B17 released

[hjsmuc 393]

I think it's fine. However, some planes which worked in PB 15 don't work for me in PB 17, A36 and the Kodiak as an example. Not such a big issue, I know the author is working on the Kodiak and Carenado will most likely come up with something soon, given that this seems to be the last beta.  

[soaring_penguin 428]

38 minutes ago, hjsmuc said:

I think it's fine. However, some planes which worked in PB 15 don't work for me in PB 17, A36 and the Kodiak as an example. Not such a big issue, I know the author is working on the Kodiak and Carenado will most likely come up with something soon, given that this seems to be the last beta.  

Could be a case where the developer was chasing betas, where he tried to fix a big in one beta, but the next beta is correct again and breaks again his work . I don't say it is, but could be. I think they should only now start working on compatibility with xp11.

[Paraffin 2,197]

7 hours ago, jh71 said:

thats a feature, not a bug :-) .

Right, in Ben's latest dev blog comments thread, he mentions this about no cockpit shadows at early/late hours:

Quote

"No. It’s intentional that the shadows are phased out when the sun angles are very low. We may look at tuning the lighting to compensate in the future, but this isn’t a bug, it’s a design limitation."

 

[Phantom88 3,287]

RATS!!!!! I thought this baby was ready to depart Henderson field 

[GusRodrigues 1]

20 hours ago, jh71 said:

thats a feature, not a bug :-) .

not a feature at all. you can correct with a lua script

 

set("sim/private/controls/skyc/max_shadow_angle",-89)
set("sim/private/controls/skyc/min_shadow_angle",-90)

 

before and after

 

[soaring_penguin 428]

I know this script, but it is on purpose, it is not a bug...  . 

[Novation 534]

1 hour ago, jh71 said:

I know this script, but it is on purpose, it is not a bug...  . 

If that is the case then it seems pretty stupid to me. The cockpits looks awful without the shadows, when the sun is still high enough to cast them. Call it a feature, or call it a bug, either way its not right, and having to mess with scripts to fix this sort of thing is just silly

I really do wonder about the LR team sometimes

[Novation 534]

Does anyone here with Beti-X's Bella Coola have issues with missing buildings and ground markings in pb17?  The rest seems to be there as far as I can tell.

EDIT - Sorted the issue. My custom scenery ini had the some of the components in the wrong order. No doubt my fault, although I don't remember touching the beti-x stuff at all. Oh well

[Mountain Man 142]

9 hours ago, jh71 said:

I know this script, but it is on purpose, it is not a bug...  . 

Correct.  From the man himself:

Quote

Ben Supnik: "It’s intentional that the shadows are phased out when the sun angles are very low. We may look at tuning the lighting to compensate in the future, but this isn’t a bug, it’s a design limitation."

On a different note, the performance we're seeing in PB17 is apparently the baseline, and things are only going to get better from here:

Quote

Ben Spunik: "The [good] news is: perf work starts basically as soon as we go final. When we looked at the future road map, there’s something that Austin wants (and has wanted for a while) that now (finally) fits pretty well with a lot of aspects of our business and the code itself: _tuning the hell out of the engine_. This means:
– higher framerate
– more fluid framerate
– getting rid of pauses and stutters
– faster loading

I don’t know how soon you see results, but we have a long list of things we want to do that will make X-plane better for everyone, and I get to start that pretty much as soon as we ship 11.0.

(I, for one, am really glad about this. I really like performance tuning…it’s my equivalent of playing video games…so getting a block in the schedule to just work on perf is fantastic.)

We’re also going hard into VR, but my part of that is…performance tuning. We want to be able to hit a locked 45 fps (for half-speed rendering with interpolation) on a VR headset with two eyes rendered.

http://developer.x-plane.com/2017/03/life-after-11-00/

[Novation 534]

50 minutes ago, Mountain Man said:

the performance we're seeing in PB17 is apparently the baseline, and things are only going to get better from here:

This is very good news. I had started to worry that performance might not get much, if any better (not that it is terrible) so this is very welcome. Stutters are the worse thing for me, and when the kids have a go, and naturally choose a fast jet, it gets very bad. Flying the slow stuff, as I only tend to do I get by, but it'll be great to eliminate them.

With this, and squashing the last of the visual bugs we will have something very special.

[Longranger 148]

9 hours ago, Novation said:

Call it a feature, or call it a bug, either way its not right, and having to mess with scripts to fix this sort of thing is just silly

I really do wonder about the LR team sometimes

Well, I think this is a rather obvious case, what they did and why they did it.

Look at the list of bug fixes in PB 16.

Quote

Cockpit shadows less blocky.

I think it is quite obvious. Under smaller angles you see more of the fine structure of the model. If you simply filter out smaller smaller angles you get much clearer shadows. You simply see the effect of shadows more often, then the small shadows at certain times of day.

Sure, it isn´t right, but with this argument games would look totally different. They often enough have to fake around.

Ben already explained how the real fix will work: A complete redesign of the process, how the cockpit is build. In this tiny space they can release the complete power of todays gaming industry.

[Novation 534]

31 minutes ago, Longranger said:

Well, I think this is a rather obvious case, what they did and why they did it.

Nope, not to me, but maybe I'm stupid?

I'll keep using the script, as long as it works, until its improved offically..... if it is.

[sightseer 895]

Can anyone tell me what controls the brightness of the haze at sunset?  Its more than just the sky texture portion although during the day that's definitely part of it.  At sunset the haze is bright no matter how dark you make the texture.  I haven't messed with the 'lighting squares' yet though.

 

any help would be appreciated because it looks weird to have a light blue haze under a darker sky.

[Murmur 3,941]

48 minutes ago, sightseer said:

Can anyone tell me what controls the brightness of the haze at sunset?  Its more than just the sky texture portion although during the day that's definitely part of it.  At sunset the haze is bright no matter how dark you make the texture.  I haven't messed with the 'lighting squares' yet though.

The haze color is controlled by the bottom row of each sky color texture. In other words, the color of the first row of the sky textures determine the color of the haze.

[Mountain Man 142]

3 hours ago, Novation said:

This is very good news. I had started to worry that performance might not get much, if any better (not that it is terrible) so this is very welcome. Stutters are the worse thing for me, and when the kids have a go, and naturally choose a fast jet, it gets very bad. Flying the slow stuff, as I only tend to do I get by, but it'll be great to eliminate them.

With this, and squashing the last of the visual bugs we will have something very special.

Yep.  Beta 17 is running quite well on my mid-range system, so I'm excited about further optimization.