21 hours ago, OSM said:

Look, for X-plane I made for myself 1,5 TB ZL17-18 orthoimages, each adjusted with Photoshop and 150 GB World2XP overlays based on the latest OSM data for the US South. I know what does it mean "spectacular". For the USA Bing images the worst source. Goggle images much better. 😀

Did you do this for the entire world?

4 minutes ago, cobalt said:

Did you do this for the entire world?

No! 😄

Only for US South

 

Edited November 28, 20205 yr by OSM

Well, that's a start -- it amounts to about 1% of the world's land area (The entire U.S. is about 6%). Let us know when you've done the other 99%.

37 minutes ago, akita said:

It's not being personal, I find this type of behavior childish.

I am not comparing between platforms, this is an MSFS forum so I discuss stuff that might be good for MSFS.

When I want to discuss stuff for x-plane, I go there and I badger about how much I would love to see x-plane a ray tracing simulator under Vulkan.

You, for some reason, are under the impression that I care what you fly. Constantly trying to derail me to a MSFS VS P3D VS XP discussion.

Read Again: The main bottleneck for real time simulations including the need to render 100nm terrain, is the cpu. as long as MSFS is DX11 you might be true. DX11 is a very multi-core limited API (2-4 cores), this is why IMO dx12 will be no less than crucial for the future of MSFS. dx12 provides the foundations and safe for threading and can scale to as much cores as you need, but they will still need, after moving to dx12, work on multi-threading to actually use the benefits.

But this all not that related to trees, since obviously a tree that is 5nm away do not need to be rendered in full detail, there are many possible optimization that can be done, it is widespread in 2020.

So, as I said, MSFS regardless of the fact that it's a big + in the graphics department compared to xp11/p3d, still leaves to be desired.

 

The topic of this whole thread is about MSFS as the future of flight simulators and that P3D and XPlane are put in a tough spot if 3rd parties stop developing for them.  So I'm well within the topic of this thread to compare MSFS to XPlane and P3D.

It's fine if you say that MSFS can still get better in graphics, even though it is a whole generation (ie. 10 years) more advanced than XPlane's and P3D's graphics and it really shows.

It appeared earlier that you were kind of defending XPlane's trees compared to MSFS's trees.  If you aren't defending XPlane's trees, then that's more reasonable.  Perhaps we both agree that XPlane's trees are really bad.

To be honest though, from a graphics perspective, I find the trees to be one of the strengths of MSFS, from the perspective of a flight simulator, and I think there are other graphical flaws with MSFS that I hope can be improved.  For example, many of the auto generated roads aren't very good at all (the photogrammetry roads are good though). While I give the trees about a 10 out of 10, some of the auto generated roads can be made much better and I would give some of the auto generated roads about 3 out of 10 (there is a whole thread about the auto generated roads being green sometimes, and the auto generated roads are sometimes not sharp and the texture is pretty poor).  

23 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

The topic of this whole thread is about MSFS as the future of flight simulators and that P3D and XPlane are put in a tough spot if 3rd parties stop developing for them.  So I'm well within the topic of this thread to compare MSFS to XPlane and P3D.

It's fine if you say that MSFS can still get better in graphics, even though it is a whole generation (ie. 10 years) more advanced than XPlane's and P3D's graphics and it really shows.

It appeared earlier that you were kind of defending XPlane's trees compared to MSFS's trees.  If you aren't defending XPlane's trees, then that's more reasonable.  Perhaps we both agree that XPlane's trees are really bad.

To be honest though, from a graphics perspective, I find the trees to be one of the strengths of MSFS, from the perspective of a flight simulator, and I think there are other graphical flaws with MSFS that I hope can be improved.  For example, many of the auto generated roads aren't very good at all (the photogrammetry roads are good though). While I give the trees about a 10 out of 10, some of the auto generated roads can be made much better and I would give some of the auto generated roads about 3 out of 10 (there is a whole thread about the auto generated roads being green sometimes, and the auto generated roads are sometimes not sharp and the texture is pretty poor).  

That's cool 🙂

Edges of roads are mainly due to tessellation, maybe asobo can crank up the max settings of it, gpus can handle a lot of triangles.

I think the greenish roads are due to there color corrections for the imagery, another thing i am not a fan of lol.

Edited November 28, 20205 yr by akita

26 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

The topic of this whole thread is about MSFS as the future of flight simulators and that P3D and XPlane are put in a tough spot if 3rd parties stop developing for them. 

Hmm, thats odd. Didn´t Mr.Kok explicitly say that X-Plane addons are selling well? Where did X-Plane suddenly get thrown into the same sinking boat that P3D is in?

Here is the quote:

"X-Plane users are still remarkably interesting as they keep on buying add-ons. Do not be surprised to see X-Plane add-ons being made, they simply sell. "

So even if there is a lot of disdain towards X-Plane here and a lot of folks would LOVE if it were to kneel down before MSFS and then wither...but it looks like it won´t. And even Mathijs is saying that the add-on market isn´t indicating it will anytime soon 😋.

30 minutes ago, Janov said:

Hmm, thats odd. Didn´t Mr.Kok explicitly say that X-Plane addons are selling well? Where did X-Plane suddenly get thrown into the same sinking boat that P3D is in?

Here is the quote:

"X-Plane users are still remarkably interesting as they keep on buying add-ons. Do not be surprised to see X-Plane add-ons being made, they simply sell. "

So even if there is a lot of disdain towards X-Plane here and a lot of folks would LOVE if it were to kneel down before MSFS and then wither...but it looks like it won´t. And even Mathijs is saying that the add-on market isn´t indicating it will anytime soon 😋.

The implication that I got from Mathijs was that there is a coming storm for X-Plane too.  That is the tone that I derived from his overall writing.  Of course, this is my interpretation of his writing so of course everyone will have a different interpretation.  It wasn't explicit in his writing, it was implicit in my interpretation of it.  What Mathijs did say explicitly is that P3D sales have dropped off drastically for Aerosoft while XPlane sales are still enough for Aerosoft to make a profit.  But one thing Mathijs didn't say explicitly is that he sees a bright future in X-Plane sales, only that in the meantime, X-Plane sales are enough to justify new products for it.

Again, I go back to the case of Blackberry when IPhone was released back in 2007.  Blackberry did not succumb in 2007, or even in 2008.  But the writing was on the wall for Blackberry.  After enough time, Blackberry eventually failed and exited the mobile phone market.  It didn't happen immediately, but it did happen eventually though.  And I don't doubt that X-Plane is looking at the same hurdles that Blackberry did back in 2007.  But maybe X-Plane will survive - who knows, only time will tell.

Edited November 28, 20205 yr by abrams_tank

Ah, ok - I didn´t read the whole thing he wrote, only the quote in the first post, so maybe I took that a bit out of the whole context.

You are right, time will tell. I think the Blackberry analogy is valid - however I think one factor needs to be highlighted: The iPhone did everything that Blackberry did and more  - plus it did it in an ergonomic and aesthetic way. MSFS is possibly more ergonomic and definitely more aesthetic - but it is far from doing everything that X-Plane does...and I don´t think it will in the next few years, either.

I believe MSFS will be the main sim for most of us in 5 yrs time....with that being said I still mainly fly P3DV5 with my other time divided between a certain beta environment and Xplane 11 for Helo’s in VR.

I have not stopped purchasing addons for P3D, especially if I can get them on sale (like my recent purchase of TE SoCal for P3D). I will be a little more hesitant for the big purchases though...like the recent Just Flight 146 professional. $85 usd, seems a bit harder to invest for me where 7-8 months ago I didn’t blink an eye dropping $100 usd on the Maddog.

Edited November 28, 20205 yr by CaptainNick

3 hours ago, Janov said:

So even if there is a lot of disdain towards X-Plane here and a lot of folks would LOVE if it were to kneel down before MSFS and then wither...

People would rather see X Plane improve in leaps and bounds like MSFS the last few months with 7 massive sim updates, 2 world updates and patch releases for critical bugs, and to witness known and annoying issues be fixed. They would also like to see XP put up some fight competition to MSFS so that both sims will flourish and compete for simmers. But what has happened to XP in 3 months, hardly anything, added logging, diagnostics and sort of half fixed the CTD issue. Oh yeah, plus the SpaceX video!  Must be watching youtube and not even working!  Not good!

Edited November 28, 20205 yr by Greazer
for SpaceX!

3 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

The implication that I got from Mathijs was that there is a coming storm for X-Plane too. 

Xplane never had a big commercial 3PD market, it was mostly freeware. There were a few payware planes and some scenery by Orbx, MisterX, etc...

The payware devs never got that big into it really, there were others of course, but compared to P3D it was more of a freeware thing.

So not sure what difference it would make anyways, even if Xplane addon sales slowdown, as they were never that high in the first place.

Edited November 28, 20205 yr by SceneryFX

7 hours ago, Greazer said:

People would rather see X Plane improve in leaps and bounds like MSFS the last few months with 7 massive sim updates, 2 world updates and patch releases for critical bugs, and to witness known and annoying issues be fixed.

I think X-Planers are happy that there is NO NEED for 7 massive sim updates and patch releases for critical bugs in the last few months 😉 (Yes, 2 world updates would have been nice!). But it is interesting to see how one can turn this into a good thing. Kinda like hitting your wall against the head and then enjoying the pain subside 😆.

The move to Vulkan has been a massive coding enterprise - with not really ANYTHING to see for the uninitiated - except for possible framerate and smoothness gains. The declared goal of Laminar was to make X-Plane Vulkan look EXACTLY like X-Plane OpenGl. Somehow this got lost on a lot of users. The move to Vulkan was sowing the seeds for a harvest still in the future.

That being said - the 11.50 beta was certainly a tedious affair - but lets not forget that there was a STABLE version always available and is to this day - and you can even go back to OpenGl if Vulkan still doesn´t work out for you.

I think the way that LR implements betas and patches and handles backward compatibility is someting that MSFS could take some pointers from (reading these forums).

Cheers, Jan

33 minutes ago, Janov said:

I think X-Planers are happy that there is NO NEED for 7 massive sim updates and patch releases for critical bugs in the last few months 😉 (Yes, 2 world updates would have been nice!). But it is interesting to see how one can turn this into a good thing. Kinda like hitting your wall against the head and then enjoying the pain subside 😆.

The move to Vulkan has been a massive coding enterprise - with not really ANYTHING to see for the uninitiated - except for possible framerate and smoothness gains. The declared goal of Laminar was to make X-Plane Vulkan look EXACTLY like X-Plane OpenGl. Somehow this got lost on a lot of users. The move to Vulkan was sowing the seeds for a harvest still in the future.

That being said - the 11.50 beta was certainly a tedious affair - but lets not forget that there was a STABLE version always available and is to this day - and you can even go back to OpenGl if Vulkan still doesn´t work out for you.

I think the way that LR implements betas and patches and handles backward compatibility is someting that MSFS could take some pointers from (reading these forums).

Cheers, Jan

LR have been iterating on X-Plane for over a decade, not three months. X-Plane's honor has been saved again.  The move to Vulkan was made to pay back some of the technical debt the software has accumulated over all of those years, and optimize for future development.  That isn't going to instantly make that aging codebase as efficient as a modern engine developed from the ground up, and any attempt to do that would also probably torpedo legacy support for XP's massive eco-system of add-ons people rely on.

Ironically, it's a similar problem to what Microsot have had with Windows - mounds of accreted technical debt, and having their hands tethered to the past by legacy support.  It's the price of success, and evolving a software project over many years.

Asobo have ~15x the number of people working on MSFS that LR have on XP for the forseeable future, not to mention all of the assisting departments at Microsoft (like Bing) and contracted third-parties that they have (like Gaya making some of their airports).  There's no way Laminar are going to be able to keep pace with that as a matter of sheer manpower, and Asobo aren't going to be standing still with MSFS, waiting for them to catch up to a similar level of visual fidelity.

MSFS is going through some frustrating growing pains as they try to stabilize and optimize the baseline experience - something that should've been done before releasing the thing, but I digress.  They have the resources, manpower, and it would appear the will and desire, to make MSFS a good sim for the sim crowd - not just a curiosity for more casual "gamers".  They've said this themselves.

Imagine where the sim will be in terms of polish and fidelity of the experience in six months.  And six months after that.  And six months after that.  With ~15x the workforce pounding away at it.  All the while add-ons continue to accumulate that expand the experience for dedicated simmers, and then the big 3PD airliners start rolling out.

 

22 minutes ago, Scottoest said:

... to make MSFS a good sim for the sim crowd - not just a curiosity for more casual "gamers". 

Hardcore simmer and casual Xbox gamer are paying the same $60, but casual Xbox gamers community much bigger than simmers. Perhaps, 3PDs, like PMDG, will make a consortium to create sophisticated SDK for the FS2020 Pro (PC version) for $150 for hardcore simmers market only.

Edited November 29, 20205 yr by OSM

It is worth remembering that the first Xplane was released in 1995 .