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mccurdypm

xEnviro 1.10 Released!

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As much as I want to like Xplane the limited weather and depiction is truly pathetic.  Why in the world does LR not fix this?  Xplane has so many advantages over P3D yet has this one glaring fault that just ruins the experience.  I just tried 1.10 for the last few hours.  This has been what we have been waiting for?  Good god 

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Matt Wilson

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A new weather engine might be XP12's headline feature. Not much else left to overhaul. 

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Belligerent X-Plane 12 enthusiast on Apple M1 Max 64GB

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3 hours ago, mpw8679 said:

As much as I want to like Xplane the limited weather and depiction is truly pathetic.  Why in the world does LR not fix this?  Xplane has so many advantages over P3D yet has this one glaring fault that just ruins the experience.  I just tried 1.10 for the last few hours.  This has been what we have been waiting for?  Good god 

I'm just spitballin' here, but my guess is that Austin doesn't like to introduce features until he can do them his way, not necessarily the conventional way. And "his way" often means waiting until computer hardware catches up to his vision.

One recent example is the way extended .dsf loading was introduced so we could finally see distant terrain features like mountains in the distance, but it was a heavy RAM hit, so it was optional in XP10. It became a default feature with no option to disable it in XP11, because the RAM in most users' machines could finally support it.

Another example is the recent introduction of particle effects, currently limited to things like contrails, but obviously particle effects could be an important part of better weather depiction later on. Laminar is introducing it now because the hardware has caught up to the point where it won't cripple the frame rate.

Austin has said in the past that the right way to do weather is 3D modeling instead of the current horizontal "layer cake" model. He has also said he'd like to do procedural seasonal changes instead of basic texture overlays. That sounds great, but it also sounds like a heavy CPU, GPU, and RAM hit.

So I think the "pathetic" weather in XP is because Austin has been waiting for the hardware to catch up to what he'd like to do with weather. Maybe that's wishful thinking on my part, but he must know the current design is pretty lame. Maybe we'll get it in XP12. It would be the killer feature to encourage the upgrade. 

Edited by Paraffin
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3 hours ago, mpw8679 said:

Yes they look horrible.  Like deformed marshmallows 

Yeah I tend to agree... although sometimes the clouds are that way....sort of flat and low in contrast.  But when you fly above clouds you can really see the little puffs and ragged edges of them...  I don't see that at all in the screenshots.  The clouds look better from underneath.


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I don't share much hope in Austin statement, from what i see he is all over the place with his thoughts and actions too. We heard it all during the year too. procedural seasons, water improvements (remember those test with the waves Ben did quite some time ago?), etc etc. I am thankful for what i get but i expect only marginal things.

 

So far xEnviro is the only offer which is different and imho aiming at noise generated clouds/volumetric ones without billboard textures, .lua workarounds and so on. So i'll keep cheering for them hoping they manage to solve their issues (they went from 2d clouds to volumetric real ones, can any other weather addon developer claim to have done that?) and with time XP, Vulkan, new configs will help in the performance department too.

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Chock 1.1: "The only thing that whines louder than a jet engine is a flight simmer."

 

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I believe Laminar knows exactly how valuable a decent weather engine is to both their user base and their sales. It's all down to juggling resources, it's a very small team in terms of game or even flight sim development, but I am pretty sure they already have something cooking. I am also convinced they monitor the add-on community and are at times inspired by that, especially, for example, the shader tweaks X-Vision introduced. I'll just keep my head down and wait for them to show us the goods.

As for X-Enviro, the scenario hasn't really changed. It's the most progressive foray in flight sim weather ever, but it struggles with that ambition in that it's hardly usable in the now. I'd say they need another 1-2 years and handle the transition to Vulkan well - right in time when Laminar might pull up with X-Plane 12. It's a tough business.

 

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Good thoughts Colonel. Laminar does have a small team and I would love to see them add a dedicated developer to head up putting together a decent weather engine that can work with third party developers to create a baseline weather engine feature set that can be extended by third parties. I could imagine that this would be the prominent feature for XP12. 


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On 6/6/2019 at 10:27 AM, france89 said:

I don't share much hope in Austin statement, from what i see he is all over the place with his thoughts and actions too. We heard it all during the year too. procedural seasons, water improvements (remember those test with the waves Ben did quite some time ago?), etc etc. I am thankful for what i get but i expect only marginal things.

Well it is always the problem of long term goals. Priorities change, like now everything hangs a bit on Vulkan, since OpenGL is left by most developers and everything goes to Vulkan.

And now it gets really interesting if they want to keep up OpenGL for a limited time while the Development for Vulkan goes on. I expect more or less a feature freeze in OpenGL with only small improvements and some bigger improvements with Vulkan. But i think the weather model will change in the background. They have to add their compatibility platform GFX into Vulkan so that the 3rd paty developers can start their work. Everyone of them will want to turn off the default weather. So this is a good position to implement a clean interface based on the ideas of the new weather model, so you won't have bigger changes in the near future.They simply turn most of the new functions off for their own weather. Let the 3rd parties play with it and test it and in the background you start a new weather model for X-Plane 12.

It has two advantages: Better motivated 3rd parties. They will debug the new platform but they also have more capabilities than before (which allows them to sell more of their add-ons). They will ask for improvements that will also improve the default X-Plane 12 weather.

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1 hour ago, Oliver Ooi said:

 

Egad, that video is painful to watch.

Austin talking about X-Plane default clouds (before launching xEnviro)..

Quote

 

So today, I'm looking at the X-Plane clouds. Whaaaa... Whaaaa. They're not that great. They're kind of like, okay. I mean, when I look at these, they look all right, but can we do something better? And the answer is, yes we can and we will... IN THE FUTURE!

 

You'd better have that "Future" in mind for XP12, because this isn't really funny at this point.

It was good to hear him acknowledge how thunderstorms are discrete 3D objects, and it can throw 'ya for a loop if you just dip a wing into the vertical convection. Now let's see him take that seriously, and not just gush about eye candy with smoke and mirrors that ignores how X-Plane can't model that thunderstorm he had to MOVE HIS PLANE AROUND to AVOID the DANGER. Because it was a 3D object! 

The worst part...

Towards the end, Austin complains about how xEnviro is getting out of sync with the "clear" weather setting in the sim. Which means he doesn't understand how other weather plugins like ActiveSkyX work either (headslap!). I see clear weather with ActiveSkyX too, Austin, because these companies have to work around your broken weather engine.

And then again... "real weather isn't what we want here." He doesn't understand that xEnviro is real weather only.

It's disappointing that Austin is so clueless in this video about what developers are trying to do, to make up for X-Plane's abysmal weather modeling. Wake up, Austin.

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I Take my Hat Off, and exhibit my bald head, to Paraffin for the above post!

Heck Paraffin,  that's paraffin for Austin to skid... 🙂

Actually I think they mess around with weather all of the time, from the overdone effects to the simple interpretation of aviation weather, as we can now see also from an 11.35 supposedly corrected bug:

XPD-8106 Weather screen temp based on sea level not airport

For me when setting T using the UI I always assumed I was setting it for a nearby station, so, reduced to the altitude of that station / airfield ?  No, it was meant to be sea level, and the problem, as Phillip explained at another site / thread is that XP didn't then reduce it to the airfield / station true elevation... So, now it reduces it, but how the heck are the simmers supposed to calculate T to set in the UI ?  They always have to take it from a METAR and then make the calculations for sea level ?

Well...

Edited by jcomm
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6 hours ago, Paraffin said:

It's disappointing that Austin is so clueless in this video about what developers are trying to do, to make up for X-Plane's abysmal weather modeling. Wake up, Austin.

He also had no idea what xEnviro was... This to me was worrying because it would indicate he really is not paying any attention to other developers and the community, and he really should be.

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It looks to me like we’ve been putting way too much faith in Austin and the team to recognize major issues with the platform and correctly identify what so many of us are looking for moving forward.

 

It boggles my mind that a real life pilot like Austin can’t easily see the massive deficiencies they still need to work on. 

 

That video really doesn’t make me optimistic for the future for XP.

 

And this is not the place for it, but this is exactly why many of us were excited to see that new Microsoft announcement. At some point the waiting just is taking too long for certain core things...

 

...and we might be waiting for nothing if he doesn’t even understand what people see as large deficiencies still.

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It was clear to me from the Flight Sim Expo presentation that Austin is not interested at all in the same things for X Plane as most other simmers. He very well could be the smartest guy in the room, and his passion is in the physics simulation. That's not a bad thing. The fact that he is able to use XP to help model and design that eVTOL is pretty remarkable.  But his passion is clearly in that  project right now...and probably will remain so for the near future. I have a feeling people complaining about clouds are just a nuisance in his mind.

Edited by snglecoil
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Chris

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As far as I understood, we wouldn't even have PBR or any of the eye candy improvements if it wasn't for the other guys on his team pushing for it. Probably wouldn't even have begun the Vulkan conversion. We'd still be stuck with that drab, dull look of X-Plane 10 and a very well modeled PT-6.

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