xEnviro 1.16

[CFIJose 5,485]

1 hour ago, Anxu00 said:

So does XEnviro worth a buy now?

I would wait for xAmbience Pro to be released this month. xEnviro can be amazing and I've already received enough joy to not regret my purchase. But, it can be hard on fps if you don't have a powerful CPU & GPU. It's been stable for me. No CTDs yet.

[sanh 823]

I think XEnviro is just trying to work within the limits of X-Plane. Even default 2d billboard overcast clouds would bring my i9700k down on 11.50 so not surprised their clouds have a sizable impact on performance.

MSFS clouds are superb and dont bring down framerates but even they have pixellation and some grain.

I think X-Enviro just need some support from the LR devs to get over the line but without a doubt they seem to be the most ground breaking weather product for X-Plane.

Edited April 5, 2021 by sanh

[Pugilist2 878]

16 hours ago, DJJose said:

I would wait for xAmbience Pro to be released this month. xEnviro can be amazing and I've already received enough joy to not regret my purchase. But, it can be hard on fps if you don't have a powerful CPU & GPU. It's been stable for me. No CTDs yet.

We will see if they release it this month? They have been throwing out release dates forever.

[Anxu00 176]

18 hours ago, mSparks said:

Bit like asking if a Ferrari is "worth" a buy. Its expensive, looks really pretty and you wont want to use it that often.

The only add-on in this "genre" at the moment is Skymax Pro 4.  I took a look at XVision, and now learned about xEnviro and now xAmbience Pro 😉 I guess I will wait or researching some more.  I only fly in VR so performance is important to me.  I skipped the 50% upgrade for Skymax Pro 5 after the review as "meh".  May be the only I need is XVision.

[Paraffin 2,197]

21 hours ago, Anxu00 said:

So does XEnviro worth a buy now?

Just my opinion but I wouldn't recommend it... unless you have enough money to also buy the competitors like SkyMax Pro, ActiveSkyX, and whatever else is out there for a full comparison.

That's the only way to make an informed decision about which weather add-on is best, because you have to fly them. You have to evaluate the performance on your hardware and at the flight altitudes and locations you prefer. The look of clouds at 35,000 ft. is very different from scud-running in mountain valleys. You can't just look at screenshots made by other people to evaluate these add-ons.

That's why I bought XEnviro when it first came out, as well as the other two mentioned above. As it turned out, I never use XEnviro because it has one glaring flaw for me, and that's not enough fine-tuning of injected weather. High storm winds make it impossible to fly light GA aircraft at certain times of the year in my favorite flying areas. The lack of fine-tuning for cloud base also makes completing flights in FSEconomy jobs difficult at times. 

What I ended up using is just ActiveSkyX with default clouds. For me, that's the best compromise with the fewest downsides, until Laminar gets off their collective butt and comes up with a better internal weather engine in a future version of the sim. 

And speaking of that, another consideration is that we may be getting near the end of the XP11 product cycle, with XP12 somewhere on the near horizon. None of the weather add-ons available now are guaranteed to work on the next version of XP, so it's not an ideal time to buy expensive weather add-ons. You might want to stick with free weather mods like cloud textures.

 

Edited April 5, 2021 by Paraffin

[mSparks 2,086]

37 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

SkyMax Pro

TLDW, not pretty, or realistic, probably worse than both XP and MSFS default clouds.

37 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

ActiveSkyX

Not volumetric.

 

 

[Paraffin 2,197]

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

Not volumetric.

(shrugs), Not the most important feature for me. I'm not as hung up on picturesque clouds as some flight simmers. I just want something reasonably close to the actual weather at the time, with enough fine grained adjustments to make the real weather flyable. Also smooth interpolation between METARs with no sudden jumps, especially on final, and no heavy hit on the frame rate. 

If I was hung up on accurate cloud depiction I wouldn't fly a sim at all. None of them currently model either the internal dynamics or the visual look of a towering CB or approaching weather front. 

[mSparks 2,086]

16 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

Not the most important feature for me.

"Volumetric" is what gives the clouds the capability to transform & transition in 3 dimension space. Non volumetric clouds (aka cloudart or 2D clouds) suffer all the same fundamental problems as default Xplane clouds do.

This stuff requires a volumetric cloud system

 

Edited April 5, 2021 by mSparks

[Murmur 3,941]

4 hours ago, Paraffin said:

None of the weather add-ons available now are guaranteed to work on the next version of XP

I very much hope that NONE of the present weather add-ons will be compatible with XP12, if you know what I mean. It would be worrying otherwise. 🙂

[mSparks 2,086]

1 hour ago, Murmur said:

I very much hope that NONE of the present weather add-ons will be compatible with XP12, if you know what I mean. It would be worrying otherwise. 🙂

I'm gonna say it.

I suspect anyone expecting XP12 weather to compete with XEnviro visually is going to end up just as disappointed as people were with MSFS.

I'm basing that on what we've seen with MSFS, P3D trusky,  XEnviro and Enhanced Cloudscapes.

Lighting, default scenery, plane API and a whole bunch of other stuff guaranteed.

But clouds... lets remember that trusky have carved a decent niche for themselves just doing cloud rendering well, and even that needed some extra special talent to do something good with (AC7).

And right now Laminar haven't even managed to fix the current SSAO implementation, tough job, but childs play compared with the magic and fairy dust required to get fully procedural volumetric clouds looking half decent at more than one frame a week.

Plus they are realistically starting from zero, because for anything more than:

clouds at height, CAVOK, VFR, MVFR and IFR

xplanes current weather implementation is not fit for purpose.

 

[Murmur 3,941]

11 hours ago, mSparks said:

I suspect anyone expecting XP12 weather to compete with XEnviro visually is going to end up just as disappointed as people were with MSFS.

I would be more than content if XP12 weather would look at least on par with FS2004 weather, albeit with the addition of volumetric clouds.

[mSparks 2,086]

3 hours ago, Murmur said:

I would be more than content if XP12 weather would look at least on par with FS2004 weather

The "trouble" I see, is that, on the one hand, what XPlane needs to do for its weather its actually not far off perfect

While on the other, actually putting in decent weather simulation and visuals is a humongous task that would need them to go back to square one for pretty much everything. 

This has to be their biggest dilemma, we've had decent hints that the art assets have had a lot of attention, lots of feedback on improving plane building further, definitely a lot of investment on the visuals and looks.

Absolutely nothing to suggest the weather in the next version of X-Plane will have remotely close to the investment needed to merge the current weather capabilities with something like the weather capabilities of XEnviro (and what they do is very very different) in order to deliver something good.

[CFIJose 5,485]

For whatever it's worth, I'm going to give my final judgement to xEnviro 1.16.

After testing for a few days, I can confirm that the add-on is not well optimized. Things I never saw in XP 11, I saw with xEnviro such as a loss of AG while flying to a destination airport and I even lost airports on arrival. This add-on has the ugliest clouds and performance goes down the tubes even with no clouds.

Thankfully I still have ASXP & xVision, so I'll survive. I posted some pics. This sim is now beautiful!

I will be beta testing xAmbience Pro in a week or so and I hope that this new weather add-on will be the weather add-on we so desperately need for XP11.

[mSparks 2,086]

4 hours ago, DJJose said:

loss of AG while flying to a destination airport and I even lost airports on arrival

not sure what this means.

4 hours ago, DJJose said:

performance goes down the tubes even with no clouds.

This is always going to be the case with all the volumetric cloud engines, the way it works is it is searching for where to draw clouds in 3D space, when there is no clouds to draw it has to search the entire space, when there is lots it can stop when it hits them.

4 hours ago, DJJose said:

This add-on has the ugliest clouds

This is the toughest part to call for me.

because they can all look absolutely beautiful, but when they don't it completely spoils it. Throw in the above perf limitations and perhaps its clearer why I don't expect similar in XP12.

2D clouds are much much easier to make look nice in 2D, full art control with the textures and no pesky math to fight that controls how they look.

The problem is, in VR, 2D clouds look very very ..... 2D

So bad that atm I'm back to flying CAVOK

I may try again when I get some time to modify EC and compact everything into a single cloud layer rather than 3, this should both improve its looks (make scattered clouds more variable in height) and improve performance (with the disadvantage of only one layer, but my reasoning is 1 is at least somewhat better than none)

My final judgement is that basically atm, there is no flight sim or flight sim addon that does cloud cover worth turning on.......

 

 

[CFIJose 5,485]

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

not sure what this means.

You are flying to a destination and when you arrive the Autogen Objects, Overlays, & the airport are not loaded. I thought that maybe xEnviro exhausted my hardware resources. I never had that happen before with ASXP.

Something occurred that I'll share. I lowered the AA to 2 and forgot about. Exited the sim and when I loaded it back I forgot that it was still set at 2AA. I loaded the sim and decided to check xEviro weather and the fps were pegged at 30. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Either XP 11.53 Vulkan needs to be restarted for AA to take effect or xEnviro is toying with me. 😀

The ground scenery was a little more shimmery, but fps were pegged at 30 for a while. There were only a few cirrus clouds.

Let's see if the fps drop again when clouds show again here in the Tampa Bay area.