30 minutes ago, jcomm said:

Regarding ASOBO and MFS, it should be noted that they're actively cooperating with most freeware / payware developers and bringing code changes and including  requested features at a pace never before seen in the MS FS franchise !  

Well - they have to, because they need all the help they can get to maybe turn their game into a flight simulator 😂.

Laminar is just as open and communicative with their freeware/payware developers, but in general the interaction needed is fairly small, because you don´t need to beg the devs to implement this or that to make good aircraft of scenery.

Go ahead and write an email to Asobo Microsoft and ask them to implement one of your pet pieves and see what kind of response you get, Jose?

5 minutes ago, Janov said:

 

Go ahead and write an email to Asobo Microsoft and ask them to implement one of your pet pieves and see what kind of response you get, Jose?

I just did Jan, and am awaiting the reply - I asked:

- Hey, please, give me an FDM at least as good and fully featured as X-Plane's !...

:-)

2 hours ago, jcomm said:

I just did Jan, and am awaiting the reply - I asked:

- Hey, please, give me an FDM at least as good and fully featured as X-Plane's !...

🙂

Don´t forget to sign my name under that!! 👍

4 hours ago, Murmur said:

I'm perplexed by your post, nobody here is saying that X-Plane is perfect, and you suggest that it is not open enough to modifications by  3rd parties, while it actually is the most open and modifiable flight sim of them all! Especially compared to MFS which is way more locked down...

Did not want to say that at all. X-Plane is great and open. But some things cannot be done by third party. 

If Ben hesitates about such an important thing the next best reaction would be to make it an option. And, no, I do not want to click with the mouse. I want to zoom whenever the mouse wheel is rotated AND the right mouse button key is pressed at the same time. Just like it is when looking around. And, by the way, the mouse button for that should also be configurable.

My first fight with LR was my claim that it is impossible to decently land a plane in XP 11.0X (don't remember the X). I asked anybody to show me one good landing, and nobody did. I just got the usual landing advices from the book. I filed a bug on LR and got an answer that essentially told me I am crazy. Of course, this issue is now fixed perfectly by adding ground effect to XP, and fixing the code that places planes to the ground. I am just telling this so that you know why I am a bit reserved about a developer for which I have much respect in many other areas. I am glad X-Plane exists, and I live to experience it. It is just so that it could be so much better with just a little more attention to the details.

I hear you @flyingpauls !!!

Many moons ago once, I believe at the .org, or maybe flightsim.com I don't recall exactly, maybe by the times of xp5, I was complaining about some problems with instruments in X-Plane, and Austin got really mad at me and posted something like: "José has nothing to do !!!"... Poor Austin...

With age and experience Austin has turned into a very funny guy to watch in youtubes, and for sure a respectable developer and creator of what I consider to be the Best  Generic Civil Flight Simulation available for the PC. No where near, at least for now, can MFS get, even with all the bells & whistles... and helicopters haven't yet come to play... Honestly MFS looks & tastes to me like War Thunder in comparison to IL2 and DCS... and I did play and even got more addicted to it than I ever had to IL2 and DCS ! But, flight dynamics and core systems wise it's playground compared to X-Plane.

I strongly believe XP will continue to be the best option in the future for more precise flight & systems simulation, and I really look forward for XP12 announcement... Until then , I'm on ww2 in DCS 😁

Edited January 13, 20215 yr by jcomm

Why should LR consider code given by users? Does _any other_ commercial (i.e. no open source) flight sim integrate user-made code in their products?

And the customization of most features (views etc.) possible in XP, seems to me to be about on par with other sims, and actually greater in some areas. 

Regarding flight models, criticism is always valid, but it seems to me that it's never been so rapidly improved as it's happened in the last couple years, with many changes since the experimental flight model has been rolled out. That's why I find it curious that those criticism are raised right now.

Of course it's still not perfect (e.g. poor post stall behaviour), but maybe XP has the "least bad" flight model of default aircraft, compared to other civil flight sims. In the recent betas, I find them finally enjoyable in most aspects, something that was not true for past versions (even in 11.xx). Not to mention helicopters, with which a comparison with FSX/P3D/MFS is not even possible.

What bothers me most are visual aspects, in which it's lagging behind: weather, lighting, scenery, etc. And I'm also bothered by things like inaccurate transition at twilight or inaccurate ephemeris, so I hope they will be (at least partly) solved in XP12. 

 

6 minutes ago, Murmur said:

Regarding flight models, criticism is always valid, but it seems to me that it's never been so rapidly improved as it's happened in the last couple years, with many changes since the experimental flight model has been rolled out. That's why I find it curious that those criticism are raised right now.

Thinking back on it, the transition from XP10 to XP11 was particularly hard I think.

XP10 had the C172 plus a couple of others flight training ready, but anything else was really more experimental.

When XP11 came along, everything broke (it wasn't so much the flight model as converting aircraft from XP10 to XP11 wasn't seamless), not even the C172 was really fit for purpose, there was (and still is to some degree) a lot of aggression thrown at anyone just trying to get a handle on why (and what things did work)

It was quite late in the XP11 run that it started to become common knowledge (and I think a lot of people still do not realise it) that any time FPS drops below 20 the flight model explodes, this wasn't really an issue in XP10 which on even very low end hardware was difficult to get below 20fps. I wasted literally weeks trying to solve problems that were simply caused by times of sub 20fps.

Then XP11.30 came along, and everything broke again.

Definitely not a fun 3 or 4 years. MSFS hasn't even begun that journey, their SDK isn't even version 1 yet......

_____

Now there is 11.51

Flight model is pretty much rock solid, you can enter real values into plane maker and get nearly perfect flight characteristics for most aircraft (few caveats aside), issues are well understood, there is the new awesome plugin admin to help developers and users identify rogue 3PD code nixing their install. 

Plus they are mostly out of the quagmire that was openGL and all the problems that came with it.

There is finally hardware on the market for a fairly affordable price capable of consistent 60fps minimums in VR - I can flight sim again (VR completely ruined 2D for me)!

My recommendation for anyone with a longer XP history is to look on it with fresh eyes, install some high res ortho for your home airport, and get to know whats there again.

 

 

 

 

 

15 hours ago, mSparks said:

but still, the situation is that right now, there doesn't seem to be a practical way to keep mac graphics on par with windows and linux, and there are big question marks (at least from where I stand) over when or even if it becomes practical.

My understanding is that Vulkan/Metal is the only futureproof option for keeping the rendering engine multiplatform capable without some dirty hacks. Not considering that the engine rewrite is still quite recent, the main roadblocks for a complete transition away from OpenGL is the lack of Vulkan support on Intel's iGPUs and lack of a Vulkan API for plugins. I hope that the latter will

 

10 hours ago, flyingpauls said:

Point missed again. I do not want to sell my skills and ideas. I give them away freely. Like almost all software I do, by the way. I get paid sufficiently.

"Sell" was meaphorical. But my point remains: If you're looking for some flightsim coding opportunities to apply ideas and somesuch, Flightgear is always a good option.

 

10 hours ago, flyingpauls said:

The point is that LR would not even consider my code for e.g. correct astronomical representation of sun and moon if I gave it to them for free.

Mildly understandable because maintainability is a bit of an issue with third party code.

But since there are working plugins that use shaders to render volumetric clouds and rain, I would not consider a sun/moon and star rendering plugin completely impossible.

 

10 hours ago, flyingpauls said:

Here is another example: I wished I had the option to zoom only with the right mouse key pressed, just like when looking around, in X-Plane. It is the most logical thing to do. It would prevent a lot of annoying problems with dials. You cannot do that with any amount of programming from the outside. It has to been in the LR code. But LR did not even react to that suggestion. X-Plane is perfect, isn't it?

X-Plane's devs mostly or almost exclusively code on Apple products. And guess what Apple products lack...

This might be doable by plugin though, considering that there is already one that blocks mousewheel zooming.

3 hours ago, Bjoern said:

My understanding is that Vulkan/Metal is the only futureproof option for keeping the rendering engine multiplatform capable without some dirty hacks. Not considering that the engine rewrite is still quite recent, the main roadblocks for a complete transition away from OpenGL is the lack of Vulkan support on Intel's iGPUs and lack of a Vulkan API for plugins. I hope that the latter will

There is an assumption that metal and vulkan are feature equivalent, in the conversation with Sid I showed this isn't true, in fact it is really "known" not to be true because:

https://developer.x-plane.com/article/plugin-compatibility-guide-for-x-plane-11-50/

Quote

For plugins like this, X-Plane 11.50 offers a new 3D drawing phase as part of the XPLM 302 SDK: xplm_Phase_Modern3D. For technical reasons this drawing phase is not available on Metal and only runs on Vulkan and OpenGL!

Quite how limiting the other "because Apple went their own way" technical reasons end up being does remain to be seen

So there are two reasons for no EC on mac.

First, EC requires GLSL4.5, and mac only has GLSL4.1

And secondly, metal is broken in ways that prevent them from even exposing the necessary bit of the graphics pipeline. 

Beyond that, mac only supports "Metal Shader Language", which no one ever used for nice graphics ever (at least as far as I can tell).

Edited January 13, 20215 yr by mSparks

20 hours ago, mSparks said:

There is an assumption that metal and vulkan are feature equivalent, in the conversation with Sid I showed this isn't true, in fact it is really "known" not to be true because:

https://developer.x-plane.com/article/plugin-compatibility-guide-for-x-plane-11-50/

Quite how limiting the other "because Apple went their own way" technical reasons end up being does remain to be seen

So there are two reasons for no EC on mac.

First, EC requires GLSL4.5, and mac only has GLSL4.1

And secondly, metal is broken in ways that prevent them from even exposing the necessary bit of the graphics pipeline. 

Beyond that, mac only supports "Metal Shader Language", which no one ever used for nice graphics ever (at least as far as I can tell).

Meh. This does not bode well for direct drawing support in Vulkan.