X-Vision???

[jtwhite 36]

Any thoughts on X-Vision? I get to the point where im just about to click "Buy" and then .....

Im really getting to the "It aint broke; don't fix it" point with XP (Im at 11.30).

 

John in Indiana

[olderndirt 2,295]

I use it in conjunction with UWXP and am happy with the results. 

[Paraffin 2,197]

Just my personal take... I don't like messing with the "art" settings in X-Plane like shaders and sky colors, or post-processing effects. I just try to keep my XP installation stripped down to the few add-ons I really need.

Right now, that's just ActiveSky for weather injection, default XP clouds, default XP sky and water colors. I know people like to mess with things like sky colors, and that's fine, but there's no guarantee any of this will still work after we move to Vulkan/Metal, and some of the saturation and post-processing effects just don't look realistic to me. 

So I'm staying vanilla for now. With real weather injection in the areas I mostly fly like the Pacific Northwest USA and the UK, I'm not going to see blue skies or sunsets for another 6 months anyway. 😉

[z06z33 763]

I'd say its worth it,but its all about the preset you use

 

Edited February 1, 2019 by z06z33

[cptCaptain 122]

1 hour ago, z06z33 said:

I'd say its worth it,but its all about the preset you use

 

 

Which preset dp you use? The water looks incredible.😯

[Pastaiolo 1,688]

I like it. The price is not high, so even if in the future it will stop working well, it would be okay.

For now it does things nicely, and XP without it is really different. Plus this is a good way of doing it without having to get lost in luas and the tons of free packages around.

[Colonel X 1,430]

It's really difficult actually.

Initially, X-Visions results can be stunning. But there are problems. The interplay of sky colors, shaders and visibility is complex, and as of XP 11.30, it seems vanilla everything (meaning no X-Vision), seems to be the only way to get consistent results in all conditions. It's how sky colors interplay with terrain shading, X-Plane's dense haze (in vanilla) creating a link between the sky and the terrain - X-Vision interferes here and the results a sort of a mixed bag, sometimes better than vanilla, sometimes worse. At points it attempts to push X-Plane's atmosphere rendering beyond what's plausible. Especially I don't like the reduced haze simply because it reveals X-Plane's low polycount of distant terrain, visibility seems outright broken when using X-Vision - it tries to extend it, but it doesn't succeed aesthetically. 

That said, water rendering is way better when using X-Vision, there's no denying that. 

For me, the best way of pushing X-Plane 11.30 is ReShade. There are no readymade solutions, and it takes a lot of time to get right, but the results can be stunning, and they only intensify the visuals, they do not alter them. Bloom, saturation, noise filters can go a long way making sunsets more stunning and fixing some shortcomings (sky color banding) without breaking anything. 

Ultimately, there's two things to look forward to: X-Enviro's atmosphere rendering (which is, not even regarding the clouds, technically and aesthetically far superior) and X-Plane 12, if Laminar ever gets around trashing the whole bitmap based sky color logic and finally come up with a fully dynamic sky.

[pmb 5,137]

12 hours ago, olderndirt said:

I use it in conjunction with UWXP and am happy with the results. 

Same here. I use the preset (+ UWXP settings) published at the ORBX forum (FILOU), and in my eyes this makes all the difference between "dull" and "stunning". Even the "impressive" preset coming with XVision is quite good.

But as always, beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.

Kind regards, Michael

[z06z33 763]

10 hours ago, cptCaptain said:

Which preset dp you use? The water looks incredible.😯

I use the default water any.png file then just use the Xvison sunglare settings the file that comes with Xvison is to light in my opinion 

[jtwhite 36]

Thanks for all the replies.

I find I'm more of the mind-set of Paraffin when it comes to the sim, and of the same mind-set as France89 when it comes to my wallet.

I really, really enjoy XP 11 as is, and while the only thing I'm using is Skymaxx Pro, still I'm always amazed as how "real" it looks to me. Maybe I'll give it a try because it's something new to tinker around with. But, the point will still be to plan a flight, take off, navigate and land. 

Fly happy.

John in Indiana

[AlfaRomeo 0]

I really enjoy the skymaxx pro package the best (with FSGRW and RWC).  I have XEnviro and Active Sky.  Just my opinion-----

[Pastaiolo 1,688]

Yeah, i think you should give a try. Unless you are one who doesn't use any lua tweaks at all, including free weather packages as FSE or even Ultraweather (because they all modify those things in a way or the other). And since X-Vision is based on presets, you don't have to get lost in all the values because it's really easy to deactivate single effects.
If you haven't already, i suggest you to read the official manual page because it has some cool before/after screenshots which can help you determine the capabilities of this addon:

http://x-vision.pro/tweaks_descr.html

[jtwhite 36]

I think this falls under the category of "Ive been flying it this way for so long, I forgot what changes I made." Anyway, I uninstalled Skymaxx pro and forgot whether it changes some of the shaders that were present some time ago. Now, when I run xVision, Im getting this error. Any idea how to fix it??

(Of course, Ill probably figure it out 10 seconds after I push the "submit reply" button, LOL)

 

 

ERROR processing solution: source files C:\Users\jtw3\Desktop\XP Downloads\xVision_121\BACKUP\Resources\shaders\bin\glsl150\ are not original shaders

[jtwhite 36]

ROFLMA ... Ha ha ha ... what did I tell you? Before I worked on xVision, I decided just to run XP and see what might have happened. Well, I got the notice for an update, it replaced all the original shaders, I copied them over to the xVision backup folder and, voila, xVision worked fine.

It never fails.

Now to see what XP looks like.

 

John in Indiana

Edited February 2, 2019 by jtwhite
additional comment

[Pastaiolo 1,688]

Glad you fixed it. The other thing you can do is just delete the Backup folder inside xVision, the next time you'll run the program it will do all the backups once again