next gen scenery, Austin Meyer

[MatthewS 761]

Austin seems to have too many side projects...  If he just concentrated on X-Plane then maybe I'd believe him.

[Claviateur 789]

On 6/2/2020 at 4:42 AM, nickhod said:

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.

 

Vulkan is day and night compared to OpenGL but I was not sure after 4 years it was a wise decision to implement it in the 11.50. Many users built an ecosystem of addons and plugins through these years and now back to case 1 as if V11 was just launched back again... Vulkan in V12 would have been a better option in my opinion.

As for scenery or even the primitive weather, I think they will do something about it. In fact the "ideology" of LR changed since few years now and they start to see the simulator as a mainstream platform that should have visual immersion like other simulators... I think this started to happen after MS put FS on ice...

But you still have the old school "purists" who long for the old days of the simulator and I talked to few of those on the forums there. They think today the sim is just silly with the focus on visual... I concluded that they prefer to have a visualizer of flight dynamics... They are the engineers or plane builders and those who just want to create airfoils and preview them...

This is what the other sim was but then LR shifted it toward the mainstream and I suppose with MSFS they feel the need to make it up to date...

However I saw Austin in a video trying to teach users on how to take advantage of the plane builder tools that ship with the simulator... I thought they are reminding people about the strength of their solution and its initial purpose maybe... Virtual Plane building...

 

Edited June 3, 2020 by Claviateur

[Krakin 5,773]

On 6/1/2020 at 3:29 PM, evaamo said:

\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.

I'll give a little insight from my perspective at the risk of the police coming for me. I live in an obscure part of the world with no photogram coverage but when I load it up it is instantly recognizable. Topography is vastly improved over default FSX. It does a good job of trying to match building types and putting them in the right places. That's it from me lol this lines up with what Lionel said anyway so meh.

 

Going OT, maybe next gen means next gen in the context of what their engine can do. I just don't see how they'll be able to compete with what MSobo are doing. More resources are going into MSFS than they've ever committed in the series' history.

[jabloomf1230 2,445]

I'm always impressed at how LR manages to eke out improvements when it doesn't appear possible. But that said, I think that competing with cloud-based photo imagery is going to be a serious challenge for both them and LM. Although there are other purveyors of such global orthoimagery datasets, Microsoft and Google have the two most comprehensive versions that are readily available. MSFS obviously uses Microsoft Virtual Earth and it remains to be seen whether some other flightsim  will utilize Google Earth imagery in a comparable real time fashion. Without doing so, I doubt that the terrain in XP and P3d will look as realistic as what is available in MSFS. The ORBX True Earth packages look nice in their limited way, but the data requirements argue against each user relying on local storage.

[fogboundturtle 2,708]

Xplane is the only sim available on Mac/Linux. This is why Austin picked OpenGL in the first place and now Vulkan.  So I guess won't disappear anytime son but I think we will see a massive exodus once a few key addons are available in FS2020. 

Edited June 3, 2020 by fogboundturtle

[goates 576]

1 hour ago, fogboundturtle said:

Xplane is the only sim available on Mac/Linux.

Everyone always forgets about FlightGear.

[pmb 5,137]

55 minutes ago, jabloomf1230 said:

The ORBX True Earth packages look nice in their limited way, but the data requirements argue against each user relying on local storage.

Plus, ORBX TE being available for a few highly privileged regions in the world only. Sure, the US Pacific Northwest has been done to death in every sim and with every technology available. But make just a little step further North to Canada and the journey ends abruptly, in XP as well as P3D. 

Consider that endless pledge in the ORBX forums for OpenLC Asia, which will lead nowhere. And we're speaking about Landclass only, no one even dares to think of professional Asia Photo Scenery (and I am not talking about cloudy, color-mismatched home-brewn patches here). The only regional package for Japan - certainly one of the most influential countries in the world! - known to me is an obscure 12 years old LC-based FSX package still in "beta" with a Japanese readme. Russia just recently got Landclass Coverage which is not too bad but day to night compared to MSFS-class quality. And even photo ground imagery of DD Moscow in P3D as well as XP is quite poor.

MSFS will be a blessing for those like me wanting to go for VFR adventures not only in the Pacific US or UK but in Japan, Africa, Russia, and more.

Kind regards, Michael

[Dominique_K 10,149]

37 minutes ago, pmb said:

 

MSFS will be a blessing for those like me wanting to go for VFR adventures not only in the Pacific US or UK but in Japan, Africa, Russia, and more.

Kind regards, Michael

An excellent point.  The new planetary scope of FS20 makes it for me a really « next gen » scenery as much as its technological prowess. Vast areas which were ignored because the rentability was supposed to be less or lack of imagination or prejudice should be covered at last. 

 

[meerkat 86]

1 hour ago, pmb said:

.. Russia just recently got Landclass Coverage which is not too bad but day to night compared to MSFS-class quality. ..

Hi Michael,

sorry for hijacking this thread.

Do you mean The Sky Flyer Landclass scenery for Russia? As it is splitted into 7 parts it would be quite an investment to buy. Can you tell what is included (aside landclass itself) and if you could recommend it?

Then, there's a severe lack of airports in Russia. Just today I found a large pack of aiport sceneries on avsim.su (68228-scenery.zip), sadly without any description. It seems to be a worldwide collection, including some 700 Russian airports (ICAO codes starting with U). I'll test it.

Cheers

[pmb 5,137]

2 minutes ago, meerkat said:

Hi Michael,

sorry for hijacking this thread.

Do you mean The Sky Flyer Landclass scenery for Russia? As it is splitted into 7 parts it would be quite an investment to buy. Can you tell what is included (aside landclass itself) and if you could recommend it?

Yes. I own three parts of the European part. It is notably better than ORBX OpenLC EU but it's just that - landclass. No POIs or such. If you're interested, it's on sale from time to time. Sorry, no more detail, as this really deviates from the thread.

Kind regards, Michael

[tweekz 2,165]

@Krakin

Wait what? Are you in the Alpha? Glad for you if so! 😉

@Claviateur

Good post. I basically agree but would like to point out that even after XP took the casual simmers road, they are still word not allowed slow at walking it. 😉

[desbean 357]

On 5/30/2020 at 4:34 AM, 767lover said:

Could the xplane team pull that off and even better?

Unless they have servers all over the world that can serve up over 2 petabytes of data on demand I kind of doubt that they will be able to match FS2020 scenery, but I am rooting for them.

[Krakin 5,773]

7 hours ago, tweekz said:

@Krakin

Wait what? Are you in the Alpha? Glad for you if so! 😉

 

Yeah they let me in right after I said I didn't care anymore lol

[tweekz 2,165]

3 hours ago, Krakin said:

Yeah they let me in right after I said I didn't care anymore lol

Great. You've always been a positive guy, you deserve it! Glad that you seem happy with it as well. 😉

[HiFlyer 9,360]

17 hours ago, goates said:

Everyone always forgets about FlightGear.

And Aerofly FS2 😺