than for larger ones. But I have not yet been able to reproduce this issue myself, and hence don't know yet what causes it.

For example, there was an interesting issue with helicopters: When a helicopter touches down, it immediately finishes the current mission and unloads the payload. Normally, this is not an problem. But in some cases, with particularly heavy payloads and particularly smooth touch downs, taking off the payload would make the helicopter light enough to float up again! So with v1.1.2, helicopter missions will only finish once touched down and the collective is reduced (see settings.lua for the particular threshold).

Another issue were taxi speeds and cruise speeds. The centerline deviation is only calculated if the aircraft is moving faster than the taxi speed, but a perfectly reasonable taxi speed for a passenger jet will be far beyond the takeoff speed of small ultralights. So now the taxi speed is determined either by a minimum of 30 km/h, or a quarter of the stall speed, whichever is higher (Again, adjustable in settings.lua). Similarly, the cruise speed is now the mean of the maneuvering speed and top speed (center of the yellow arc), which is probably conservative for turbine-powered aircraft, and a bit too fast for piston aircraft, but in any case much better than before.

A third issue was a real head-scratcher: Sometimes, some X-Plane datarefs would apparently contain invalid data. This seems to happen randomly, but more often at very low frame rates (which I don't run) and in conjunction with a lot of other plugins (which I don't use). As such, I could never reproduce these issues. The root cause is probably a bug in SASL or X-Plane, and not under my control. And in any case, most of the time, these little hickups would not matter much, and merely cause a transient error in the X-Plane log or a short flicker on the briefing screen. But sometimes, in very rare cases, they would block mission progress, or prevent mission success. I have added workarounds for these cases, which will hopefully make them unproblematic.

And finally, there are of course a number of additional bug fixes, like fixes for the payload name generation, time formatting in the briefing and debriefing, overly-unreliable missions, and a renamed menu item.

The resulting incomplete scenery database lead to empty mission lists or even freezes when opening the mission list (if you had one of those malformed sceneries). As always, this problem did not happen on my machine, since none of my sceneries had these problems.

Thus, I now added some scenery validation code which should prevent malformed apt.dat files from messing up the whole scenery database.

Additionally, the patch fixes a bunch of smaller issues, such as payload issues, mission distance issues, and more mission templates. And I have a new theory on why the centerline deviation is sometimes way off: It might be because the Mission Generator interprets taxiing too fast as part of the takeoff roll. If you experience the centerline issue, try taxiing slower than 30 km/h (15 kt).

Both of these issues were due to X-Plane not giving plugins information about runways, which meant that the Mission Generator used its own runway database that I created offline from X-Plane's apt.dat.

Of course, this database would not show any changed runway layouts or added runways from third-party sceneries, or X-Plane's own global airport updates.

As of v1.1.0, the Mission Generator intelligently reads your installed sceneries, and builds a new runway database every time you install a new scenery. The process can take a few seconds to finish, but it is only run if your scenery changes. If you think it might not have picked up on a new scenery, you can also start the rebuild manually from the menu bar.

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.

• Corrected payload generation (should no longer try to cram ten 20kg people into a five-seat aircraft)
• Take-offs from non-default add-on airports no longer messes up the Mission Generator.
• Adds some logging, which should make debugging easier in case you find more problems.

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.

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!

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.

This is very exciting, since I have never done a commercial project before, and don't know what to expect!