xAmbience?

[jt8d9a 1,881]

..has been released. Has anybody bought it and can recommend it?

http://highskytech.com/xambience.html

[Paraffin 2,197]

Interesting! There is an xAmbience support forum at the .org forums under "Utilities and Tools," but only a few posts and no real reviews yet. 

Somebody buy it and give a report. 🙂 And thanks for the heads-up.

Man, these mostly cosmetic weather add-ons are getting thick as fleas lately. Not that this is a bad thing, but it's getting expensive to compare them all. Also, I wonder how many will still work after we move to Vulkan/Metal...

[jt8d9a 1,881]

It seems to feature also seasonal textures:

 

Link to the support forum: https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/forum/444-xambience/

[Paul Deluca 164]

Thanks for posting this  JT.  Looks like the midwest US . Paraffin  made a good point about conversion to vulcan/metal.

[jt8d9a 1,881]

There is a risk with any new version of XP. Like with Xvision.

There is a lot of negativity expressed at the Org, so maybe we get a demo for xAmbience.

I quote from the developer:

"Feature list:

Main:
-Custom clouds with many rendering logic and blending 
-Custom atmosphere rendering 
-Water system rendering 
-Advanced plugin controls 
-20+ sliders for control full x-plane global sphere. 
-Simulate true visibility effects and haze effects 
-Seasonal ground textures with advanced auto-change mode. 

Clouds: 
-Custom cloud draw 
-Advanced controls 
-Cloud lightning model, depends at real weather situation and time. 
-Custom cloud shadow system with realistic effects 
-Custom cloud formation. 
-10 cloud texture solutions with automatic install in plugin 
-2 Rendering types: Detailed, Simple. 
-Cloud illumination from ground lights 

Atmosphere: 
-Custom visibility rendering 
-Advanced atmosphere rendering 
-Algorithmic Sky rendering model with custom controls 
-Sphere saturation control 
-16 sky colors with custom lightning effects
-Advanced fog implementation with 3d effects 
-Sky city lights effects 

Water: 
-Custom water rendering model with effects, 3d waves and lightness 
-Mist on water effects 
-Custom wave amplitude model 
-Advanced settings 

Other: 
-Custom lightness 
-Custom post processing effects 
-Custom cockpit shadow effects with immersive effects 
-Shadow intensity controls 
-Seasons implementation
-Snow effects 

Little FAQ:

When and where it will available?
-Within 24 hours it will be available on X-Plane ORG Store. 

What price?
-34.99$

What minimal requirements for xAmbience?
-X-Plane 11 Windows, Mac or Linux 2GB VRAM Minimum - 4Gb+ VRAM Recommended 

Are you product have a demo version?
-No.

xAmbience compartible addons list?
-Our addon is't compatible with any simulating weather addons. Compartible weather engines list: FSGRW, ASXP."
 

Edited January 14, 2019 by jt8d9a

[tonywob 4,769]

This looks like it might do what xEnviro does for the colours and sky, but without the weather, and the future plans look pretty good. I'm going to hold off on this one until the promised features of 1.1 are released, otherwise it's just another sky textures and colours replacement until then

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

Another question is whether much of this is done with tweaks to the "art" settings in X-Plane, like the multitude of Lua scripts that affect sky and ground colors. Those settings are available for users to mess with for fun, but Laminar advises payware developers not to use them, because they could be changed or removed at any time. 

[signmanbob 592]

So  would this be compatible with Active Sky X, SkyMaxx Pro or Real Weather Connector?

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

6 minutes ago, signmanbob said:

So  would this be compatible with Active Sky X, SkyMaxx Pro or Real Weather Connector

The FAQ says it's not compatible with SkyMaxx Pro (and I assume other "cloud depiction" weather add-ons), but it's compatible with add-ons that are only weather injectors like ActiveSky X and FSGRW.

I assume that means it won't work with ActiveSky later this year when they release their own cloud depiction add-on.

[jt8d9a 1,881]

So has anybody bought it and can comment about it?

[steve310002 1,198]

1 hour ago, jt8d9a said:

o has anybody bought it and can comment about it?

+1

[tonywob 4,769]

Well I ate my own words and bought it out of curiosity, but it didn't last long on my machine. I had major problems with it, including the clouds being dark coloured (Like back in the early XP10 dais) and very strange sickly blue coloured water. The other major gripe I had was the "0 performance impact" statement wasn't true, I lost quite a lot of performance on the default settings (nearly 15fps in some places)

Seasons are implemented as a 6GB texture pack and do not work with orthos like xEnviro does. However, they are planning to do so in future releases. The seasonal changes suffer the same problem as TerraMaxx and force a reload of the scenery. I don't think this is their fault and just a limitation with X-Plane at the moment

My results, I put this down to my machine setup since I've seen screenshots of others using it and they look much better than my system, so I guess something messed up or I have a conflict somewhere. I'm keeping it around but disabled just to see how they progress with the seasonal part. I'm using Mac OS X, and I've not see anyone else posting results from Mac OS yet, so maybe this was my problem.

If anyone has UWXP then it's pretty similar. There is a UI to adjust various texture sets and cloud sizes, and some post processing effects. For me, my combination of UWXP/Xvision still looks much better. Where this one will win for me is if they manage to get the seasons working correctly like xEnviro is trying, since it works with any weather engine.

[steve310002 1,198]

Thanks for the update Tony. I find it very strange the publisher of Xambience has not released any promo videos. It seems that some people are having better luck than others with it from what I read at the org. My guess is there are a lot of conflicts with existing plugins so perhaps it is not displaying correctly for everyone. I am really hoping they release Xenviro 1.10 soon. I must admit that with all the snow around where I live at the moment, it is quite disheartening flying in summer conditions all the time in X-Plane. I will keep an eye on Xambience and see how things developed but having just bought Xvision and Active Sky (and already Skymaxx Pro and Xenviro), I must admit my tolerance for 'far from perfect' weather add-ons is quite low as I am sure many others feel at this stage.

[Humpty 751]

Is this like X-vision ? 

[Celis 24]

I did had fps hit, from 60 to 30 going down to 20s. Even with all sliders at 0%.  (GTX 1080Ti)

xVision is more powerful working with shaders.

maybe with 3d puddles, 3d snow, 3d snow on aircraf mentioned for next update will be better. 

Of course they need to fix the frame issue.

 

 

Edited January 15, 2019 by Celis