7 minutes ago, steve310002 said:

I recall someone saying before that an FTX Global type of addon is difficult to create for X-Plane 11 due to limitations of the engine but according to what Austin alluded to in the video, it is fully possible in the engine to create replacement textures and indeed localized scenery texures in X-Plane 11 for each season. I wonder how 'easy' this is to do and why then no one is doing it?

They are doing it, there are actually several packages on the x-plane.org that actually try and do this. Seasonal variation is possible in X-Plane and some people have already done it, e.g. Trees, snow etc.

The X-Plane engine however works very differently than FSX in that it isn't landclass based tiles of 1x2km in size, but rather layers of textures blended together to form a final effect. It's really not as easy as it is FSX, especially if you want the autogen to also look correct as well

2 hours ago, tonywob said:

but rather layers of textures blended together to form a final effect.

Tony, maybe this is a stupid question but would seasonal textures work with orthoscenery?

Tom

Yep. If you could find orthos for different seasons, you could flip out the textures based on the season, just like the trees and ground textures

Anyone can explain what do they mean by developing Airbus systems?

Is Jardesign having "X-Plane engine" limitations?

31 minutes ago, kakusso said:

Anyone can explain what do they mean by developing Airbus systems?

Is Jardesign having "X-Plane engine" limitations?

well apart from the fact that the jar design is a fun plane but no airbus, what austin means is that airbus have flight control modes that stop you from crashing.

In "normal law" you can only bank an airbus around 60ish? degrees and then the system will activley stop you to bank further. If you pitch up and are almost stalling, the plane will pitch down to prevent stalling even if you pull the joystick back. 

This is basically called the FBW system and it has different "laws".  So you need to program all this logic ontop of all system logic you already need to do, because on a GA you can simply pitch up until you stall.  There are people that developed these systems, like qpac, that you can buy or design them yourself.  Austin is developing these  at the moment for x-plane out of the box. I do not know if he will do more than normal law though

3 hours ago, tonywob said:

Yep. If you could find orthos for different seasons, you could flip out the textures based on the season, just like the trees and ground textures

Oh no Tony, it's a hardisk nightmare to have orthos for one season. Orthos for each one of them might be a case for sesquashtoo.

Tom

16 hours ago, strider1 said:

I was a little disappointed as well ! Doesn't sound like there is a fix coming anytime soon :( The clouds in XP-10 are not transparent at night, not sure why it's a issue in XP-11....

They switched with X-plane 11 to Deferred Lighting/Shading.

The big advantage: If you have many lights  and their light circles connect it can be much faster.

Normally you have to calculate the effect of every light source independendly. If you have many lights this takes a lot of time.

If you use Deffered Lighting you only need two passes across the whole image. One for the objects and then you calculate all lights in a single pass. The disadvantage of this calcuation: It can't handle translucent objects. You have to add these objects on your own. And this can be a bit tricky. It isn't easy, but it is possible. But Ben wants to do this efficiently, and at the moment he doesn´t have an idea how to do this. It is totally impossible to render them in in real time.So such objects are always the result of different tricks. So there is no generic solution how to handle such objects.

If I think about it this is probably especially tricky with OpenGL. In DIrectX or Vulkan you can probably add an additional rendering step, that could handle these effects.

8 minutes ago, Longranger said:

The disadvantage of this calcuation: It can't handle translucent objects.

Paradoxically, maybe the easiest method to handle that would be to turn cloud puffs into solid objects. After all, real cumulus clouds are mostly solid and not translucent. Maybe a very close ring of puffs near the aircraft could be made translucent, in order to simulate the wooly aspect of clouds up-close, while the rest of solid cloud puffs would block the lights below.

 

18 minutes ago, Murmur said:

Paradoxically, maybe the easiest method to handle that would be to turn cloud puffs into solid objects.

This might be a solution, but we don´t know if this is really doable without rewritting parts of the rendering engine.

If you ask me, I presume, that he might want to do the switch to Vulkan first. There it is much easier to pull some additional effects out of your hat.