XEnviro update to 1.07 imminent?

[Colonel X 1,430]

28 minutes ago, tonywob said:

Obviously everyone's priorities on what they want is different, ...

That applies to many aspects of our hobby! The missing custom weather is a major bummer I guess, but it seems to be their philosophy. 

[anden145 2,285]

A little bit dissapointing... but is what's posted here the full changelog - or "just" the changelog for RC1?

[alpha12125 213]

i still think the whole "lets scrap the complete planned development and focus on 3D clouds" was rushed and not the best idea. I still have the feeling that it was a somewhat hurt ego over the "ohh its 2d clouds that doesnt look real" word not allowed that was spewed around initially and its now a "i show you what can be done"

At the end of the day its quite ironic that the release of 3D clouds is getting pushed back again and again because the performance is still not good enough. Something that was always held against other developers continiously by x-enviro word not allowed. 

At the end its potential that is there and putting 1.07 now was the right idea, because x-enviro doesnt need fantastic new innovations it needs constant iterations of existing features. 

 

[N1G 88]

Has anyone actually been able to speak to someone in the company about the concerns?

Is there any comms at all from them, aside from posting what the product will and will not have?

 

Bob

 

[alpha12125 213]

3 hours ago, Colonel X said:

That applies to many aspects of our hobby! The missing custom weather is a major bummer I guess, but it seems to be their philosophy. 

well according to facebook, custom weather wont happen, but we could get historic weather. Atleast that would be somewhat helpfull

[avgaskoolaid 292]

1 hour ago, N1G said:

Has anyone actually been able to speak to someone in the company about the concerns?

Is there any comms at all from them, aside from posting what the product will and will not have?

 

Bob

 

They're pretty active on facebook.  https://www.facebook.com/groups/xenviro/

7 hours ago, tonywob said:

Ohhh, so this doesn't actually include the new clouds or any hope of having custom weather . It's been a very long wait since January, and I think the lack of progress has left a lot of people quite frustrated (including myself)

Actually, their new voxel array system makes the clouds look a bit better despite still being 2D. This was posted on reddit last night by a beta tester:

And yes, I'm frustrated as well. Updates were coming along nicely until they inexplicably decided to re-engineer the whole plugin. 1.07 is welcome, but honestly it should have been out in April at the latest. Those crashes when the server connection is lost are completely unacceptable and should have been fixed ASAP. 

[N1G 88]

Thanks Harmoody!

[Paraffin 2,197]

4 hours ago, alpha12125 said:

well according to facebook, custom weather wont happen, but we could get historic weather. Atleast that would be somewhat helpfull

I can't see that being a substitute for custom weather. At least not the way I use custom weather with SkyMaxx Pro or default XP weather.

I like flying in real weather as much as possible. I like having my sim flight match (more or less) what's happening outside my window if I'm flying in my home area. But because I fly only GA and helicopters, and often into small uncontrolled airstrips, sometimes I need to make a small adjustment like reducing wind speed or adjusting visibility to complete the flight (i.e. see the runway on final approach). I do almost all my flying in FSEconomy so completing each flight is important!

Historical weather doesn't fix this. It's not fine-grained enough to duplicate existing weather but "a little less," like I can do in Skymaxx or default weather. Historical weather would only let me pick some random day in Summer, when it isn't likely to be raining or blowing hard, and it won't look anything like what the existing METAR is showing. I want the existing METAR but "a little less." 

I bought EXenviro before knowing it wouldn't ever do custom weather, so I'm still following it out of curiosity. But it doesn't look like it will ever be practical for what I need in a weather plugin. 

Regarding the development delay, I wonder if they're waiting for the new plugin SDK in v11.10 that was just mentioned in the dev blog. Apparently there will be a wrapper for backwards compatibility, but it will be slower than using the new SDK. Any work they're doing on 3D clouds may also be waiting for Vulkan/Metal, which Ben said is still "a long way off."

[steve310002 1,198]

I wish it would work with the Oculus Rift. I will not bother installing it otherwise. 

[Colonel X 1,430]

5 hours ago, steve310002 said:

I wish it would work with the Oculus Rift. I will not bother installing it otherwise. 

Well FlyInside (for X-Plane) will be pretty much dead once Laminar adds native VR. And X-Enviro might well be the perfect match given how little GPU time it requires (and how much VR requires) - however it seems future versions of X-Enviro might be a lot heavier on the GPU, at least that's what it sounds like on Facebook, the developer repeatedly emphasized his performance issues with the new builds.

 

[steve310002 1,198]

15 hours ago, Colonel X said:

Well FlyInside (for X-Plane) will be pretty much dead once Laminar adds native VR.

 

Any idea if Laminar gave an approximate release date for the VR update? I am tempted to purchase Flyinside but it's pretty expensive at around 38 USD. Whilst the experience of VR is amazing with Flyinside, I am debating whether its worth investing especially if Laminar are about to release a free update. Currently I am making do with the 15 minute demo.

[Colonel X 1,430]

19 minutes ago, steve310002 said:

Any idea if Laminar gave an approximate release date for the VR update? I am tempted to purchase Flyinside but it's pretty expensive at around 38 USD. Whilst the experience of VR is amazing with Flyinside, I am debating whether its worth investing especially if Laminar are about to release a free update. Currently I am making do with the 15 minute demo.

Yeah I was also doing the demo but found it was too sluggish to invest in, and performance was bad even on a 1080ti. Ben has stated that VR will go into beta as soon as 11.10 is final. 11.10 beta is expected to start very soon and is said to last "months", so I'd say November would be a good guess if you're optimistic.

[Lenny777 299]

An update? For example I was expecting volumetric clouds. Really not much.

[Colonel X 1,430]

5 hours ago, Lenny777 said:

An update? For example I was expecting volumetric clouds. Really not much.

Manage your expectations.

Some user apparently live streamed a preview of 1.07 but it's not accessible anymore nor have I seen it.

This is this mornings update from the developer:

"1.7rc04 is on general test, only two items left to do: adjust ground haze levels to match xp11 and assemble new installer.
11 other pending items have been moved over to 1.08 work plan."

[alpha12125 213]

9 hours ago, Lenny777 said:

An update? For example I was expecting volumetric clouds. Really not much.

acording to facebook: 

originally 1.07 was planned with 3d clouds. However since they are currently still in performance improvement testing and everyone wants an update, Andrey decided to split the update in two parts and move the clouds back to 1.1
with 1.07 you will get alot of bugfixes and other usability functions, plus all the backend technology for the 1.1 update. If you see on the screenshot above the new cloud placement is already part. 
1.07 is in RC4 atm and 1.08 will be out soon afterwards. Then the 3D clouds will be released. 

http://flightdeckx.com/developer-qa-with-xenviro/

here is a recent interview with the developer for some more insight why he did things he did