X-Plane Webinar

[BostonJeremy77 519]

As an MSFS, P3D, and XP owner, I am very excited for the future of this sim after watching this. I really don't like sim wars. There is a place for all 3. Austin showed a lot of cool stuff and I really like his approach in not being redundant. Each of the 3 sims does something unique in their own way. We have MSFS for satellite imagery. But as it stands right now, it can't touch X-Plane in other things, such as IFR flight. I have unique aircraft in the 3 sims and really enjoy changing things up depending on my mood. 

We need X-Plane to stick around. And it will. There is no doubt in my mind that LR will put out another quality product and I couldn't be more excited about the new technology that will be the evolution of THIS sim. The trees today... man... that was phenomenal looking. 

On the other hand, as a relative newcomer to XP (started with MSFS, then invested heavily into P3D, and now also starting to get things for XP), I am apprehensive about buying anything new for it because a new version is around the corner that may not need certain things or those things might not be compatible. Right now I am eyeing XEnviro, SFD Global... things like that. But it might not make the best sense to get those. And of course, I am always looking for new aircraft. I might get some older Airbus and Boeing stuff - already got the only A350 for any sim (FlightFactor). Heard really good things about iniBuilds. 

[strider1 575]

I am not sure if I am excited for the new sim or diving Wreck Alley in SD if I decide to make the long drive to SD for FlightSimExpo 😜

[mSparks 2,086]

4 hours ago, Janov said:

and Austin has been given (and agreed on) divulging only about certain subjects in that interview.

of which im pretty sure divulging a date for the first beta was not included, but he just couldnt help himself 😁 Watching him impatiently bouncing around like a small child in the background was really entertaining tho.

Im really glad they finally "let" the marketing guy start and talk a bit. Austin tends to repeat himself too much and give things away he wasnt supposed to. 

I also found the "dont have a user in mind" kinda off - especially after the emphasis on commercial use and mobile - they clearly do have particular users at the top of the list, not admitting it isnt productive.

Edited July 30, 2021 by mSparks

[Biology 1,347]

6 hours ago, BostonJeremy77 said:

As an MSFS, P3D, and XP owner, I am very excited for the future of this sim after watching this. I really don't like sim wars. There is a place for all 3. Austin showed a lot of cool stuff and I really like his approach in not being redundant. Each of the 3 sims does something unique in their own way. We have MSFS for satellite imagery. But as it stands right now, it can't touch X-Plane in other things, such as IFR flight. I have unique aircraft in the 3 sims and really enjoy changing things up depending on my mood. 

We need X-Plane to stick around. And it will. There is no doubt in my mind that LR will put out another quality product and I couldn't be more excited about the new technology that will be the evolution of THIS sim. The trees today... man... that was phenomenal looking. 

On the other hand, as a relative newcomer to XP (started with MSFS, then invested heavily into P3D, and now also starting to get things for XP), I am apprehensive about buying anything new for it because a new version is around the corner that may not need certain things or those things might not be compatible. Right now I am eyeing XEnviro, SFD Global... things like that. But it might not make the best sense to get those. And of course, I am always looking for new aircraft. I might get some older Airbus and Boeing stuff - already got the only A350 for any sim (FlightFactor). Heard really good things about iniBuilds. 

Exactly what I am thinking. I am really tired of this neverending war between simulators, not even mentioning it is kind of pointless given that they all have the potential to give its users an extremely realistic experience, both procedurally (systems etc.) and aerodynamically, thanks to their add-on aircraft. In a sense, it is like consoles - they all are great, but each console has its exclusive games, making it unique for its users. Similarly I have all 3 simulators for their exclusive offerings - MSFS for PMDG DC-6 and upcoming modern airliners, P3D for modern airliners and X-Plane for classic airliners. I enjoy them all throughly. I expect things to be like that in the future too - people will likely use all platforms for their exclusive add-ons and therefore unique experiences.

Also as Austin said, there is no point in copying other simulators' approach - doing so would make X-Plane simply a copy of MSFS. Each simulator using different a approach means users will have choice, so they can go with the approach they like the most.

Lastly as an X-Plane developer I can safely say that feel free to purchase new aircraft. Unless they are abandoned, they will most likely quickly get updated to X-Plane 12. Based on what I know so far, transition to X-Plane 12, especially in terms of rendering gauges, will likely be straightforward. However I cannot say the same for visual add-ons, I have a feeling that Laminar might remove the OpenGL depth bridge (Modern3D callback), which might render add-ons like xEnviro completely incompatible.

Edited July 30, 2021 by BiologicalNanobot

[BostonJeremy77 519]

45 minutes ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

Exactly what I am thinking. I am really tired of this neverending war between simulators, not even mentioning it is kind of pointless given that they all have the potential to give its users an extremely realistic experience, both procedurally (systems etc.) and aerodynamically, thanks to their add-on aircraft. In a sense, it is like consoles - they all are great, but each console has its exclusive games, making it unique for its users. Similarly I have all 3 simulators for their exclusive offerings - MSFS for PMDG DC-6 and upcoming modern airliners, P3D for modern airliners and X-Plane for classic airliners. I enjoy them all throughly. I expect things to be like that in the future too - people will likely use all platforms for their exclusive add-ons and therefore unique experiences.

Also as Austin said, there is no point in copying other simulators' approach - doing so would make X-Plane simply a copy of MSFS. Each simulator using different a approach means users will have choice, so they can go with the approach they like the most.

Lastly as an X-Plane developer I can safely say that feel free to purchase new aircraft. Unless they are abandoned, they will most likely quickly get updated to X-Plane 12. Based on what I know so far, transition to X-Plane 12, especially in terms of rendering gauges, will likely be straightforward. However I cannot say the same for visual add-ons, I have a feeling that Laminar might remove the OpenGL depth bridge (Modern3D callback), which might render add-ons like xEnviro completely incompatible.

Yeah, I think I may do exactly that. I am kind of itching for the iniBuilds Airbuses cause I don't have anything like that in P3D or MSFS. I do have CaptainScam's Boeing 737, 757, and 767 though, so I think the next purchase will be a pre-320 Airbus. That should be fun as the only airliner I have in XP right now is the A350. 

Graphical mods... well... they can wait until XP12, I want to see what the stock sim provides. I do have Orbx TerraFlora which makes the trees better and that's enough for now. Honestly, I don't find the stock landscape to be as jarring as stock P3D... It's definitely passable. I MAY get a freeware mesh in the meantime. 😉 Though, like I said... I flew around LOWI a bunch and did a volcano exploration series with Kilimanjaro, Vesuvius, and Etna and they all look fairly respectable! I also did a flight around the Everest area and it looks fine to me. 😉 I didn't even do anything of the weather sort - I find the default live weather that updates every 15 mins to be OK for now. Gonna see what 12 brings and then go from there on expanding! 

Really happy to see I am not the only one who enjoys having all 3 sims and not descending into this neverending sim war nonsense. If we don't have competition where they push each other, everyone is bound to just sit in their comfort zone too much. Like the case with MSFS - it came out with amazing visuals. Great! Now Austin has to think "Well, what can I do? I don't want to go THAT route, but I gotta do something to make the visuals come up a bit, so what's MY angle gonna be?" And now we are starting to see some of that push. I will never buy the idea that he was NOT AT ALL affected by MSFS release - he comes off as a bright dude, he KNOWS he needs to do stuff. The question is... what's the approach? I think we are in a really refreshing environment in flight simulation. Lots of things on the move. I don't think P3D is gonna stop here either - they are gonna be at FlightSimExpo, I believe they might just bring some stuff to show too. In terms of MSFS, love it or hate it (I enjoy it a lot when it's not straight after updates), it reinvigorated the whole scene. And X-Plane out of the box? It's not gloom and doom at all! Like I said, I am flying JUST with TerraFlora right now and enjoying it. 

[Biology 1,347]

2 hours ago, BostonJeremy77 said:

Graphical mods... well... they can wait until XP12, I want to see what the stock sim provides. I do have Orbx TerraFlora which makes the trees better and that's enough for now. Honestly, I don't find the stock landscape to be as jarring as stock P3D... It's definitely passable.

As a long-time X-Plane user and a new P3D user, I experienced the exact opposite. If you are talking about autogen I completely agree, but I find default terrain textures in X-Plane rather unpleasant to look at and since seeing Orbx Global & Orbx openLC or even default P3D terrain textures, I just cannot stand default X-Plane terrain textures.

It looks like new generation X-Plane will receive updates in that regard too, so I am really excited for now.

For airliners in X-Plane, I definitely recommend FlyJSim 727, FlyJSim 737-200 and all three iniSimulations offerings. Upcoming Felis 747-200, Rotate MD-11 and ToLiSS A340 seem really promising too. When it comes to A320 series aircraft, I find FSLabs A320 better than anything available in X-Plane, so given that you have P3D I would not recommend another A320 series aircraft. While you have Captain Sim 757 & 767, I will still recommend Flight Factor 757 & 767, while they fall short on audiovisual aspects, they have really nice systems modelling.

If you are into GA with Garmin / Avidyne avionics, I recommend Hot Start TBM-900 and TorqueSim SR22 & SR20, they are easily the best GA aircraft available for X-Plane.

Edited July 30, 2021 by BiologicalNanobot

[akita 429]

Some quotes from the org by JustSid, about the new trees:

Quote

The trees are however completely done on the GPU. The tech makes heavy use of compute for culling and then dispatches a few indirect draws, extruding geometry on the fly in the shader as necessary. It does also run the animation in a shader, but it happens in the vertex shader. Essentially this is as fast it gets, since the GPU can just play all by itself without needing the CPU to do anything besides kicking everything off once. In theory this should use less or the same VRAM and be about as fast as the previous trees at the same density level than the previous tree tech. I spent a lot of time making this scale to millions of trees in the world.

 

Edit: Also for those wondering, this is an extension of the existing forest system as far as the scenery side is concerned. So old .for files still work, the file format just got extended to support 3D trees now. So existing scenery will pick up 3D trees when they use the existing trees. Tree replacement libraries can be updated to include 3D trees.

Quote

That statement is gonna come back to haunt me, isn't it? lmao

So uh, two things: As you can see in the video, density levels are higher (you give artists 2ms worth of speed ups and they'll figure out a way to make art that's 3ms slower... It's the engine programmers life). Additionally, this kinda assumes your GPU isn't fully loaded. Which, quite honestly, most GPUs running X-Plane just aren't. You don't need to sell your house to buy a 3080 to game under the bridge in order to get X-Plane to not hog every shader unit. Obviously rendering detailed 3D geometry is more expensive than like... not rendering it. Duh. It's just not that much more expensive in the grand scheme of things, and can be soaked by previously idle GPU times.

But what do I know?! After all this is posted from my 3080 from under the bridge 

 

All I'm saying, don't expect magic results from the 550 Ti you bought in 12th grade with money you made mowing lawns. But if you got decent hardware, you should not feel the trees. And if you do feel them, please remember that my name is John and I work at Johnson and Johnson.

 

Quote

I believe we'll have the option to have a billboard only mode for trees. It's not like the current trees that are two quads at 90 degree angle from each other, but a single quad that always faces the camera. That being said, you can also always throw the current forest scenery pack and throw out the new one. The new tree system can absolutely render old school trees (just better and faster).

That being said, I'd say it's a bit too early to lament the lack of options and loss of performance 

 

And just a little boost to my ego, I speculated an extension to .for files and photometric lighting in some comments a while ago so maybe...Ray Traced GI and tessellated terrain next?? LOL

Edited July 30, 2021 by akita

[Bjoern 1,153]

On 7/29/2021 at 8:26 PM, akita said:

4) A nice one that I caught: on the new jetways shots, there is a data ref for jetway animations, meaning we are probably getting moving jetways and ways to implement it out of the box.

I was wondering why Laminar would show off various jetway objects and this confirms my suspicion. Thanks!

 

On 7/29/2021 at 8:28 PM, tonywob said:

Austin seemed very reluctant to mention anything about it being called XP12, which I did find odd... I presume it will be a new paid version though, but I really hope it's not going down a subscription route.

Major releases for a one-time fee, continuous updates across major releases by supscription. Everybody's happy.

 

13 hours ago, Janov said:

As I said before, a subscription is not necessarily the more lucrative option for a developer. It does "smooth out" income a bit, and may also entice people to shelf out 2$ per month more easily than 60$ every 5 years...but at the same time people will cancel subscriptions much faster when they decide to not use X-Plane for a few months or if something more appealing comes along. So I personally doubt that XP desktop will go subscription.

A two-tier model seems to work for P3D though. For the developer subscription, continuous updates including major release jumps, more direct contact with the core developers and two licenses are the major perks, while for standard licensens, major version jumps require a new license.

But we'll see.

[mSparks 2,086]

3 hours ago, akita said:

And just a little boost to my ego, I speculated an extension to .for files and photometric lighting in some comments a while ago so maybe...Ray Traced GI and tessellated terrain next?? LOL

 

[BostonJeremy77 519]

3 hours ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

As a long-time X-Plane user and a new P3D user, I experienced the exact opposite. If you are talking about autogen I completely agree, but I find default terrain textures in X-Plane rather unpleasant to look at and since seeing Orbx Global & Orbx openLC or even default P3D terrain textures, I just cannot stand default X-Plane terrain textures.

It looks like new generation X-Plane will receive updates in that regard too, so I am really excited for now.

For airliners in X-Plane, I definitely recommend FlyJSim 727, FlyJSim 737-200 and all three iniSimulations offerings. Upcoming Felis 747-200, Rotate MD-11 and ToLiSS A340 seem really promising too. When it comes to A320 series aircraft, I find FSLabs A320 better than anything available in X-Plane, so given that you have P3D I would not recommend another A320 series aircraft. While you have Captain Sim 757 & 767, I will still recommend Flight Factor 757 & 767, while they fall short on audiovisual aspects, they have really nice systems modelling.

If you are into GA with Garmin / Avidyne avionics, I recommend Hot Start TBM-900 and TorqueSim SR22 & SR20, they are easily the best GA aircraft available for X-Plane.

Hey thank you SO MUCH for the recommendation! I don't have any 727s on anything. I am waiting for MilViz to do witheir 737-200 on MSFS though. They said it will come. I have every FSLabs product on P3D so I am happy with their 32x. Have you seen CS 757 and 767? Can the FF ones compete with that? In terms of systems. I am very much into GA, but right now MSFS with JustFlight Pipers and Warrior as well as A2A's excellent stuff on P3D and MilViz KA350i and P180 do the job. I do want a biz jet though. On XP, I feel like I can either do C172 or A350 right now. That entire range in between remains unfilled. 🙂

[akita 429]

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

 

And now all done on the GPU 🙂 I wonder how many blades of grass Xplane Vulkan can handle.

This is seriously some Next-Gen stuff, especially with the seasons shaders, scenes like this in Xplane can be possible:

 

 

 

I'm also still a newbie in Xplane's scenery system, just found a real nice decaling system to expose grass patches etc..., all combined, I think Xplane's terrain scream "tessellation", if they do this IMO Xplane's terrain system is pretty much the best that I'm aware off for flight simulation.

It also shows me how under used the system is out of the box.

[mSparks 2,086]

2 hours ago, ianlighting said:

SORRY BUT CAN YOU GUYS GO BACK TO XP ORG AND TAKE YOUR NEGATIVE ATTIDUES WITH YOURSELVES AS WE DONT NEED IT ON AVSIM AND WE DONT WANT IT SO GO BACK TO XP ORG AND COMPLAIN ABOUT IT THERE WHICH IS A DEDICATED FORUM FOR YOURSELVES!

But you gotta love how the LR talk kicked off by pimping AVSIM

After everything the org did for them, scamming users, banning large numbers of 3PDs, doing everything they could to stop legitimate bug reports reaching LR support, so simple issues went years unreported, claiming people stole work off unnamed, unidentified individuals with precisely the opposite of evidence and banning and threatening to ban anyone who disagreed with them.

Austin wasn't convinced about having an ingame store, but the flood of departures that behaviour has created is exactly why its needed, at which point I would expect avsim to become the #1 XP site again.

[jarmstro 2,402]

On 7/29/2021 at 11:11 PM, GoranM said:

I make add ons for X-Plane. People have been telling me I’m stupid if I don’t switch to MSFS, because X-Plane is dead and can’t compete with MSFS. Hence, I’m glad I stayed with X-Plane. 

Well you could still switch. But you would be making add ons for an XBox game. Not saying there's anything wrong with that but that is what MSFS has become. The PC version now lies in the shadow of the XBox which now determines the code for the sim. And I'm eating humble pie.

Unless or until they fix it AND restore the graphical quality that made MSFS great I'm back flying X-Plane.

Edited August 3, 2021 by jarmstro

[GoranM 3,762]

9 minutes ago, jarmstro said:

Well you could still switch. But you would be making add ons for an XBox game. Not saying there's anything wrong with that but that is what MSFS has become. The PC version now lies in the shadow of the XBox which now determines the code for the sim. And I'm eating humble pie.

Unless or until they fix it AND restore the graphical quality that made MSFS great I'm back flying X-Plane.

An honest, objective, "accept what could be the truth", response.  Very refreshing.

I have an opinion on this whole mess that has the label "SU5" on it, but I'd rather not discuss it here, for what could be considered obvious reasons.

I will say it's a little funny how the usual suspects have pulled a disappearing act.

But I tip my hat to you and your objective and honest post.  

I've always said it.  Every single one of us is entitled to enjoy what we want to enjoy, without negative and derogatory comments from the "other side".  Personal choice!

👍

[jarmstro 2,402]

2 minutes ago, GoranM said:

But I tip my hat to you and your objective and honest post.  

But I've always been honest. I just like to use the best tool for the job. MSFS was that tool. But it isn't now. In my opinion XP11 with OrbX and XVision is now better looking. Money talks and MSFS is now an XBox game and that's that. A pity.