On 1/29/2021 at 7:07 PM, Janov said:

And for those who can´t wait for updated scenery - maybe try this one?

...

How on earth does Armin manage to push out all these updates so quickly...?

X-Europe/America/etc. is great and all, but only ever really shines with orthos, which in turn take time to be generated and use up a whole lot of disk space. But good for a quick fix to get better roads and buildings nearly anywhere.

 

19 minutes ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

However in real life this doesn't always work so smoothly, as camera parameters have limited precision. This means temporal reprojection can't always keep up with the camera motion, which results in ghosting or grain artifacts. This is why MSFS sometimes has grainy clouds. This is one of the main issues I experienced with Enhanced Cloudscapes - camera parameters exposed by X-Plane are extremely low-precision, preventing proper temporal reprojection. You can try it yourself - using Enhanced Cloudscapes Controller, set skip_fragments to 1. You'll see the amount of ghosting and other weird artifacts. This wouldn't be an issue if the clouds were built directly into X-Plane, as it would be possible to choose an arbitrary camera precision.

Thanks so much for your reply. I am a great admirer of you work with regard to Enhanced Cloudscapes.  What I don't understand is why there is such an enormous FPS hit not just with your mod but with x-enviro and symaxpro even with a miserably restricted cloud draw distance. The clouds in MS2020 seem to have little impact? Is this just because they are integral to the sim rather than just being plugins? 

7 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

The clouds in MS2020 seem to have little impact? Is this just because they are integral to the sim rather than just being plugins? 

Yes. This allows Asobo to optimize things a lot better than third party developers. It can also be attributed to their skills - their temporal reprojection implementation seems to be almost rock solid, which is something really hard to get right.

Edited January 30, 20215 yr by BiologicalNanobot

10 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

why there is such an enormous FPS hit

running AA?

at high resolution?

AA upscales the image by "X times" then scales it back down to get cleaner (colour shaded) edges - that means EC (and likely XE) has to copy around "X-Times" as many pixels into the framebuffer - an already slow task. Actually rendering it is orders of magnitude faster - and as BB said, is wasteful to do every frame.

My solution was to turn AA off, then use SteamVR rendering resolution for the same effect with virtually no GPU time hit.

What is your GPU time? your "5 fps gain" from Vulkan came from using less CPU time, next gen graphics consume GPU time, the two are not connected in virtually any way.

Edited January 30, 20215 yr by mSparks

13 hours ago, jarmstro said:

That seems very low to me? Especially with regard to the number of third party developers. Would they bother with such a small user base?  The forecast for MS2020 sales is 3.5 million and rising.

MSFS sales passed 2 million in December. Since the holidays and all it has probably already surpassed 3 million, or 3.5 million by now. They are getting about 2 new add-ons every day. Their steam charts have easily climbed past XP. Like it or not that's the facts.

2 hours ago, Bjoern said:

How on earth does Armin manage to push out all these updates so quickly...?

X-Europe/America/etc. is great and all, but only ever really shines with orthos, which in turn take time to be generated and use up a whole lot of disk space. But good for a quick fix to get better roads and buildings nearly anywhere.

 

OMFG this is good

 

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

OMFG this is good

The textures are low res 480p, PS2 style. The autogen are basic too. You need to compare to other sims. You are way too easily impressed.

Edited January 30, 20215 yr by Greazer

4 minutes ago, Greazer said:

The textures are low res 480p, PS2 style. The autogen are basic too. You need to compare to other sims. You are way too easily impressed.

Maybe he could try the same flight in MFS, using one of its helicopters... Oh wait you can't do that! 🤣

31 minutes ago, Murmur said:

Maybe he could try the same flight in MFS, using one of its helicopters... Oh wait you can't do that! 🤣

He would need to install windows first 😀

1 hour ago, Greazer said:

You need to compare to other sims.

I've asked for someone to show it in MSFS, feel free to excite me, Dobanovci heliport to the west of LYBE to the right of the two water towers, so far they seem to be too ashamed, I doubt they could even find it if the water towers are missing.

1 hour ago, Greazer said:

The textures are low res 480p

For a couple of reasons, first, Lvl16 ortho means I can fit the entire world on a single nvme drive, second so they sit happily in VRAM and fps doesn't get hit moving them in and out, but mostly, because at VR resolutions you couldn't really tell if they were higher

also

32 minutes ago, peroni said:

He would need to install windows first 😀

^^

And from what I've seen so far I would rather pull my eyes out with a fork than let windows anywhere near my hardware to send my documents folder off to the mothership for inspection or let some disgruntled ex MS employee encrypt and hold all my files to ransom..

Edited January 30, 20215 yr by mSparks

5 hours ago, Greazer said:

MSFS sales passed 2 million in December. Since the holidays and all it has probably already surpassed 3 million, or 3.5 million by now. They are getting about 2 new add-ons every day. Their steam charts have easily climbed past XP. Like it or not that's the facts.

If anything, your outlandish posts, comments and unproven, sourceless statistics, provide endless entertainment, and always bring a smile to my face.

I'm genuinely curious, though.  Because of MSFS passing X-Plane in sales, what then?  What would you like to see happen after that?  What kind of response are you looking for?  Many of us have already said MSFS kills X-Plane in the scenery department and eye candy.  What else are you looking for?

 

Edited January 31, 20215 yr by GoranM

8 minutes ago, GoranM said:

If anything, your outlandish posts, comments and unproven, sourceless statistics, provide endless entertainment, and always bring a smile to my face.

Interesting idea though.

If Laminar launch the next version of Xplane on both PS5 and XBox series X, pretty sure I know who nets the biggest profit.

3 hours ago, mSparks said:

OMFG this is good

 

Even minecraft is doing shadows these days... 

Ok, yes, that was rude and provocative, but it's to illustrate a point.

On a post about the future of Xplane, I think its fair to prod LR at least in this department.  What you don't want to be is Kodak in the early 2000's, or a film camera exclusivist, who poked fun at the digital camera revolution claiming that digital cameras would never achieve the quality of film.  To deny that MSFS has pushed the bar forward is to risk the same obsolescence that occurred in the photography world.  Xplane holds an edge in the flight model and avionics department, but that gap is closing pretty quickly.  Laminar is a great company and xplane is a great sim, but that shouldn't be an excuse for anyone to put our heads in the sand and deny what is happening in the sim world.  There are youtube channels starting everyday from pilots (not "gamers" which is always used in the derogatory sense here for some reason) that are using MSFS.  A neo 320 pilot has been posting these lately.  The A320NX mod keeps getting better and better and features a custom flight model that is getting higher marks these days.  The point here is that If a bunch of freeware modders can do it, its a bit of a stretch to think that it will forever be out of reach from the likes of a team at PMDG for example.

This is NOT a bash X-Plane.  I love the sim and still read every blog post from Ben and Sydney on the website.  I just think the dismissive attitude towards potential competition is dangerous in that it allows the "other side" (if that's your perspective) to continue to gain ground whilst the fans remain unaware.  I think quite a few of the criticisms against MSFS in its current state are justified, but there are several here who take it to a somewhat factually incorrect extreme.  It does not have a "hopeless flight model", or "completely broken avionics".  There are bugs, but its still getting 75-85% of it right.  Those who cling too tightly to the hope that xplane's superiority in these ares will forever be an insurmountable hill, are the ones most likely to be found someday still holding on the canisters of 35mm kodachrome film wondering where everyone went...

To me, as an enthusiast for BOTH sims (and DCS for that matter), I think threads like this should more passionately and constructively prod LR to retake some ground, especially in the scenery department.  It cant hurt, can it?

26 minutes ago, VFXSimmer said:

To me, as an enthusiast for BOTH sims (and DCS for that matter), I think threads like this should more passionately and constructively prod LR to retake some ground, especially in the scenery department.  It cant hurt, can it?

Maybe, if it weren't for a couple of trolls who keep infesting this forum, threads like these would be more constructive, and XP users wouldn't have to resort to point out the deficiencies of MFS to reply to the trolls.

Also, apart from a couple of persons, I think most here are acknowledging that MFS looks better and that XP needs (and already needed for some time) some serious advancements in several visual features.

Also, I don't think anything posted here has any effect on future LR decisions. They probably rarely or don't even read these forums. Feedback on features using the ad-hoc website, or direct feedback/suggestions via the usual contact channels, is more useful.

Finally, trolls like Greazer are not interested in seeing XP improve, that's why the only sensible response is ridiculing them.

 

Edited January 31, 20215 yr by Murmur

1 hour ago, VFXSimmer said:

Even minecraft is doing shadows these days... 

Even minecraft is also doing real time ray tracing, dynamic lighting and global illumination too. But it's clear all this stuff is not coming to XP anytime soon.