P3D 5.1 Released

[B777ER 2,486]

48 minutes ago, micstatic said:

says in notes.  client only if you prefer

I would definitely clear out everything and go with a full clean install.

[alox 6]

Great news. Regards.

[Boeingnut 72]

6 minutes ago, Chapstick said:

How is EA VRAM usage now?

Mine went up an entire gig

[remcosol 39]

Must say i am not impressed with this release.......

Flashing clouds is still here and very annoying in "legacy"mode i.e. ea off.... ea on looks still the same to me to be honest, yes i read the thread above...

Performance on my i9 10900kf is a lot!!!!!! worse than on v5 hf2. ORBX true earth netherlands just became very annoying to use with a lot of stutters and flashing clouds....... very very very dissapointed

[mpo910 2,112]

This is very immersion killing and I really hoped for they would eliminate this. Pictures below with links!

Cloud pattern:

Ugly Cloud pattern  looking down from higher Flightlevels looking to a "quadratic raster".

Flying from cloud shadows into sunlight: 

Also the transition flying from "sun light pattern" to below darker clouds out of the sun is not smooth. In a millisecond it gets "dark", really dark. Like you "fly to a wall and suddenly the light went off.  

Flat cloud layer:

Also the "flat cloud layer" is simply annoying and still in there.

Haze/Transition:

Strange haze transition also flying into or out of the haze layer is not smooth. Like someone turned it on or off in a millisecond. 

Rain

No rain shafts, No realistic visibility reduction. Rain is almost not visible anymore. 

Cloud layers

Still it is not possible that layers can be mixed. the top of the lowest layer MUST be below the bottom of the higher layer.....not realistic at all.

Dawn/Sunset

White, Blue, Dark...that is it.....better as it was compared to Beta. But there are no nice looking sky colors at all!

Water/Ocean

Still annoying much to big waves at rivers, ocean even at FL 450!

Water is flattened out in distance. This looks catastrophic with sun reflection on it at sunset or dawn! Wow...just very bad implemented

Shadows

Cloud shadows are not following the contours of the clouds. They are just very low res, even at higher settings. Ugly shaped and not impressive at all.

Summary

I don´t want to be that negative...but It is my first impression. I really hoped for a impressive implementation with Truesky. This is nothing compared what is possible with truesky.

For me a no go! If this is the speed P3D will enhance, I probably will leave the train the next 6 to 9 months!

Cloud pattern

Next Ugly Cloud pattern

Edited October 28, 2020 by mpo910

[Biology 1,347]

In addition to the previous message I've sent...

I've just noticed this entry in the changelog: "Added VolumetricClouds.cfg to control various Enhanced Atmospherics cloud parameters". Could someone upload the VolumetricClouds.cfg to somewhere like Hastebin? My internet connection is quite slow and it will probably take hours for me to download the 5.1 update, so I would be appreciated. I really wonder what options are exposed and if there's a way to improve clouds even more.

Edited October 28, 2020 by BiologicalNanobot

[AnkH 2,267]

Ok, WHAT exactly is the reason they call EA not a Beta anymore, if most issues like objects shining through, repetitive patterns and those flickering edges around simobjects are still not fixed? Is this a joke?

[mikeymike 362]

😂 🍿 

[pgde 571]

44 minutes ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

As the developer of the freeware volumetric cloud add-on for X-Plane (https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/forums/topic/218819-enhanced-cloudscapes-freeware-volumetric-clouds-for-x-plane-11/), I really would like to mention a few things about the visual glitches people are mentioning:

Sadly, aircraft and other objects (including terrain) having pixelated / flickering edges issue will probably stay forever - it is an issue caused by lower-resolution rendering of the clouds. Basically, as our current GPUs are unable to render all pixels of clouds real-time, a compromise needs to be done.

It is possible to render less per frame and then use temporal reprojection to reposition rest of the pixels (which is what MSFS is doing). It is quite nice, but it also causes lots of noise / grain artifacts.

Another approach is to render clouds off-screen with a lower resolution - as clouds are inherently blurry, it is possible to get similar results while rendering a lot less pixels (which is what trueSKY is doing). However, this approach causes an issue with depth testing (hence the interaction with all objects) as the depth buffer is now also low-resolution. This creates pixel "gaps" and these gaps become visible once they are overlapped into the final high-resolution screen.

trueSKY tries to prevent this effect by using both high and low resolution depth testing passes with some edge detection magic (I might be slightly wrong, check out the trueSKY SDK for more details: https://docs.simul.co/programming/rendering.html - the "Mixed Resolution Rendering" part) but it is not 100% effective, so you still get these artifacts. My plugin has the exact same artifact, and iirc even xEnviro. In other words, this is a general issue with all volumetric cloud implementations and there's not an effective fix yet.

Sadly, it's the same with new rectangular pattern observable in higher altitudes. But I still believe further updates might be able to hide that effect a lot better than now.

This should be made a sticky!

[GSalden 4,657]

12 minutes ago, AnkH said:

Ok, WHAT exactly is the reason they call EA not a Beta anymore, if most issues like objects shining through, repetitive patterns and those flickering edges around simobjects are still not fixed? Is this a joke?

I do not have v5.1 installed yet, but I would like to know from others if these observations are correct or if they do not see them .....

[pgde 571]

12 minutes ago, AnkH said:

Ok, WHAT exactly is the reason they call EA not a Beta anymore, if most issues like objects shining through, repetitive patterns and those flickering edges around simobjects are still not fixed? Is this a joke?

Read the post above yours from BiologicalNanobot.

[kaha 205]

1 minute ago, GSalden said:

I do not have v5.1 installed yet, but I would like to know from others if these observations are correct or if they do not see them .....

I don't dare finding out.

Karl

[mpo910 2,112]

2 minutes ago, pgde said:

Read the post above yours from BiologicalNanobot.

I also read that. But in P3D it is MUCH more present compared to the other platforms which do support volumetric clouds. 

In P3D it is really heavy visible

[BWBriscoe 116]

So are people saying, don't update to 5.1?!

[remcosol 39]

there is almost no difference with p3dv5 / the beta, also without EA on the blue / white edges around the trees are still there, i am really struggling to see what they have been doing for the last 8 months

Edited October 28, 2020 by remcosol