9 hours ago, Greazer said:

Make proper environment engine (no sound "loop").

Not even going to bother with your other points, because, for the most part, they just don't make any sense, but how do you expect to have, for example, an engine recording, for potentially in excess of 12 hours, with no looping???

 

Edited January 22, 20215 yr by GoranM

52 minutes ago, GoranM said:

Not even going to bother with your other points, because, for the most part, they just don't make any sense, but how do you expect to have, for example, an engine recording, for potentially in excess of 12 hours, with no looping???

Procedurally generated environment sounds i.e. not a pre-baked loop that plays over and over again like a broken record.  

Why not ask for true artificial intelligence in modelled animals, that interact with the moving grass, vehicles, and people.  Even better!  People in cars driving through a fast food drive through.  How about rubbish that flies around with the wind?  

 

Edited January 22, 20215 yr by GoranM

2 hours ago, Greazer said:

Procedurally generated environment sounds i.e. not a pre-baked loop that plays over and over again like a broken record.  

Greazer is right! It should be easy. Just calculate the acoustic properties of the cylinders and engine, then simulate the air-fuel-mixture combusting, calculate the pressure-wave front bouncing of the engine parts, how it gets muffled and reflected inside the cowling, transfering vibrations and distortions to various parts of the aircraft and then finally how the soundwaves travel though the air and hit the users ear.

Certainly something a contemporary flight simulator should be able to do!

 

3 hours ago, Janov said:

Greazer is right! It should be easy. Just calculate the acoustic properties of the cylinders and engine, then simulate the air-fuel-mixture combusting, calculate the pressure-wave front bouncing of the engine parts, how it gets muffled and reflected inside the cowling, transfering vibrations and distortions to various parts of the aircraft and then finally how the soundwaves travel though the air and hit the users ear.

Certainly something a contemporary flight simulator should be able to do!

 

Don't forget to take into account the barometric pressure and temperature!

😛

3 minutes ago, GoranM said:

Don't forget to take into account the barometric pressure and temperature!

😛

My bad!!

29 minutes ago, Janov said:

My bad!!

And what about the flies buzzing around the cockpit or those nasty bugs as they squish on the wind screeen, oh it will never be any good, wasnt it supposed to die in 2020, there is a you tube video about it, I suppose that person may have to eat his hat...

7 hours ago, GoranM said:

Not even going to bother with your other points, because, for the most part, they just don't make any sense, but how do you expect to have, for example, an engine recording, for potentially in excess of 12 hours, with no looping???

His points were all pretty valid to me, so not sure what doesn't make sense here (and these comments are pretty tame criticisms based on his history). Regarding audio, maybe just make it less obvious it's looping.. I have a few planes that the looping is quite obvious, e.g. It will make a popping noise when it resets, and it's very off-putting. I can't comment on how difficult this would be to fix, but I accept it's an annoying problem that seems to affect quite a lot of planes. It's sad how often sounds are overlooked when making planes, I find it a huge part of the full experience.

 

40 minutes ago, tonywob said:

so not sure what doesn't make sense here

I shall indulge...

1. Fix the half finished Vulkan port and all the issues that currently exist. And fix performance to what it should be for Vulkan API.  We have multi core for about 15 years or more by now!

2. Fix all the previous Open GL issues and graphics bugs (sudden weather redraws, cloud flickering, jagged shadows, sudden brightness changes etc etc).

3. Fix HDR and make sliders to improve color, contrast, brightness and ability tweak the shader settings etc. Should not have to go after market for everything!

4. Make XP world look proper at ground level (grass, dirt, trees, animations, people). Make proper environment engine (no sound "loop").

5. Create a proper weather engine with seamless transitions etc.

6. Sync ATIS with (injected) weather and (injected) Traffic and ATC.

 

1.  Half finished Vulkan port??  They're constantly working on getting rid of device loss errors.  And they know it's caused by overclocking.  

2.  They can't fix what is natively in OpenGL.  OpenGL is very old and by todays standards, very inefficient.  Hence, the port to Vulkan/Metal.

3.  This one is just mind boggling.  If the colors are off, use the monitor calibration or graphics card control panel.  They're not going to add sliders IN SIM, and then risk people cranking up the saturation and contrast, then post pictures of X-Plane saying, "Look how great this looks" or "Look how bad this looks!".  Whatever setting they implement is what THEY think is right, and they're perfectly happy for that responsibility to fall on them.

4.  Really??  Detailed ground, dirt, grass, trees, people??  I would rather have the extra CPU cycles dedicated to important things that have to do with flight simming.  Not scenery simming.  I don't mind SOME resources dedicated to scenery, but grass and people??  

4.  I've already replied to that one.  And if an add on has a "pop", then it's on the developer.  If a default aircraft has a "pop", then file a bug report to Laminar.  They WILL fix it.  But there is absolutely no way around sound looping.  And to create procedurally generated sound, well, I'll refer you to Jan's post.

5.  I don't think this has been done ANYWHERE.  For seamless transitions, the weather injector/updater would need to update every SECOND.  However, having owned xavion, and knowing what is in there, and Austins announcement that he will be bringing that weather engine into X-Plane, there will be very little to complain about (apart from updates every second)

6.  Isn't it already?  

Most of these points will be taken care of/touched in the next version of X-Plane. I don´t know any details, but there is extensive work going on (as hinted by LR) with regard to graphics, including lighting and multicore.

LR will not divert extensive resources to stomp out remaining issues with OpenGL (or rather technical limitations) that Greazer mentioned.

Greazer has very "special" preferneces for flight simulation - I remember one of his top wishes to be the ability to change the outfit/clothing on ground personel... I rest my case.😂

Cheers, Jan

2 hours ago, GoranM said:

I shall indulge...

1. Fix the half finished Vulkan port and all the issues that currently exist. And fix performance to what it should be for Vulkan API.  We have multi core for about 15 years or more by now!

2. Fix all the previous Open GL issues and graphics bugs (sudden weather redraws, cloud flickering, jagged shadows, sudden brightness changes etc etc).

3. Fix HDR and make sliders to improve color, contrast, brightness and ability tweak the shader settings etc. Should not have to go after market for everything!

4. Make XP world look proper at ground level (grass, dirt, trees, animations, people). Make proper environment engine (no sound "loop").

5. Create a proper weather engine with seamless transitions etc.

6. Sync ATIS with (injected) weather and (injected) Traffic and ATC.

 

1.  Half finished Vulkan port??  They're constantly working on getting rid of device loss errors.  And they know it's caused by overclocking.  

2.  They can't fix what is natively in OpenGL.  OpenGL is very old and by todays standards, very inefficient.  Hence, the port to Vulkan/Metal.

3.  This one is just mind boggling.  If the colors are off, use the monitor calibration or graphics card control panel.  They're not going to add sliders IN SIM, and then risk people cranking up the saturation and contrast, then post pictures of X-Plane saying, "Look how great this looks" or "Look how bad this looks!".  Whatever setting they implement is what THEY think is right, and they're perfectly happy for that responsibility to fall on them.

4.  Really??  Detailed ground, dirt, grass, trees, people??  I would rather have the extra CPU cycles dedicated to important things that have to do with flight simming.  Not scenery simming.  I don't mind SOME resources dedicated to scenery, but grass and people??  

4.  I've already replied to that one.  And if an add on has a "pop", then it's on the developer.  If a default aircraft has a "pop", then file a bug report to Laminar.  They WILL fix it.  But there is absolutely no way around sound looping.  And to create procedurally generated sound, well, I'll refer you to Jan's post.

5.  I don't think this has been done ANYWHERE.  For seamless transitions, the weather injector/updater would need to update every SECOND.  However, having owned xavion, and knowing what is in there, and Austins announcement that he will be bringing that weather engine into X-Plane, there will be very little to complain about (apart from updates every second)

6.  Isn't it already?  

Just wanted to correct a few things:

1. Even though I wouldn't call Vulkan mode half finished, many people (even without overclocking) are reporting problems, so the fact that I or you don't have these issues doesn't mean everything is perfect for everyone.

2. These have nothing to do with OpenGL and how inefficient it is. Sudden weather redraws could be addressed by repositioning "impostor"s slowly. Cloud flickering is a common issue with most 2D cloud implementations, as positions of impostors keep changing relative to camera. However, X-Plane's imlementation definitely doesn't try much to hide this artifact. Jagged shadows also have nothing to do with OpenGL, it is caused by limitations of shadow camera resolution, which gets worse with sun angle. Sudden brightness changes could easily be addressed by using a better eye adaptation algorithm.

4. Detailed ground scenery is definitely possible with today's hardware, without hindering the "flight simulation" aspect. "Flight simulation" and "scenery simulation" are not mutually exclusive.

5. Active Sky does this really well, and running weather model many times per second definitely isn't necessary for it. Slightly delaying the results displayed on the simulator would allow smoothly interpolating between states.

I still think his points, especially the ones about weather are quite valid and would make X-Plane 12 a delight. Prepar3D aircraft had proper weather radar at least since v3, while X-Plane aircraft still use faked weather radars.

Edited January 22, 20215 yr by BiologicalNanobot

Thanks for all your input regarding this topic guys. 

X-plane seems so slick in comparison to MS2020 which I personally find quite clunky, especially since the all the Vulkan work. They have a great base to now really improve things, kick on and take it to the next level.

It will certainly be a delight to eventually see what they have been working on in the background

Good discussion, sometimes you need somebody like Greazer as long as the discussion stays civil.

About HDR and colors/contrast/brightness, an excellent solution would be to reach out nVidia and have them add support for XP in Geforce Experience for the ones that want to use it. Currently it just says XP is not supported 
The tool allows to change many aspects of the final image in real time and with extremely limited impact on the framerate.

Not sure if AMD have something similar.

Talking about Vulkan, i do remember something had been mentioned by Ben on the blog much prior to the Vulkan API release , it was regarding using multithreading under Vulkan and do remember Ben said that it won't be in XP11, the whole Vulkan engine would be released with XP12 , in a way Greazer is not right or wrong ,   i feel he wants all that in XP12 and not in XP11.  , it would be stupid to ask all that for XP11, i would want XP11 cycle to end now , but LR also needs to make money.

 Sound looping was terrible during XP10 , i haven't noticed that in XP11 payware aircraft , if it's in the default ones then one should contact LR. 

 About making excellent grass or the ground environment and the other ground visuals can be left to 3pd's  but this move would require LR to open up the engine to make all that work nicely which as of now it's fine but it's not great. 

The first priority of XP12 should be the visuals change that would include excellent wx / lighting. These two things alone would do a lot of good for X-plane.

Screw opengl that's the past , i wouldn't want anything with opengl in the new versions of XP.

I do not expect everything from LR in comparison to what MFS can do VISUALLY.  But they can be there half way.

Edited January 22, 20215 yr by HumptyDumpty

My 2 cents here as well, especially on something mentioned by others.

I completely agree on the fact that in 2021 flight simulation and "scenery" simulation goes hand in hand. What we want is an immersive product, and while flight dynamics wise i think we can be quite satisfied, a part of the immersion comes from the plausibility of the world we get to fly in.

Plausibility which is directly connected to a lot of simulation related decisions we, as virtual pilots, have to take. Take an example the need to avoid vertically developing clouds such as a cumulonimbus (hence avoiding icing and turbolence), watching how the wind is blowing over grass and trees to judge the direction of wind in preparation for landing in a small airfield or with a helicopter.

Did you think about any of those situations, @GoranM ?

Edited January 22, 20215 yr by Pastaiolo