1 hour ago, Sphynnx said:

......The popping in issue does not really bother me, tbh. I can live with it. 

 

 

 

Wow, I can't believe the popping and lod culling is something you can live with.  I'm the opposite. The colors and some blurriness at altitude etc is no big deal to me, but this culling and low lod is ridiculous.   I just landed at MSP and the terminals didn't pop in until a mile from threshold, half the terminals had no walls, none of the edge lights had orbs etc etc.  This is with LOD and Object sliders both set to 200.  Yes, the fps were great - very much improved -  only can happen when you don't render half of the objects needed to call it an airport.  Why bother.

Edited July 30, 20214 yr by irocx
spelling

There are some airports that have issues with this version, does that happen at every airport?
Hopefully people will soon recompile with a newer version and it will fix it (not sure).

I've only flown around 1 custom airport, the difference I see is the autogen quality and the clouds and grass. The grass is taller in some places and perhaps that's why it looks worse (Asobo changed the grass height). Asobo has not been 100% revealing in what they changed graphic wise, so they didn't change LOD culling for custom buildings (we've established that), but they did make hardcore rendering changes, including to autogen and grass and clouds. The grass is actually NOT even the same size as before in many places, so people saying things look the same are not comparing at enough detail to see the differences.

As far as custom buildings, they look similar but I didn't test it in every fashion. As far as why autogen doesn't look as clear, I don't know what they did to it yet, still messing with resetting some things. As far as grass and clouds, they flat out changed the way they are rendering them.

Edited July 30, 20214 yr by Alpine Scenery

1 hour ago, Alpine Scenery said:

There are some airports that have issues with this version, does that happen at every airport?
Hopefully people will soon recompile with a newer version and it will fix it (not sure).

 

My issue posted earlier @ MSP was a stock Asobo airport - I'm assuming they already have the requisite 4 LOD's in their models and have recompiled using the latest SDK.  

To not ever see the side walls on the wings of the Lindbergh terminal while stationary for 20 minutes on taxiway W @ W7  tells me LOD restrictions might be tad too aggressive and need some tweaking.  Hopefully long before SU6 months away.......

 

Edited July 30, 20214 yr by irocx

2 minutes ago, irocx said:

My issue posted earlier @ MSP was a stock Asobo airport - I'm assuming they already have the requisite 4  LOD's in their models and have recompiled using the latest SDK.

Interesting, I don't know what they changed, because they aren't clear about that stuff. They say one thing and then it's really something else, which has happened in at least half the updates they've given. They were on a roll about 3-6 months ago with several good updates, then the last 2-3 updates started going downhill from a dev perspective anyhow. Things started becoming increasingly difficult, then they got better, now they are back to excruciatingly difficult again.

 

1 hour ago, Alpine Scenery said:

As far as grass and clouds, they flat out changed the way they are rendering them.

Yeah, though to be honest the changes may be more related to all the performance whining going on from people on low end machines  then anything to do with XBox per se. I have a mid range system (older 9900K and a 3070) and was happily pulling 60 FPS at 1440p.

REGARDLESS --- whereas previously when recording videos you used live weather or a cloud preset to improve the look and immersion of videos it looks like now you may need to use "clear skies" for video making.

 

BEFORE - Typical realistic looking Ultra Clouds BEFORE the SU5 patch:

AFTER - Cartoony new Ultra Clouds AFTER the SU5 patch:

 

Edited July 30, 20214 yr by Glenn Fitzpatrick

4 minutes ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

Yeah, though to be honest the changes may be more related to all the performance whining going on from people on low end machines  then anything to do with XBox per se. I have a mid range system (older 9900K and a 3070) and was happily pulling 60 FPS at 1440p.

REGARDLESS --- whereas previously when recording videos you used live weather or a cloud preset to improve the look and immersion of videos it looks like now you may need to use "clear skies" for video making.

Typical Ultra Clouds BEFORE the SU5 patch:

 

Yah, well I have a mid-range PC compared to most, very fast CPUs (5600x - 5800x) and have 3 PC's here, but only with 2060-2080 cards. The 2080 isn't mine, borrowing it from a friend who had to go overseas. They all worked fine before the patch and the patch was unnecessary IMO. Even the 5600x + 2060 was fine to be honest, a bit laggy in the largest 5 cities, but that's about it. So be it, to each their own though.

 

Edited July 30, 20214 yr by Alpine Scenery

4 minutes ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

Cartoony new Ultra Clouds AFTER the SU5 patch:

 

Look at the clouds in the distance right at the start of the timestamp you gave.

Just now, Concodroid said:

Look at the clouds in the distance right at the start of the timestamp you gave.

In the second clip?

That is the point, super high contrast almost like a painting or an anime.

Not at all realistic compared to before the patch.

3 hours ago, Sphynnx said:

They look oversaturated, there is no more self shadow, but green and magenta.

The self shadow I can prove wrong. Yes, taken with SU5.

9 minutes ago, Alpine Scenery said:

Interesting, I don't know what they changed, because they aren't clear about that stuff. 

 

You know and I know that many 3rd party scenery devs are perplexed and not very pleased.

To me it looks like a classic case of "if too many users on low end machines insist on pushing the sliders all the way up and then complaining about performance - lets limit the available high end options to keep the complainers quiet" .

7 minutes ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

To me it looks like a classic case of "if too many users on low end machines insist on pushing the sliders all the way up and then complaining about performance - lets limit the available high end options to keep the complainers quiet" .

Could be I guess, but I don't like to speculate what people are thinking when it comes to such a large team of people, I mean sometimes its just they weren't all on the same page.

My guess is they had a specialized team of programmers for optimizing for the Xbox, and then Asobo or Microsoft's idea was since they are optimizing for XBOX, why not also use the team to make the PC version faster. I agree in the sense I doubt it was an "intentional hit job" for a console, but more of a we can kill 2 birds with 1 stone kind of thing. I just wished they used 2 stones and didn't try to kill any birds 🙂

I think they just went too far, as you can see their plan is to force LODs eventually (so it appears), but it's the wrong plan. If they want to fix the LOD issue, they need to make the compiler auto-generate the missing LODs in advance, so we don't have to do it ourselves, just like UE 5 does and some other modern game engines now do. That saves a ton of time, the auto-gen lods might not always be as good performance-wise, but it's better than having 1 LOD. We aren't AAA developers, most people are 1-5 man teams here, a few are larger.

Edited July 30, 20214 yr by Alpine Scenery

3 minutes ago, Alpine Scenery said:

Could be I guess, but I don't like to speculate what people are thinking when it comes to such a large team of people, I mean sometimes its just they weren't all on the same page.

There is also the vast difference in what people think "looks good".

As an ex-photographer the new oversaturated, over contrasted, clouds look like something out of one of those kitsch Chinese knock off oil paintings of horses running in front of a thunderstorm. 

However if you go to any wallpaper download site you will often find most of the scenic wall paper available also looks like that. Apparently people find oversaturated unnatural scenery pleasing? probably because it has more impact? who knows?. 

Now that may be fair enough for wall paper but surely a flight sim is attempting to be realistic ?

I think a lot of people are very temperamental and take the game all emotionally, so if something isn't quite right, they try to ignore the shortcomings until it gets to the point of maybe CTD's where they cannot play. So a lot of people get angry in here if you point out problems with the update, but to me the frustration of it is because they get so close to having a great system, but then they mess up by 1-2 design decisions.

For instance, the MS store lacking a decent order history and no country filter, I mean that should have been done by update # 2. It's like some of the priorities are so weird, the smallest things they can do to make the experience so much better are overlooked, and instead they go for gargantuan complex tasks to improve things in areas that may not even be that bad.

 

2 minutes ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

To me it looks like a classic case of "if too many users on low end machines insist on pushing the sliders all the way up and then complaining about performance - lets limit the available high end options to keep the complainers quiet" .

 

4 minutes ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

To me it looks like a classic case of "if too many users on low end machines insist on pushing the sliders all the way up and then complaining about performance - lets limit the available high end options to keep the complainers quiet" .

I haven't posted here for ages - but I've read at Avsim and elsewhere everyday.  I expected better from you Glenn.  The majority of the complainers I've read about here and elsewhere, are of the type with high end machines and GPU's screaming "Please, let me use my expensive hardware."  Even with my rig I advocate to Asobo - bring it on - let me burn my rig with your sliders and I will build a new one when necessary.

In my case, with my lowly [email protected]/1080/24gb machine running 1080, I was blown away by the performance when I finally tried the sim in January - solid 30 fps on high/ultra.  The visuals were fantastic too. Nirvana.  Now.   I can do 50-60 fps easy and rock solid 30 everywhere most high and ultra, but after the latest patch the popping and culling simply ruin the experience.  Not worth the FPS increase.  Could very well be my FPS are great, but I don't have the cores and threads.

But, I thought that's what those sim settings sliders were about - so an experienced simmer could configure the sim to meet their system's needs -  in lieu of a forced reduction of visuals for everybody.