A very nice summary of what's to come, and screenshots!   http://xplanereviews.com/index.php?%2Fforums%2Ftopic%2F517-laminar-research-x-plane-11-release-notes%2F

 

Looks nice. Hope the 172 is better looking than the earlier versions

Fellow Pilots,

 

I am trying to better understand the requirements for the next X-Plane 11. I've read everything but need to clarify.

 

I presently own X-Plane 10 North America. According to what I read, this will not meet the standards for an update for a paid upgrade to X-Plane 11 once it becomes available. In order to be eligible to receive the "upgrade" to X-Plane 11, I need to buy a digital copy of X-Plane 10 that includes all the global regions. It also appears as it all regions must be installed prior to the upgrade. Is all this correct?

 

Also, what is the current understanding of Payware aircraft compatibility with X-Plane 11? This hobby is expensive enough. lol.

 

Thanks!

Stephen

If you have bought X-Plane 10 in the last week then you are entitled to a free upgrade to X-Plane 11. If not, you can purchase X-Plane 11 separately upon release for $59.99. Don't think of it as an upgrade, its a new sim.

Thanks for the clarification Jason.

 

Any word on the payware compatibility?

From what I understand most payware should be more or less compatible straight away. There might be a few things that need updates.

If you have bought X-Plane 10 in the last week then you are entitled to a free upgrade to X-Plane 11. If not, you can purchase X-Plane 11 separately upon release for $59.99. Don't think of it as an upgrade, its a new sim.

Please be more precise, some people will do the mistake:

 

"If you have bought the digital version of X-Plane 10 through X-Plane's official website in the last week then you are entitled to a free upgrade to X-Plane 11"

So sorry for my imprecision, just trying to help a fellow simmer.

Again Jason, thank you. I'm not happily standing by for the next iteration of X-plane.

. It also appears as it all regions must be installed prior to the upgrade. Is all this correct?

 

Also, what is the current understanding of Payware aircraft compatibility with X-Plane 11? This hobby is expensive enough. lol.

 

Thanks!

Stephen

No, you can select what regions to install. Got my key and await XP11 as I suspect price could go up to 79.- upon release for at least a year or so.

Basically all xp10 stuff should work but for ex. I need to remove my reflection and OpenAL code from my plugin.

Also for ex. Carenado etc. probably will need to update their whole fleet. But I expect that most developers give a free update to XP11. (althoug not all)

 

 

But I expect that most developers give a free update to XP11

 

I wouldn't be so sure about that. Most airplanes and scenery should continue to work, but I wouldn't be surprised to see developers charging to update their planes to PBR textures. It's actually a lot of work, even more so than a 32-64bit upgrade of a plugin. 

While it's totally speculative, I don't expect PBR to involve more than simply paste a ATTR tag into objects with a texteditor.

Maybe there's even a OpenAL abstraction layer so all plugins/aircrafts continue to work as in XP10.

We need to be patient some more weeks.

With PBR, it's much much more than that. Developers will need to create new textures sheets to define the metal, shineness and plastic propertes of their materials. It won't just be a case of adding attributes to object files (unless LR do some magic), but rather editing the models and textures directly. It will be a similar process to adding normal maps (i.e. Someone will have to create these texture sheets with the right properties). I wouldn't blame someone like Carenado charging, especially for their older products. During the presentation, they showed that existing planes will become reflective, and I guess this will be an ATTR setting, but this isn't true PBR.

 

It will be interesting for sure to see what happens, but I suspect the initial performance hit will shock people (Just like when HDR first came out).

 

Edit: Of course I could be wrong. But having worked with PBR for the unreal engine, this is the general process and is quite different from the older diffuse/spec/normal workflow in XP

Everyone has to earn and Xplane is one of the cheapest commercial flight sims , of course anything not charged on updates for a new version is always welcome.

For how long we had Xplane 10, 4 years? I'm fine with this as we probably should get seasons and better weather within xp11.* and coming years.

A Citation X? Oooooooooh!