EDIT: As of 26.09.2025, the Beta build 3 has been recalled due to the issues experienced by Mac users.

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Laminar Research has published a new beta build with weather radar improvements, bug fixes and improvements for the default aircraft, implementation of new debug tools for developers, and the fix for the users who experienced black boxes in the sky.

Currently, there are two known issues: the update to Beta build 3 for users on macOS will fail unless the X-Plane.app file is deleted beforehand, and the weather radar output may be inaccurate for some 3rd party aircraft.

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This build brought in many improvements and fixes, with some of them being the improved TrackIR movement, a new debug tool for capturing graphic data, fixed synchronising between sim and UTC time, improved colors of the VFR map and the Synthetic Vision, improved crash handling on systems using Windows, and many more.

For the aircraft side of the update, the close-range weather radar detection has been significantly improved, as in the previous versions, the radar could miss the clouds due to the width of the beam. The rest of the improvements are for the Beechcraft Baron 58, where the fuel tank selector could cause some levers to get stuck, Boeing 737-800, where the wind condensation particles have been corrected, and lastly, the PROG page on the Cessna Citation X on the second FMS is now fixed, and the destination airport is displayed there as well.

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The full change log is as follows:

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General

• Improved TrackIR movement (XPD-17277)
• Limit number of frames in flight to avoid stuttering with swapchain acquisition (XPD-17244)
• Fixed display of truck count on Ground-Handling window when GPU is already connected (XPD-17274)
• Implemented a new debug tool to capture frame graphics data (Developer → Capture Frame) when X-Plane is run with the command line option —gfx_frame_capture
• Added a new option to disable safe mode in the pro settings
• Added a new option to configure the exvis standby screen via the pro settings
• Fixed an issue where the ZULU time was not set correctly
• Improved colors of the VFR map and Synthetic Vision output (XPD-17336)
• Improved the crash handling on Microsoft Windows
• Fixed an issue where the Load Flight screen was showing a wrong directory for replays (XPD-16885)

Aircraft

General

• Improved close-range weather radar detection by simulating realistic radar beam spread near the aircraft, preventing situations where clouds directly ahead could be missed due to the main beam being too narrow.
• The weather radar texture will clear the pixel buffer before blending the new return. This is important for aircraft with ND backgrounds other than black.
• The MFD of the X1000 will remain in the chosen track mode after returning to the main screen from some subscreens via a long press of the CLR button (XPD-17339)
• Fixed an issue where the Synthetic Vision loader could run out of cores (XPD-17335)

Beechcraft Baron 58

• Fixed the fuel tank selector logic where some levers could get stuck (XPD-17248)

Boeing B737-800

• Improved the wind condensation particles (XPD-17346)

Cessna Citation X

• Display DEST on PROG page of second FMS as well (XPD-17321)

Graphics

• Fixed an issue where black boxes could appear in the sky (XPD-17023)

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The Beta 3 is available for download for all users who have chosen the public beta.

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