Wouldn't it be nice if there was some kind of road map for X-Plane development? The only way right now to get a vague idea of what they're working on is reading the comments section in the X-Plane dev blog. If it wasn't for that I wouldn't know they're working on some kind of alternative for clouds (entire weather engine?). And then there's Austin's random comments about "Ultimate scenery" whatever that means. MSFS is about to set the bar high in both of those departments.

Edited June 19, 20205 yr by Kopteeni

14 minutes ago, Kopteeni said:

Wouldn't it be nice if there was some kind of road map for X-Plane development? The only way right now to get a vague idea of what they're working on is reading the comments section in the X-Plane dev blog. If it wasn't for that I wouldn't know they're working on some kind of alternative for clouds (entire weather engine?). And then there's Austin's random comments about "Ultimate scenery" whatever that means. MSFS is about to set the bar high in both of those departments.

Not if it stutters it’s not. 

4 minutes ago, Ianrivaldosmith said:

Not if it stutters it’s not. 

Yeah we'll just have to wait and see. Stutters in flight sims is a huge immersion killer, no matter how pretty it looks. I would hope that both X-Plane and MSFS would reach that stage. It's certainly looking promising with Vulkan X-Plane.

Edited June 19, 20205 yr by Kopteeni

6 hours ago, Kopteeni said:

Wouldn't it be nice if there was some kind of road map for X-Plane development?

Generally presented at flight sim conferences and in their Q&A sessions once a year.

Currently they are still basically at the tail end of

Microsoft pysops got the last Q&A pulled, Ben did an interview for FSElite back in Jan that covered a lot of it (before COVID locked the world down)

https://fselite.net/originals/fselite-interview-laminar-research-x-plane-11-vulkan-and-more/

6 hours ago, Kopteeni said:

MSFS would reach that stage

Its probably the most egregious of the large number of well known limitations of DX11 and OpenGL 4.x, so I wouldn't hold your breath.

6 hours ago, Kopteeni said:

Stutters in flight sims is a huge immersion killer

And gives you motion sickness/headaches in VR. AKA Why those who have XP11.50 up and running are so overjoyed with it.

Edited June 19, 20205 yr by mSparks

32 minutes ago, mSparks said:

Generally presented at flight sim conferences and in their Q&A sessions once a year.

Currently they are still basically at the tail end of

Microsoft pysops got the last Q&A pulled, Ben did an interview for FSElite back in Jan that covered a lot of it (before COVID locked the world down)

https://fselite.net/originals/fselite-interview-laminar-research-x-plane-11-vulkan-and-more/

Its probably the most egregious of the large number of well known limitations of DX11 and OpenGL 4.x, so I wouldn't hold your breath.

And gives you motion sickness/headaches in VR. AKA Why those who have XP11.50 up and running are so overjoyed with it.

I've seen beautiful and fluid games implemented with DX11 so sorry can't really jump on that doom and gloom dx11 band wagon you seem to be riding on.

I just today completed a flight on the latest Vulkan XP and Reverb and overjoyed is not the correct adjective here. Promising? Sure.

59 minutes ago, Kopteeni said:

and fluid games implemented with DX11

with a maximum view distance of 5 miles - yes.

flight sim has a minimum view distance of like 10 miles, 250km at FL350, which is a whole different ballgame.

The way DX11 games get around the limitation is loading screens, often done since the days of Quake I as elevators between levels.

Edited June 19, 20205 yr by mSparks

17 minutes ago, mSparks said:

with a maximum view distance of 5 miles - yes.

flight sim has a minimum view distance of like 10 miles, 250km at FL350, which is a whole different ballgame.

The way DX11 games get around the limitation is loading screens, often done since the days of Quake I as elevators between levels.

Sure, flight simulators come with their own set of challenges. It comes down to managing what gets rendered and when and at which LOD. Having a massive amount of small things to render far away from the camera also means that you can get away with all sorts of simple tricks when you're rendering these things in. Also the worlds in flight sims don't require a massive amount of dynamic interaction with the player.

At the end of the day it's not more challenging than developing a AAA fps game. It's just a different paradigm.

On topic again: UWXP 2.6.1 around Annecy, France:

Edited June 19, 20205 yr by soaring_penguin

18 minutes ago, Kopteeni said:

It comes down to managing what gets rendered and when and at which LOD

Which is something openGL and DX11 simply do not support, in exactly the same way Metal doesn't support the openGL bridge required for XP11.50 weather engines to run on metal. It doesn't matter how much the developer wants or tries to get around the limitations caused by DX11 / OpenGL abstracting away managing GPU resources, the only solution is DX12 or Vulkan (as also recently seen with P3Dv5 aiui) which don't do that abstraction.

14 minutes ago, soaring_penguin said:

UWXP 2.6.1 around Annecy, France:

Better to use imgur.com to embed images here, I can't see these

Edited June 19, 20205 yr by mSparks

48 minutes ago, mSparks said:

Which is something openGL and DX11 simply do not support, in exactly the same way Metal doesn't support the openGL bridge required for XP11.50 weather engines to run on metal. It doesn't matter how much the developer wants or tries to get around the limitations caused by DX11 / OpenGL abstracting away managing GPU resources, the only solution is DX12 or Vulkan (as also recently seen with P3Dv5 aiui) which don't do that abstraction.

Better to use imgur.com to embed images here, I can't see these

Well, if on launch day msfs turns out to be a stutter fest I really don't know if I should laugh or cry. At least it's gonna be a nice screenshot generator as we've seen from the weekly updates. Then we'll just wait for another year when they migrate to dx12 in case MS has not already lost interest in the project and pulled the plug. 

Sorry for the offtopic btw.. I'll stop now.

1 hour ago, soaring_penguin said:

On topic again: UWXP 2.6.1 around Annecy, France:

could you do a with/without. Because Im pretty sure these are screenshots of default clouds.

4 minutes ago, Kopteeni said:

I really don't know if I should laugh or cry

Always best to just laugh, crying sucks.

Interesting. 

Im running ASXP with SMP+RWC and so far I've been pretty happy.  I tried UWXP v2.6 and wasn't satisfied.  There's also a few bugs present that caused me to steer clear.  I havent tried 2.6.1 yet though.

bouncing off the walls waiting for his exams to finish.....

lol