5 hours ago, peroni said:

What if LR and the developer reached an agreement? I bet the majority would be proud to get their work recognized and settle the deal without cash being exchanged. It would be a win-win for Laminar and the users.
The alternative is that the developer after some time loses interest and the add-on eventually dies

I don`t have any juristical background but I can say that the economical juristic section is a real dirty bussiness. Even if they make an agreement, that does not mean everything is OK for LR. Depending on situations, if someone changed his mind, there can be situations where the old contract can be overcome. It does become more difficult if the persons claiming for their money live in different countries.

Austin Meyer made a documentation about a lawsuit he received from a no-man company:

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sG9UMMq2dz4

The company that sued him had only mad financial interests. Austin Meyer had to invest 500 000$ just to defend himself on a thing that was clearly on his side. I can imagine LR just wants to have as less agreements as possible. After all they got better things to do, rather than working in the juristical bussiness or selling 3080 on Ebay. Every criminal starts small. 

4 hours ago, Paraffin said:

For me at least, the issues with weather revolve around the fact that we don't have a fully 3D weather system. I can't see a CB over there on the horizon before I get anywhere near it, and change my flight path to fly around it. Or be flying in clear skies and see an overcast cloud bank on the horizon that I gradually into, over, or under. 

Well, In the sense that a lack of a feature you (we) want is an issue I can agree.

But volumetric clouds have their own issues which are not particularly well done anywhere.

First, probably most importantly - getting reliable CB out of them isnt particularly a solved problem - you still need the air mass physics running underneath to drive them through their lifecycle.

Which comes into the next issue - good grief they are hard on the cpu (air mass physics) and gpu - (they are basically raytracing, so non RTX cards need not apply).

The work around to these issues is to "cheat" which brings on other issues - either nasty rendering artifacts or loss of the dynamism or view distance that made you want them in the first place.

Coupled with windows terrible support for multi threading - and the unfortunate need to support windows and what we have now isn't far off as good as it gets without limiting it to top of the line hardware and/or server style operating systems (i.e. Windows server or Linux or Azure).

Not that I'm criticising any of the efforts, Enhanced Cloudscapes is my daily driver, I much prefer them to default and work is ongoing to get rid of and minimise the issues, but truth be told the existing XP clouds do have less issues, at least for now. Question is, what issues are you willing to put up with? Prior to 11.50 anything but clear skies was unflyable for me due to the perf hit, but it still helped a lot to get my PPLH.

 

Edited October 7, 20205 yr by mSparks

I think some people may confuse "beautiful" clouds with good lightning.

With proper lightning, even low res models and low res clouds look 100x better.

1 hour ago, mtaxp said:

With proper lightning, even low res models and low res clouds look 100x better.

Yes, but lightning will only illuminate the clouds for a fraction of a second, so it is hard to see that they are looking better! But I am all for better lightning, maybe they can even implement how it strikes aircraft, sometimes?

2 hours ago, mtaxp said:

with good lightning

There are two, and only two ways to go "good" lighting

Send your models and textures off to a Linux render farm to prebake the lighting like the AAA studios have been doing for the last 10 or 20 years. Downsides, costs millions of dollars, consumes gigs and gigs of hard disk space and can only do a single time of day.

Or

Move the contents of a linux render farm to the local machine, aka, support RTX - Downside, RTX is still new so code needs a lot of investment, end user needs GPUs with RTX support (so no hope for MacOS)

Tyler has updated many requests with 'We're looking into this for the future' most of them are related to scenery, rendering engine and weather but also atc and multiplayer.

That's yet another confirmation of the direction the devs are going. Just one variable missing, when? 😀

Tyler's reply was as noncommital as it gets, but oh well, it's at least an acknowledgement.

Hmm Xprealistic up to 17,500 users I suppose that is a good estimate of the xplane base, also a testament to how few use steam.

1 hour ago, mjrhealth said:

also a testament to how few use steam.

worth bearing in mind that steam charts give "number of people using it now" rather than "number of people who installed it"

not really possible to go from one to the other, but as an example if on average every user that installed it flies for 1 hour a week, 1500 users every hour of every day would be 252,000 users who installed it on steam.

I seem to recall Austin saying in one of the discussions about 12 months ago there had been some 500,000 sales of xp11.

Edited October 17, 20205 yr by mSparks

Laminar couldn't care less about active users. It always was, is and will be about the number of sales because that's what finances X-Plane's further development.

Edited October 17, 20205 yr by Bjoern

1 hour ago, Bjoern said:

Laminar couldn't care less about active users. It always was, is and will be about the number of sales because that's what finances X-Plane's further development.

True - but in a way the number of active users is a good feedback to how much they like X-Plane and also an indicator of how many sales to expect for a future version. So while technically you are correct, I can guarantee that Laminar would care A LOT if active use (and they have sophisticated metrics on that: http://dashboard.x-plane.com/ ) dwindled towards zero now.

It´s a bit like the elections - technically it doesn´t matter if they like a politician except for the day they go to the ballots. In practice it doesn´t quite work that way.

Cheers, Jan

4 hours ago, Bjoern said:

Laminar couldn't care less about active users. It always was, is and will be about the number of sales because that's what finances X-Plane's further development.

3rd parties otoh care a lot, because inactive users don't find and buy addons.

For me, what bothers me is the ancient popping clouds issue. 

4 hours ago, beep747 said:

For me, what bothers me is the ancient popping clouds issue. 

Yeah, lots of us couldnt stand that so we fixed it ourselves.

 

I just purchase X-Plane 11 on the Halloween Steam sale.   What the hell was I missing?....X-plane-11 is not bad at all! especially the Zibo mod.   Since this is all new to me I'm like a kid in a candy store looking for freeware at Xp.org and boy there's a lot of nice freeware to choose from!....I'm in Flight Sim heaven now! 

Edited November 4, 20205 yr by egguzman