"By Christmas" is the official laminar stance...I can neither confirm nor deny otherwise :) I definitely believe XP10 is a very solid foundation and while many will be expecting extensive custom 3D content throughout, this will not be the case. What we are really focusing on is making the creation of 3D content fast and easy, even for the laymen. Some of you might have read the XPlane 10 blog talking about "lego bricks" for scenery design. What we have here with xp10 is a basic lego set. Lego pieces are not very exciting in and of themselves. You don't go to legoland and stand and stare at a box full of unassembled lego pieces, you stare at the creations made with them. Our "first" lego set here is small, but it exists now and that is the cool thing. As time grows, we'll eventually get us a "technic" series and even more cool scenery will result. We want the "everyman" to be able to open up WED, grab some scenery pieces and make some scenery. I'll slip in a quick screenshot here that some of the AVSIM staff saw recently. IGNORE the terrain and scenery, this is all V9 stuff. The 3D is independent of the world in which is resides...this is my development sandbox. What I want to show here is this scene was made in about 10 minutes using the WED program and the default artwork in x-plane 10. Anybody without any 3D experience will be able to open up WED, draw a shape to represent a generic terminal, drag in some ready to go "jetway scenes", throw down some aircraft or other buildings and have a scene in a matter of minutes. Anybody would be able to build this scene in 15 minutes or less once they know how. Like Legos, it will be the imagination of the author (and the limitation of the lego set) to see what people develop. Consequent to this idea is that we can begin building better and more extensive lego sets though laminar will probably have a much smaller "lego budget" than the 3rd party world. We're more interested in enabling and fostering development, not shouldering it all. This interactive nature of development among the community is part of the appeal of x-plane and gives a bit more purpose to the sim than just jumping in and "flying it", though I know for some that's what they want. Now along with a scene like this comes real ramp lighting and shadows....and if the more enterprising 3D developer chooses to make a few custom 3D parts to make a scene more authentic, then they can do that also. Recall this is default x-plane and not custom...there is a limit to how much accuracy we can pursue and as Austin stated, our goal is to get high quality plausible airports insim...and the 3rd party guys can do whatever they want. Tom KylerV10 airport scenery

Thanks for trying to keep the quality of this discussion at a reasonable level :) I believe the terrain in the AVSim screenshots is still V9. A bunch of similar screenshots were posted in the X-Plane Facebook group on the 18th, with this note:"Note that the mountains and terrain in these photos are those of Version 9; X-Plane 10 terrain, still being generated, will improve on this." So there's an explanation for the jagged, blocky look of the terrain. XP9 didn't do dynamic LODing of the mesh, instead rendering at the full resolution even in the far distance. This is why visibility has to be set quite low in XP9, and it's also the reason that the mesh is quite low-resolution. Hopefully XP10 will improve on this. So the things to look at are the clouds, lighting, atmospheric effects etc. as well as the cockpit, which looks much better than any of the stock FSX aircraft. The city in the second to last screenshot does look like XP10 however, at least the 3D scenery part. XP10 builds the scenery around the autogen, unlike FSX and XP9, which just plop the autogen and vector roads on top of a flat city texture. This is a huge thing iMO - FSX looks terrible when you have lots of residential vector roads from something like UTX on top of a 2D texture with built-in residential roads in the texture. Most of us probably turn off residential roads when using UTX, and the OrbX sceneries don't come with those roads enabled either, even though the data is available. It just looks better if you rely on the "fake" roads built in to the city texture instead. in XP10, there's no such thing as a city texture. The city is built up in full 3D like in real life.

Wel,, the LOD thing. Its not that easy, and for the first release, I am almost sure there will be no dynamically refined mesh. I mean, no tessellation from the start. The simple reason is, that this technology (in X-Plane) is not ready for prime time. BUT, the good news is, that we are prepared to turn this "feature" on, as soon as it works well enough. How? Well, the scenery data shipping with XP10 will already have the high res elevation data in each file. So, the tessellation engine could use this immediately. See Ben Supniks (our main coder behind all things in scenery/visuals/3d etc. etc. etc.): http://www.x-plane.com/blog/2011/08/dsf-gets-raster-data/'>http://www.x-plane.com/blog/2011/08/dsf-gets-raster-data/ (by the way, for all those who are interested in some background technical details, I highly recommend Bens blog: http://www.x-plane.com/blog/)

Good to hear it's at least in the works. It's one of those things that really make the XP scenery seem outdated - FS has been doing this since at least FS2002 (not sure about FS2k), and Flight Unlimited II did this in 1997.

Well, the reason is a very different general approach in how the X-Plane mesh works. I think, many don't know this, but X-Plane works with an irregular mesh (so its not a regular, equally spaced grid of triangles like in MSFS). The advantage of this approach was - and still is - that it can allocate very different sized triangles depending on the feature detail of the landscape. Mountains get a lot more triangles then the flat land ... But of course this also introduces a much higher cost (because of computational complexity) on tessellation. With old tech it would have been just too expensive ... But with todays tessellation technology it will become a viable solution and I think, that is where XP10 will be heading. There are also shading technologies implemented in XP10 which react on the fly to the slope of the triangles (this is already working tech) ... so, when one day the tessellation engine introduces more microfeatures in the landscape the shader will be able to react to it (especially the cliff shader, which paints the steep rocks when the mesh becomes steep). By the way, in an older Blog post of Ben, he had a screenshot of that irregular mesh, see here:http://xplanescenery.blogspot.com/2009/04/so-how-big-of-mesh-can-you-build.html And here he talked about irregular mesh etc.:http://www.x-plane.com/blog/2009/12/135/

Who says their terrain engine is not ready?

Ready, in place, whatever. 2 months out and we are still seeing XP9 scenery in screenshots? Just a little odd if it's really that close to release.

Just because you haven't seen it, doesn't mean it's not done or ready!

I might have missed this question in previous replies. What about integration for cockpit builders? Is it possible to control the aircraft with real switches, yoke, throttles?

I use XPlane 9 as the basis for my home cockpit. I'm using Project Magenta for avionics and systems, ACE 737 yoke, CPFlight MCP/EFIS, FDS MIP and Revolution Simproducts throttle. There are plugins for consumer level hardware such as saitek switch panels / Goflight etc. but yokes just work out of the box, as do joystick throttles such as saitek or ch. Do some research to check if your hardware works or not.

Just because you haven't seen it, doesn't mean it's not done or ready!

Whatever. You are arguing semantics at this point. I'd define ready or done as being in the game, in place, and ready to use. You obviously don't.

So what proof do YOU have that it is not done, ready, finished, ready to go, in place, ready to use? Is it just the fact that you haven't seen any screen shots of it? Have you also seen every plane that will be in XP10? So can you state the same thing: just because YOU haven't seen them, they must not be done? Please enlighten us as to your inside knowledge of XP10! Now, if you want to say I wish to see things, I want to see things, I would love to see things....... OK, I think we would all agree with that type of statement!!

So what proof do YOU have that it is not done, ready, finished, ready to go, in place, ready to use? Is it just the fact that you haven't seen any screen shots of it? Have you also seen every plane that will be in XP10? So can you state the same thing: just because YOU haven't seen them, they must not be done? Please enlighten us as to your inside knowledge of XP10! Now, if you want to say I wish to see things, I want to see things, I would love to see things....... OK, I think we would all agree with that type of statement!!

If it were ready and in place it'd be in these new screenshots. For what logical reason would you release screenshots of your game with old generation scenery if you had the new stuff ready and in the game working? You sound more like you're playing devil's advocate then making a real logical case. "Hey let's release some new screen shots, but let's replace our ready and in place terrain engine and stick in XP9's instead" "Brilliant!" Makes no sense. None at all. A little critical thinking would say it's much more likely it's just not done yet or incorporated in the game to this point. That in turn makes me highly question the release date that's two months away.

IIRC, Austin has stated that he has contracted a 3rd party programmer to code fully functioning, realistic ATC. There are quite a few new 3rd party add ons in development that will rival, and at the risk of being flamed, exceed the top level FSX add ons. Both in systems AND eye candy.

I'd certainly hope so, given that all 3rd party efforts are built on 5 year old software. Frankly, if out-of-the-box X-plane 10 doesn't blow out-of-the-box FSX out of the water in every single way it is a complete failure.

The city in the second to last screenshot does look like XP10 however, at least the 3D scenery part. XP10 builds the scenery around the autogen, unlike FSX and XP9, which just plop the autogen and vector roads on top of a flat city texture. This is a huge thing iMO - FSX looks terrible when you have lots of residential vector roads from something like UTX on top of a 2D texture with built-in residential roads in the texture. Most of us probably turn off residential roads when using UTX, and the OrbX sceneries don't come with those roads enabled either, even though the data is available. It just looks better if you rely on the "fake" roads built in to the city texture instead. in XP10, there's no such thing as a city texture. The city is built up in full 3D like in real life.

If true, that's pretty exciting. City textures and environments have always been the black eye graphically of the FS series.

If true, that's pretty exciting. City textures and environments have always been the black eye graphically of the FS series.

I don't imagine it will be true - unless every road in Xplane is physically modelled.

I don't imagine it will be true - unless every road in Xplane is physically modelled.

http://www.x-plane.c...and-x-plane-10/ "OSM contains significantly better road data in every part of the world." http://www.openstreetmap.org/ Exciting stuff.

http://www.x-plane.c...and-x-plane-10/ "OSM contains significantly better road data in every part of the world." http://www.openstreetmap.org/ Exciting stuff.

I've seen it at use in XP9. It's certainly amazing tech. Could be a game changer for graphics realism and accuracy.