1 minute ago, Paraffin said:

Okay, maybe y'all aren't aware of this, but Sundog is the outfit that makes the SkyMaxx Pro and RealWeather add-ons for X-Plane, and also the new TerraMax seasons plugin. They've been involved with X-Plane add-ons for a while now.

Not when I wrote that, back in 2013...... 😃

And for Triton SDK in P3d4, which handles water circulation.

Edited April 28, 20188 yr by jabloomf1230

39 minutes ago, HiFlyer said:

Not when I wrote that, back in 2013...... 😃

Okay, and this still raises a good point about all the posts people make, lusting after various fancy terrain and weather engines that could be the "next gen flight sim." Or wishing they could just be smoothly integrated into existing sims. 

Sundog's SkyMax Pro is a good weather plugin, but it's not a great weather plugin due to built-in limitations in XP's internal weather modeling. You can't just slap fancy graphics from a 3rd party engine into an existing platform that easily. And the fancy graphics engines aren't a good platform for developing a flight sim from scratch, for the same reason. They'll always be compromised by the needs of a full-featured flight sim.

51 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

Okay, and this still raises a good point about all the posts people make, lusting after various fancy terrain and weather engines that could be the "next gen flight sim." Or wishing they could just be smoothly integrated into existing sims. 

The fact that threads like that keep reappearing has always seemed to me to be an expression of the community's pent up longing for something better. An urge to finally have options beyond FSX/P3D.

One of my major qualms against FSW was that they took the seemingly easier, quicker route of pouring their resources into an updated clone, rather than striking out to create something new that could be designed from the beginning to take advantage of modern hardware.

As it was, they found themselves chasing P3D, which had years of a head start.

Still, they gave it a good run! I'm surprised they actually got so much done so fast. Given more time, I suspect they would have had a good chance of eventually leaving P3D in their technological dust, but unfortunately, they didn't have a multi-quadrillion dollar company backing them up that could fund development out of spare pocket-lint.

I sob, weep and cry sadly when I see what TrueSky is capable of and wonder how it hasn't made it into P3D or X-Plane yet. Hopefully LM, now having seen how good it looked in FSW will perhaps think about it, as if done correctly, it really would be a game changer. Not so much for folk like REX etc who sell their fantastic cloud textures, but great for us. Skymaxx Pro, whilst great when it first came out, is stuck limitations which I fear doesn't let it shine as well as it could.

It always amazes me that our current sims really don't do a very good job of depicting the weather. X-Plane's implementation is pretty poor (xEnviro improves it somewhat, but P3D (with addons) smashes it in this department. Considering just how important and evident weather is for a flight simulator, I'm amazed it isn't given more attention. Just ask @jcomm the weather-man, he loves it 😁

 

 

lIndeed @tonywob, we all deserve a better overall weather engine.

I have dreamed about that holy grail since ever. Flight Unlimited 3 was truly amazing for it's time, well ahead of all of the competition, and Active Sky still is, IMO, by far the best alternative presently available which I really look forward to see in X-Plane.

In the Combat simulation front we can see stuff being modelled quite better than in the civil sims, like non-standard pressure lapse rates due to low / high temps and other effects. Some sims also model ground friction effects for winds near ground, like we feel it IRL....

Weather for me, more than any other item right now, is what I look forward to find enhanced in our civil sims, and for sure FSW was following the right track and doing a remarkable job.

I still hope for something really surprising to also happen to AEFS2... They're calm in their slow but sound evolution and do not look worried about sustaining their business, so they are calmly adding stuff to their platform which already actually models turbulence, shifting winds and ground friction effects better than X-Plane or P3D + ASP4 IMO.  Maybe they can surprise us ?

Meanwhile, I love the clouds in IL-2 Battle of Series ( I hate the genre... )...  

 

Edited April 28, 20188 yr by jcomm

1 hour ago, jcomm said:

lIndeed @tonywob, we all deserve a better overall weather engine.

I have dreamed about that holy grail since ever. Flight Unlimited 3 was truly amazing for it's time, well ahead of all of the competition, and Active Sky still is, IMO, by far the best alternative presently available which I really look forward to see in X-Plane.

 

 

Very true. Weather and the good representation of it, is for me an essential and one of the most important things in a flight sim. It is a pity that Austin seems to don't have it really on his list.

Though the rest of the Sim is so good (also tubeliners! Well, see the Flight Factor products or the Zibo 737 mod FOR FREE, for those who are thinking XP11 is only good in GA).

But coming back to Weather. 

You spoke about Hifi and XP11. I would too more than love to see my beloved p3d Active Sky there. But after their announcement last year to go to XPlane they've been very quiet about that.

Maybe it is because of the huge restrictions in XPlane according the weather representation engine. You can read that also very often over at the .org Forums from Andrej and MDavidov, the devs of XEnviro.

So IMHO Austin should reconsider to rework it completely. Hopefully he does. Otherwise maybe the Weather will always not as good as in prepar3d. 

 

Regards,

Jens

Edited April 28, 20188 yr by rapsta

1 hour ago, rapsta said:

Very true. Weather and the good representation of it, is for me an essential and one of the most important things in a flight sim. It is a pity that Austin seems to don't have it really on his list.

He doesn´t have it on the direct list, because Ben doesn´t have it on its direct list. And Ben simply doesn´t have it on its list, because all weather effects are dark wizardry. This means, they don´t simulate anything, they are simply effects, that try to look like the real deal.

It would be a bit stupid to put work into this code, while you revamp the complete rendering engine, since you have to recreate such effects anyway after you have the new rendering engine.

Yes. You are right that it isn't realistic to "simulate" Weather with a pc. There is a reason why weather models are calculated with the biggest computers of the World. I am aware that it is only try to show what is going on at the moment, out of e.g. METAR data.

In detail I meant only for example why it is not possible to show clouds right  to the Horizon...  like in prepar3d. I know I know. And I don't want to compare Apples and pears.

And yes. If they have to rework the whole engine for that, that would make no sense. But that is a thing probably only Austin and Ben could answer if they are working on it in the Vulcan engine version.

Edited April 28, 20188 yr by rapsta

4 hours ago, Longranger said:

It would be a bit stupid to put work into this code, while you revamp the complete rendering engine, since you have to recreate such effects anyway after you have the new rendering engine.

Absolutely NOT stupid.  You most definitely want to take into consideration everything you "plan" to render because that will define your render engine/pipeline and the order of how you want things to render.  Clouds/Fog are very "alpha" (transparency) enabled and as such you want to make sure you get that rendering done at the correct point in the pipeline to minimize the number of passes ... put it at the wrong point and you'll run into serious FPS issues.

As you know, XP11 is deferred rendering (this is better for dynamic lighting as it's rendered/pass at a more optimal point).  Deferred rendering does come at a cost of other processing such as shadows, alpha (transparency).  So planning one's render pipeline is VERY important and should be done early and with the understanding of all that needs to be rendered.

Cheers, Rob.

1 hour ago, Rob Ainscough said:

Absolutely NOT stupid.  You most definitely want to take into consideration everything you "plan" to render because that will define your render engine/pipeline and the order of how you want things to render.  Clouds/Fog are very "alpha" (transparency) enabled and as such you want to make sure you get that rendering done at the correct point in the pipeline to minimize the number of passes ... put it at the wrong point and you'll run into serious FPS issues.

As you know, XP11 is deferred rendering (this is better for dynamic lighting as it's rendered/pass at a more optimal point).  Deferred rendering does come at a cost of other processing such as shadows, alpha (transparency).  So planning one's render pipeline is VERY important and should be done early and with the understanding of all that needs to be rendered.

Cheers, Rob.

I guess what he means is that, being in the process of switching the current rendering engine to Vulkan, it would not make sense to rewrite the weather-related code now, because it would have to be at least partly rewritten anyway after the switch to Vulkan. So it makes more sense to review/rewrite the parts of code that needs to be improved, only after they switched to Vulkan the rest of the rendering engine.

9 hours ago, jcomm said:

Weather for me, more than any other item right now, is what I look forward to find enhanced in our civil sims, and for sure FSW was following the right track and doing a remarkable job.

I still hope for something really surprising to also happen to AEFS2... They're calm in their slow but sound evolution and do not look worried about sustaining their business, so they are calmly adding stuff to their platform which already actually models turbulence, shifting winds and ground friction effects better than X-Plane or P3D + ASP4 IMO.  Maybe they can surprise us ?

Don't get me started on weather and AFS2. 😡 I've been asking for that for ages and they didn't even say they will actually work on it. It's on their we-will-think-about-it-when-we-are-done-with-our-current-to-do-list-list. In short, don't wait for it. Won't be here before 2022. Or later. Imho they are TOO calm and slow. But well, yes, maybe they can surprise us. But I'd be very surprised if they can. (Which would make me surprised twice, I guess... 😜 )

Edited April 28, 20188 yr by Guest

On ‎4‎/‎27‎/‎2018 at 12:18 PM, fshobby said:

I think there was a bigger issue. DTG could have (and did I believe) soften the stance on selling through steam etc, but DTG had ripped out support for C/C++ gauges, making it impossible for Aerosoft to port over their bus (or for FSW support most complex addon aircraft). The removal of C gauge support was discussed at fsdeveloper many months ago and the consensus even then was that was a pretty fatal error on DTG's part.

I remember that conversation. I was appalled and gutted when I learned that C/C++ was deliberately purged from FSW, as it totally killed my interest in developing for it.

2 hours ago, Rob Ainscough said:

Absolutely NOT stupid.  You most definitely want to take into consideration everything you "plan" to render because that will define your render engine/pipeline and the order of how you want things to render.  Clouds/Fog are very "alpha" (transparency) enabled and as such you want to make sure you get that rendering done at the correct point in the pipeline to minimize the number of passes ... put it at the wrong point and you'll run into serious FPS issues.

As you know, XP11 is deferred rendering (this is better for dynamic lighting as it's rendered/pass at a more optimal point).  Deferred rendering does come at a cost of other processing such as shadows, alpha (transparency).  So planning one's render pipeline is VERY important and should be done early and with the understanding of all that needs to be rendered.

Cheers, Rob.

And this is exactly what I love in our hobby. This thread started to discuss the end of FSW. And now we are already moving on and start solution oriented discussions how to make something that is already good even better. We all burn for our hobby. No matter what platform no matter if community or dev. And as long as it is like this. There can be only one direction. Getting better and better for us all.

Edited April 28, 20188 yr by rapsta

2 hours ago, Rob Ainscough said:

As you know, XP11 is deferred rendering (this is better for dynamic lighting as it's rendered/pass at a more optimal point).  Deferred rendering does come at a cost of other processing such as shadows, alpha (transparency).  So planning one's render pipeline is VERY important and should be done early and with the understanding of all that needs to be rendered.

Sure, it is important, but exactly that is the problem. Try to really solve the deffered rendering issues in OpenGL. It gets pretty hard, since you don´t really have direct access. Any partially solution in this area doesn´t help you in Vulkan, where you have more direct controls.

In 11.0 when I first saw the deferred rendering problems in the clouds I immediately guessed that Ben will probably simply try to put a small patch on it and then go on, till Vulkan. It is an insane problem and highly involved with the current graphics driver. Add a new driver and everything might change.

Furthermore: the interface for weather engines totally changed. The weather plug-ins were directly drawing into the GPU in OpenGL with only very small contact with the rendering engine of X-Plane itself. Ben asked for direct contact with these developers several months ago, since this access will no longer work! Instead they will have to tell X-Plane, what they want to do and X-Plane will have to integrate it in its own rendering calls.

They have their own significantly improved weather engine, Sky Maxx Pro ,X-Enviro and I presume Active Sky. And I don´t think Active Sky will be silent, in what they want and need. And Ben knows exactly what he has to integrate: Particle effects, tesselation effects in water and land tiles, water effects and clouds in sceneries, additional animation capabilities. So they should have the input, that they need. And they haven´t started with the switch now or yesterday. On the surface 11.20 only has these VR stuff added, but I am pretty certain that they changed part of their internals in a much bigger way, than what we currently see. But huge parts of the new engine aren´t yet in place or active. If Ben would have to do it by himself, I wouldn´t have the slightest hope, that this switch might work  But they have now a bigger team.