next gen scenery, Austin Meyer

[HiFlyer 9,333]

1 hour ago, miguel88 said:

well unfortunately l I cant see xplane 12 reaches close to fs20 cause the budget and team resources that Microsoft have will be impossible to come close to xplane team, competition is always good but  thiese are very different companies

Well, and also Laminar is slower than molasses in winter.

How many known issues have languished forever, like ATC? I've seen Asobo/MS fix things in weeks that experience has taught me to expect Laminar would not get around to in years.

Good luck competing, with that being the case.

[tweekz 2,165]

10 hours ago, Kopteeni said:

They would need a huge investment in infrastructure and staff. I don't think it's realistic until the required tech becomes more mainstream and available.

Given the small dev team and considering their history, it's not reasonable to think they'll try to compete with the streaming / AI technology.

To put this into perspective:
Last year live weather was broken for about a month or so because the provider changed from http to https. Imagine what problems may arise with infrastructure in the scale of MSFS.

What's reasonable?
I think they will redo their graphics (scenery and weather) + more accurate landclasses.

Edited May 30, 2020 by tweekz

[Murmur 3,940]

Hopefully Laminar will do good competition. Better for anyone. There are still many unknowns for the upcoming future about the sim landscape. VR? Performance? At least this time around, LR have a valid excuse for the seemingly slow development of XP, i.e. the switch to Vulkan. But they won't have excuses for XP12.

[Theboot100 404]

I think the biggest drawback Xplane has is any engine changes it does for performance or visual reasons needs to support a ton of legacy add-ons.

[mp15 138]

I love Xplane, AMD and Planemaker.

[Ops Normal 57]

With what i've seen so far, xplane isnt too far behind. it needs Global scenery and fixing the constant weather draw and re-draws and you could probably compare the two sims screenshot by screenshot. 

[Kopteeni 819]

52 minutes ago, Ops Normal said:

With what i've seen so far, xplane isnt too far behind. it needs Global scenery and fixing the constant weather draw and re-draws and you could probably compare the two sims screenshot by screenshot. 

It's just those two features are the most demanding to implement. Consider MSFS where it's been a joint effort of a AAA game studio, Bing Maps + Azure cloud technology and a company specializing in reconstucting our world digitally. Also even after Vulkan is out of beta X-Plane will be stuck with OpenGL until X-Plane 12 is out. 

Edited June 1, 2020 by Kopteeni

[tweekz 2,165]

1 hour ago, Ops Normal said:

With what i've seen so far, xplane isnt too far behind. it needs Global scenery and fixing the constant weather draw and re-draws and you could probably compare the two sims screenshot by screenshot. 

Without streaming you will not get a decent depiction of real world scenery (pivotal for a realistic VFR experience and nice to look at with IFR approaches). What it can do is look nice graphically and approximately similar to the real world.

Sure, there is Orbx, but you have to be lucky for it to be available in your favorite place + if you fly around a lot chances are that a lot is actually not covered. With MSFS you have decent scenery on a global scale.

Edited June 1, 2020 by tweekz

[bonchie 2,305]

Frankly, I lost hope in Austin actually delivering this stuff a long time ago. ATC? Still broken. Weather? Still broken. Clouds? Still terrible. Ground handling? Still awful.

These are issues that have been going on since the release of XP11. Now he's going to deliver "next-gen" scenery at some unspecified time in the future? Color me skeptical. How about just fixing the sim itself so people can enjoy Ortho4XP at least?

[evaamo 549]

4 hours ago, bonchie said:

Frankly, I lost hope in Austin actually delivering this stuff a long time ago. ATC? Still broken. Weather? Still broken. Clouds? Still terrible. Ground handling? Still awful.

These are issues that have been going on since the release of XP11. Now he's going to deliver "next-gen" scenery at some unspecified time in the future? Color me skeptical. How about just fixing the sim itself so people can enjoy Ortho4XP at least?

While I agree that ATC, Weather and ground handling definitely need mayor focus, I'm not sure it's the same story when it comes to scenery. He should focus on fixing those items while "the community" (freeware and commercial) keeps improving the scenery situation.

I'm not in the FS2020 alpha, so I cannot comment how much of an improvement this new technology really brings to ATC and weather (although from the looks of it, weather and atmospherics in general look amazing). When it comes to scenery, it's even harder to know how places outside of Europe and the USA are treated by this Azure AI thing. X-Plane has relatively easy to use tools to develop scenery, and the concept behind the gateway (while far from a FlyTampa airport in terms of quality or detail) offers a much better chance of basic but updated coverage in comparison to P3D. 

On the other hand, if Asobo provides powerful tools and simplifies the process of scenery creation and creates some sort of "gateway" for keeping scenery/airports up to date, then this would help providing coverage to places where the high definition scenery is non-existent. I'm talking Africa, some parts of Latin America and Asia where I'm sure photogrammetry is out of the question. 

[tweekz 2,165]

10 hours ago, evaamo said:

X-Plane has relatively easy to use tools to develop scenery, and the concept behind the gateway (while far from a FlyTampa airport in terms of quality or detail) offers a much better chance of basic but updated coverage in comparison to P3D.

Consider that this mostly only covers airports. The scenery of MSFS does much more than that. It tries to create a decent model of the scenery everywhere. Trees, fields, houses. In real life you don't just realize streets, rivers and mountains, but also patterns of houses, trees and so on... MSFS tries to cover that.

And less important but a huge thing immersion wise. If you go bush flying and land on a field, you will acutally land on an area with dynamic 3D grass. 😄

Edited June 2, 2020 by tweekz

[Elwyn 67]

Got to admit, I was expecting Austin Powers, even it says Austin Meyers (what's wrong with me!) @5:30 I was expecting to hear "Ohhhh behaaaaive" 😁😁

[dongdongliushui 49]

I will keep supporting him. I appreciate his enthusiasm for VR.

[nickhod 425]

By "next gen scenery" I assume he means that, with more FPS capability due to Vulkan and continuing optimisation, the complexity of autogen and airport assets and be upped to match MSFS levels.

I'm pretty hopeful that X-Plane can be a good competitor to MSFS. We need competition in the market.
Laminar has been slow in the past, but MSFS seems to have lit a fire underneath them. Would we have the Vulkan beta in our hands if it wasn't for MSFS? My guess is that it would still be in development.

FWIW I've been impressed by the latest Vulkan beta. VR is actually usable and pretty smooth. I can get 45fps in heavy Orbx scenery.

 

[Pastaiolo 1,686]

Video from April... we are in June. Also he said nothing yet relevant. We'll know more once they actually release concrete things. Ben mentioned reworked lighting back then, and it's likely noise generated clouds will also show up (unless they are so masochist, but even them aren't). At this point i see nothing to talk about but an old video with old generic information and just guessing game which leads nowhere