Xplane 11.50

[Old_As_Dirt 160]

Microsoft tried “Flight” a few years ago and it was pretty good - graphically - but they tried to make a game out of it instead of a simulator.  Bad mistake.  They shut it down and I lost it when I had a hard drive crash.  MS would not let me retrieve it after having purchased several of the updates including Alaska.  Done with MS!

[Paraffin 2,197]

12 hours ago, eaim said:

The trouble is, so is MSFS and P3D v5, LR needs to up their game to make sure they lose the least amount of simmers possible long term, this applies to potentially to Xplane and P3D  personally I want all my flight sims to be great and optimised.

Any "competition" with the new MSFS -- and I'm sure Austin doesn't think in those terms -- will be with the next version XP12, not improvements to XP11.

The new MSFS won't be public until, best guess, late 4th quarter this year. There is time for Laminar to figure out what they want to do with XP12.
 

5 hours ago, sanh said:

After they start buying addons for MSFS I cant see then shelling out for another sim that is trying to play catch up.

It's MSFS that will be playing catch-up for a year or two at least with the available aircraft fleet. As it stands now, there won't even be any helicopters in the initial release, a major strong point for XP11. 
 

3 hours ago, Old_As_Dirt said:

Microsoft tried “Flight” a few years ago and it was pretty good - graphically - but they tried to make a game out of it instead of a simulator.  Bad mistake.  They shut it down and I lost it when I had a hard drive crash.  MS would not let me retrieve it after having purchased several of the updates including Alaska.  Done with MS!

The new MSFS is being made by a different outsourced developer with ASOBO in France, in coordination with Microsoft for the world database and server back-end for streaming scenery. 

I can understand caution, based on their previous bail-out from FSX and what they did with Flight. But this really is a major new, serious effort. It will take time to build up from the GA planes they're starting with, but as someone in the MSFS Tech Alpha, I don't think I'm breaking the NDA by telling you that they're not kidding around this time. This isn't another MS Flight.

Edited January 31, 2020 by Paraffin

[GoranM 3,764]

To put it simply, don't make the mistake of writing off X-Plane, based on a few screenshots and videos of FS2020.  The X-Plane community, and the LR employees, have a living to make, and Austin is very loyal to his employees.  You can bet money that he's going to pull out all the stops to make sure X-Plane survives and can go head to head with FS2020.  In saying all that, I don't think it's a good idea if he shares what he has planned just yet.  As far as 11.50 is concerned, like I said, people will be very surprised with what has been done.  And it can only get better from there.  

Bottom line, X-Plane won't die.  Far from it.  The worst case scenario is it'll be a distant second to FS2020 IF (and that's a very big if) FS2020 can deliver.  

 

 

[jcomm 5,929]

And... flight dynamics wise, don't really be taken to believe they "discovered" anything new... quite on the contrary, and they're just debuting with it, while LR has been there for ages.

It can look gorgeous, but I really hope so will XP12, even more gorgeous and effective as never before running on Vulkan / Metal.

I have never really felt the hype, although I do expect to be positively surprised, but I'm not tricked to think everything will be just perfect ... 

It's good to have competition in the market nonetheless, and I surely hope Austin's team takes this chance to step forward and listen to stuff their users and the 3pds have long been asking for. Weather comes to my mind as it is on of my main focus after the flight dynamics.

 

 

Edited January 31, 2020 by jcomm

[tweekz 2,165]

7 hours ago, Paraffin said:

It's MSFS that will be playing catch-up for a year or two at least with the available aircraft fleet. As it stands now, there won't even be any helicopters in the initial release, a major strong point for XP11.

Helicopters only make up about 4% of the aircraft usage in XP. So while your argument is true, I don't think it has a great impact overall. http://dashboard.x-plane.com/#os-heading

I agree with the catch up regarding addon market. However, I could imagine some devs like PMDG are already working on something that could be out pretty soon after release. To me, the months after release it will mainly be a demo of the core tech. All the great stuff yet to come.

I'm sure I will use both sims parallel for a while. XP works fine for me. If they improve the performance, I am happy. But I will sure as hell also try out MSFS.

Edited January 31, 2020 by tweekz

[tweekz 2,165]

2 hours ago, jcomm said:

And... flight dynamics wise, don't really be taken to believe they "discovered" anything new... quite on the contrary, and they're just debuting with it, while LR has been there for ages.

We have to wait to know more. All I know is they were talking of slightly over 1000 simulated surfaces on a aircraft. If this turns out to be true and a competent dev makes use of it... holy mother ...

Edited January 31, 2020 by tweekz

[jcomm 5,929]

2 hours ago, tweekz said:

We have to wait to know more. All I know is they were talking of slightly over 1000 simulated surfaces on a aircraft. If this turns out to be true and a competent dev makes use of it... holy mother ...

Problem is, what to do with it...

Some platforms that follow a similar approach strive to find acceptable outcomes of their FDMs for ages, some fine tune them continually, some simply offer a compromise.

That's why sometimes a "table-based" approach can actually do a better job in nailling the numbers. That's why so many X-Plane aircraft I have tried are so out of sync with their RW specs.

Really will require at least a lot more of dedication, more than access to proprietary data as is the case with the other approaches.

I'm actually more interested in their approach to the weather modeling, because that could - so I hope - bring a new reference for other platforms too.

 

 

Edited January 31, 2020 by jcomm

[Colonel X 1,430]

Here's an interesting quote from developer Drzewiecki on Threshold X:

"The plan is to have the airports P3D-FS-XP-compatible, with all the features we had so far (including terminal/hangar interiors, detailed gates with vgds/jetways etc) plus new features that became available lately."

So, this is what I think ... in the longterm, most (airport) sceneries will be compatible between the two sims (after P3D died), or in other words, the same scenery will be available for multiple sims (hopefully, with little to none cost when you switch), so that entry cost of switching sims won't be as high as it is now. FS2020 will have a major advantage out-of-the-box for landscape scenery, and X-Plane will be ahead in airports (just can't beat the Gateway) and probably, flight dynamics/default planes. For XP12, I expect Laminar to be competitive in terms of weather/atmospherics, so the really interesting point will be how Laminar plays catch up in terms of landscape/city scenery. The current landmark approach will be all but too slow to keep up, and there needs to be some sort of "ortho" integration. Austin will probably have to invest here, in a major way. 

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

2 hours ago, Colonel X said:

For XP12, I expect Laminar to be competitive in terms of weather/atmospherics, so the really interesting point will be how Laminar plays catch up in terms of landscape/city scenery. The current landmark approach will be all but too slow to keep up, and there needs to be some sort of "ortho" integration. Austin will probably have to invest here, in a major way

I believe Austin is on record somewhere as hating the ortho approach to scenery. I remember that comment from years back, so it may have been partly due to the lack of coverage and high resolution at the time. I don't love ortho scenery either, mainly due to the artifacts like squashed cars and squashed buildings when scenery isn't carefully hand-edited like the Orbx TE packages. And even there, I sometimes see immersion-breaking artifacts.

Anyway, it's not really the default ortho terrain that's blowing everyone away with the new MSFS, because it's really not that good in areas where the only 3D objects are autogen. Even in the carefully selected preview images, it suffers from the same problem with squashed artifacts and color mis-match where two different images join together that we see with user-made orthos in XP11.

What's impressing everyone in MSFS is mainly the photogrammetry scenery with highly realistic 3D modeling and roof/facade imaging for buildings. And also the streaming server tech in the background, so you don't have to keep all that scenery on your hard drive.

Even if Austin decided to include default ortho scenery in XP12, he may not be able to afford the data for photogrammetry, or the servers to stream it. Because it sure as heck isn't going to fit on our hard drives the way we're doing it now. By the time Orbx finishes the West Coast USA in TE scenery it will probably take close to a terabyte (my WA state installation is 200 gigs). Ortho-based scenery is becoming a dead end unless you take the MSFS streaming approach, which also leverages photogrammetry areas where you don't need much hand-tweaking for it to look good (you do need some).

Looking into my own crystal ball, I think Laminar's approach to landclass + OSM scenery probably won't change with XP12. It will be enough of a heavy lift to program much better weather, integrated with procedural seasons.

If they are planning procedural seasons, that could integrate better with landclass scenery than an ortho approach. Especially if it includes procedural foliage as well, like deciduous trees dropping leaves in Winter, grassland/savannah drying out in Summer, etc. There may even be a performance advantage with that approach compared to what MSFS is doing, which could mean faster frame rates in VR. Or maybe not. We can't benchmark the performance of MSFS until it's optimized and released.

[Casualcas 830]

Xplane certainly won't die, but they do have alot of work to do if they want to be competitive with MSFS, or DCS. then again, what's their market? Flight training or general public? 

Excuse me, my C90 is yelling at me KMSY is coming up

[strider1 575]

3 hours ago, Paraffin said:

What's impressing everyone in MSFS is mainly the photogrammetry scenery with highly realistic 3D modeling and roof/facade imaging for buildings. And also the streaming server tech in the background, so you don't have to keep all that scenery on your hard drive.

No, what is impressing everyone is cherry picked previews!

[strider1 575]

7 hours ago, Colonel X said:

 FS2020 will have a major advantage out-of-the-box for landscape scenery, and X-Plane will be ahead in airports (just can't beat the Gateway) and probably, flight dynamics/default planes. For XP12, I expect Laminar to be competitive in terms of weather/atmospherics, so the really interesting point will be how Laminar plays catch up in terms of landscape/city scenery. The current landmark approach will be all but too slow to keep up, and there needs to be some sort of "ortho" integration. Austin will probably have to invest here, in a major way.

You are farely spot on. I don't think Austin is going to invest in any kind of Ortho, to expensive. And the quality of ortho is a mixed bag. As an example Orbx said "we have had four texture artists working round the clock to fix major colouring issues and missing data". FS2020 is not immune to this. Laminar just need to make their autogen and landscape scenery better! 

 

[Colonel X 1,430]

I didn't mean he must invest in ortho, but in some kind of scenery tech, maybe more along the lines of what Mister-X is doing. Like "plausible ortho". The current texture tech won't cut it in tomorrows sim.

[tweekz 2,165]

17 hours ago, Paraffin said:

Looking into my own crystal ball, I think Laminar's approach to landclass + OSM scenery probably won't change with XP12. It will be enough of a heavy lift to program much better weather, integrated with procedural seasons.

That seems like a given to me as well.

Streaming ortho data would mean continous costs. Plus you don't have the infrastructure and technology in-house, so you would be dependent on other companies. That would mean a 180 turn in philosophy for what LR stands for.

It will most probably be better autogen and more accurate landcalss files.

[zemez 184]

Some updated estimate from developers would be nice.