ENVSHADE released.

[PaulFWatts 100]

In my opinion they have botched the release by not having ENVTEX ready to run in the new ENVDIR which is needed to handle the (hard to find) settings for ENVSHADE.

Lots of people including me thought there was a problem because ENVTEX was coming up as not activated in ENVDIR and all the settings were grayed out and didn't notice that you needed to scroll down to see the settings for ENVSHADE.

After wasting time uninstalling ENVTEX and reinstalling to try and activate it finally found the answer in a seperate tab in their FAQ on their website that the current version doesn't work in ENVDIR yet.

My feelings at the moment is that I have wasted EUR$4.40 for ENVSHADE but fortunately it's only a small amount of money.

Back to the trusty REX HD Textures and PTA with Matt's preset for me and may look at TOGA again when they get their act together.

 

[WebMaximus 372]

29 minutes ago, J van E said:

And I happen to like Matt's default preset which comes very close to this one (=PTAbsolute).

Maybe I need to give Matt's preset and PTA a second try because when I tried it I thought the clouds although looking very nice in an "artistic" way looked quite a bit too much of that and almost like an oil painting or how to describe it. Certainly not anywhere near realistic on my 4K Samsung screen which in every other situation shows very true to life scenes be it in the simulator or outside of it such as in videos on YouTube etc.

I guess what makes me curious is you say Matt's preset comes close to PTAbsolute and that preset I too found to be very good although I opted to go with URP in the end which on my screen and IMO gives the absolutely best and most realistic representation overall be it in the cockpit, looking at clouds, shadows on the ground, blueish mountains in the far distance etc etc.

[Guest]

30 minutes ago, WebMaximus said:

Maybe I need to give Matt's preset and PTA a second try because when I tried it I thought the clouds although looking very nice in an "artistic" way looked quite a bit too much of that and almost like an oil painting or how to describe it. Certainly not anywhere near realistic on my 4K Samsung screen which in every other situation shows very true to life scenes be it in the simulator or outside of it such as in videos on YouTube etc.

I guess what makes me curious is you say Matt's preset comes close to PTAbsolute and that preset I too found to be very good although I opted to go with URP in the end which on my screen and IMO gives the absolutely best and most realistic representation overall be it in the cockpit, looking at clouds, shadows on the ground, blueish mountains in the far distance etc etc.

I do suppose it also depends on which clouds you are using: I (still) use the free HDEv2 clouds.

And Matt's preset comes close to PTAbsolute because those are the only two presets that do not make everything dark and black (with other presets I can't even see the detail on the VC of my Comanche), white (bleeched out clouds) and cartoonish (over the top colors). Matt's preset as well as PTAbsolute mainly make things in the distance a bit blue (making things look a lot more realistic). deepens the shadows without making my cockpit dark as hell and add just a bit of color to things. The effects are rather subtle, unlike other presets, but very, very noticable. After using PTA for a few weeks now I still think every flight 'Man, this just looks real!'. Going back to Orbx scenery with the same green stuff all the way up to the horizon is a no go for me now.

[WebMaximus 372]

Maybe you're right about the clouds. I'm using ENVTEX clouds and find them really good.

Did you try URP?

If not I suggest you give it a try since it's free and again IMO gives the most realistic result of all different shader presets and methods I've tried and I think I've tried them all by now.

I also use the sky textures that are included with URP and another thing I like is how nothing is overwritten when using URP meaning there's no need for any backups.

[scottb613 1,188]

Hi Folks,

Yeah - also wasted a couple hours on trying to get ENVTEX to work with ENVDIR... We could have waited the extra week for release to avoid the frustration... Really...

Thanks for the tip Roland or I might still be trying to figure this out...

That said the shader itself looks pretty good and previously I did tend to set it and forget it with PTA...

I just started with v4 though yesterday and the associated upgrade costs - so for $5.00 it's a welcome keeper - we'll see how it goes...

Regards,

Scott

[GEKtheReaper 364]

I wanted to purchase ENVSHADE but can't seem to find that acclaimed "special offer for ENVTEX users" even after putting the product in my shopping cart. Is there any "special offer" or is it the same discount price till 15.11 that applies to all buyers?

[WebMaximus 372]

7 minutes ago, GEKtheReaper said:

I wanted to purchase ENVSHADE but can't seem to find that acclaimed "special offer for ENVTEX users" even after putting the product in my shopping cart. Is there any "special offer" or is it the same discount price till 15.11 that applies to all buyers?

I think it was explained earlier in this thread that the model will be time-limited for everyone rather than based on previously ENVTEX customers.

[OzWhitey 3,353]

3 hours ago, GEKtheReaper said:

 

I wanted to purchase ENVSHADE but can't seem to find that acclaimed "special offer for ENVTEX users"

 

Don't get too excited, you only save like 80 cents, cos this app is cheap as chips.

Everyone gets the discount, they decided it was too hard to work out who the previous owners are. I bought from simmarket yesterday.

[Lenny777 299]

58 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

Don't get too excited, you only save like 80 cents, cos this app is cheap as chips.

Everyone gets the discount, they decided it was too hard to work out who the previous owners are. I bought from simmarket yesterday.

Back to PTA. Very poor launch and I've still not got it to recognize ENVSHADE as activated while  it clearly is. Envtex will also be in limbo until these elements get properly integrated. 

[jimcarrel 688]

After using all these shader manipulators over the last couple of years, I can totally understand the mix up with these 3 pieces of software from TOGA.

This morning the latest Envir installer was published by TOGA and the publisher mentioned that SimMarket issued new installer for Envtex. So what I have done in preparation was uninstall the 3 TOGA products, cleared shaders - set ASCA back to original and Have uninstalled and re-install P3D 4.1 Client. (supposedly creating clean slate for all shaders).

Tomorrow I will install envtex, then envir, then envshade. Until then  I don't think it is possible to see the differences that TOGA expects from envshade.

Life is never boring for a flightsim user.

[kmax59 213]

Hi Lenny, 

There is no more issue on Envshade activation (which by the way was actually not caused by us but anyways, it doesn't matter). If you still can't get Envshade activated it's much much probably because of an incomplete authorization code. I still don't understand why many users don't paste their full code in the simmarket installer (the first 21 capital letters) but it happen to many people so I don't blame you, there's something that may be unclear.
We will add the possibility to change your license by yourself in the future updates, waiting for this feature please take a look at our FAQ explaining how to solve this, or simply send us  by mail your license file and your order ID, we will correct it for you and you will be good to go.

About the discount, I agree it's not a lot, but we couldn't make a 50% discount on such a low priced product. We didn't decided it was too complicated, simmarket said it was and asked if we would agree to apply the discount to everyone because it's complicated for them, and I can understand so we agreed.

Sorry if this launch bring you some frustration, as also being a flight simmer and not only a developer, I know how frustrating it is not being able to use the product you just bought, but you probably all know that issues often appears during an initial launch. We're doing our best to remove all the bugs before the release with our beta team but 10 users are nothing comparable to hundreds or thousands of users. Issues are almost inevitable during a release, believe me we're doing our best to solve all of the issues.

We also discovered a random issue with registry keys for windows 7 and windows 8 users that may cause an app crash during the splash screen, this will be solved in a few hours.

About the fact that Envtex is not integrated, well, we initially wanted to release both of the product for Envdir the same day. But after thinking about it we realized it was not a good idea at all, why? Because as I said above, bugs are inevitable during a release, releasing both products the same day would have multiplied the chances of issues by twice. The support request would also have been multiplied by twice and it would have been even harder for us to isolate the issues. 
As I'm providing support alone now and as we're only 2 developers in the team, it wouldn't have been serious to release both of them the same day and it would have possibly created even more frustration. However I admit we made a mistake not to be clear enough about the fact Envtex was not supposed to be integrated yet, as well as the user manual may not be clear enough.
No problem I totally understand and we will do what's needed to correct our errors. Hopefully I've been able to provide a pretty good support during these last 24 hours, but I really felt the need to have someone else in this task as Envshade seemed to be a very awaited product.

I hope you understand our point as we understand yours, but please be sure we are currently working very hard to solve everything as soon as possible. Once all of the important issues (i.e those preventing you to use the product) will be solved, we will create the Envtex 1.1.1 package and send it to simmarket so you'll be able to enjoy both of them from Envdir during the week-end.

Considering the amount of work I have to complete until this week-end I'm not able to answer everyone here, but please feel free to come on our forum and give us your opinion on what we failed to do correctly, on what you'd like to see improved or anything else. Any constructive feedback is always welcome, we're still a very yound development team and we still have a lot to learn.

Thank you all :)

[mnafic 0]

Good evening, may i know whats the recommended FTX global lights settings for the Envshade ? Many thanks

[roland_lfor 245]

Maxime I would like to thank you very much for this new product.

I'm flying virtually since more than 30 years and I have to say that the feeling with Envshade (+ ENVTEX) is amazingly realistic. I would say photo-realistic!

A few pictures I would like to share with you:

 

 

[GEKtheReaper 364]

Dear Maxime ( @kmax59),

I also just purchased ENVSHADE and the latest ENVDIR 1.1.1.2 was downloaded automaticaly from SimMarket.

Some questions I would like to adress you (or others who might know the answer):

1. I already own ENVTEX which is fully configured with all the requiered paths ASCA / P3D / Backup location / and so on. ENVDIR again wants to know the ASCA path and a BACKUP folder.

Can I point the backup to the same path I backed up ENVTEX? What would it back up since the ENVTEX Backup folder already contains the ShadersHLSL so it might have already altered the original P3D Shaders?

2. How will we be informed about the updates (e.g. the release of ENVTEX version 1.1.1)?

Regards,

Gerald

[Afterburner 374]

I am wondering:  What is ENVDIR good for in the first place?  What is the goal of that tool?  Will it replace ENVTEX?  Or is this an "administration" tool for all TOGA products?

I am asking because when I click on ENVSHADE after opening ENVDIR, I see the same sliders and texture replacement settings as in ENVTEX (although they are blank now), so why the need to have a separate entry to ENVTEX and ENVSHADE if all options are presented in one interface?  I hope my question is clear.