34 minutes ago, BobFS88 said:

You say here "Nothing was done for several more years because graphics wasn't a leading priority for XP until MSFS was released."

Do you understand why they decided to the move to the Vulkan api?

Do you know that they announce that move to Vulkan at Cosford on November 4th 2017?

Do you think they did this just as a nice to have feature for bragging rights?

Their goal was to improve performance that will give them near guarantee mim performance of 30 or better fps in VR which also will help performance with multi screen to reduce the stutters for there professional customers. 

They knew that if they were going to add 3D trees, volumetric clouds running along side of particle systems for rain an accumulated snow to created fully procedural dynamic scenery, (all of these things that impact performance) would have render the sim into a slide show.

The move to Vulkan has everything to with graphics performance which allows them the head room to add in all the graphic feature that they couldn't do otherwise without taking a huge performance hit. It also gave them the tools that they didn't have to observe the performance, to improve memory management in order to help optimize it. As a benefit, going to Vulkan modernize the graphic engine Xplane to take advantage of the newer hardware and feature that they wouldn't have otherwise.

Everyone who understood this knew it would be a big deal. But for whatever reason you think they weren't doing anything. But now you say " For whatever reason, Austin and LR did not prioritize the graphics until now." just because you can see it? That is something I would expect an average end user/ gamer to say and not something coming from a software engineer.

I don't think 3D trees is something that could have been done only recently and required Vulcan.  I used to play WWIIOnline, and when you fly planes in WWIIOnline, the trees are 3D trees (yes, WWIIOnline has the same problems as many flight simulators in that you can view objects from the air from many miles away).  And this was from over 10 years ago.

And Microsoft Flight also had much better looking trees than vanilla XP 11 and Microsoft Flight was from almost 10 years ago:

 

Edited September 27, 20214 yr by abrams_tank

13 minutes ago, tonywob said:

...nooo...... then how will 3rd parties make money 

TBH, there are some things that are better left to developers who care more about them, which is pretty much the case with payware airports and regions. People who make these airports will spend a lot of time making one particular airport look perfect and this is simply something LR or Asobo don't have the resources to do. I'd rather Asobo and LR put more effort in to the base sim and gave developers the ability to make awesome addons rather than trying to do everything theirselves.

Airports should always be done by 3rd parties as they can add the details to the airports, including ensuring all the buildings, taxiways, markers, signs, etc, match the airport in real life.

What Pastaiolo and I are referring to is the area surrounding the airport, including the city itself, should better reflect what that city looks like in real life. Assuming Austin/LR won't allow satellite & photogrammetry streaming in XP (even by a 3rd party), then better regional autogen can help and serve as somewhat of a substitute.

4 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

What Pastaiolo and I are referring to is the area surrounding the airport, including the city itself, should better reflect what that city looks like in real life. Assuming Austin/LR won't allow satellite & photogrammetry streaming in XP (even by a 3rd party), then better regional autogen can help and serve as somewhat of a substitute.

That was my point about SD Global.. It doesn't matter if the artwork looks really good, each country is quite unique on how cities and towns are laid out that just replacing some art assets with varied versions won't cut it. It needs to be way more intelligent than a simple global solution that lays out everything as if it was the USA with some regional-themed buildings. It absolutely could be done without using expensive satellite imagery, but the problem is that now, no matter what they do, it would still be unacceptable to most users who want what MFS has. Anyone who has this expectation of seeing their own house in the sim without purchasing addons should probably not be using X-Plane or P3D anymore... 

They also asked about tools to edit local Mesh... The answer was not objective though, and apparently there will be none, at least at release time...

10 minutes ago, tonywob said:

Anyone who has this expectation of seeing their own house in the sim without purchasing addons should probably not be using X-Plane or P3D anymore... 

We're not

13 minutes ago, tonywob said:

That was my point about SD Global.. It doesn't matter if the artwork looks really good, each country is quite unique on how cities and towns are laid out that just replacing some art assets with varied versions won't cut it. It needs to be way more intelligent than a simple global solution that lays out everything as if it was the USA with some regional-themed buildings. It absolutely could be done without using expensive satellite imagery, but the problem is that now, no matter what they do, it would still be unacceptable to most users who want what MFS has. Anyone who has this expectation of seeing their own house in the sim without purchasing addons should probably not be using X-Plane or P3D anymore... 

Couldn't they localize some of the buildings/houses per region though for autogenerated scenery?  For example, building/houses in eastern Europe countries could look the same.  Then buildings/houses in southern Africa could look the same.  That's a stop gap measure that I could perhaps digest, if satellite & photogrammetry streaming is not available.

I agree with you that localizing the autogen to every separate city is too much work.  Even localizing it to the resolution of a country may be a lot of work.  But localizing it to a regional basis (where a region can represent multiple countries) would be tolerable for some simmers like me.

Edited September 27, 20214 yr by abrams_tank

if you try to look at Mumbai in default XP11 (even in mfs )  , it looks bad because the buildings are not what we have here , i believe the data is that procedural thing so what i see in new york are probably have same objects being displayed which might have the same height etc.. .  but I put my Mumbai models it just changed and did look a lot more like mumbai.  So yes leave it to developers

Edited September 27, 20214 yr by Humpty

22 minutes ago, abrams_tank said:

Couldn't they localize some of the buildings/houses per region though for autogenerated scenery?  For example, building/houses in eastern Europe countries could look the same.  Then buildings/houses in southern Africa could look the same.  That's a stop gap measure that I could perhaps digest, if satellite & photogrammetry streaming is not available.

Yep, and I'm hoping they've done something like this to some extent.. Currently we're basically stuck with the world either looking like Germany or the USA :-). A few more varied building types would be nice at least

37 minutes ago, tonywob said:

Currently we're basically stuck with the world either looking like Germany or the USA

OrbX EGCB and surrounding look pretty much perfect, and thats similar to neither US or germany or even most of the rest of the UK.....

We did like for like comparisons with MSFS NYC and XP11 when i made that typhoon VR video, it was really swings and roundabouts with no clear winner, I prefer XP because of the longer view distance, MS guys preferred the accurate representation of the buildings they were about to crash into.

I think the expo video showed exactly what was needed in the scenery section, looked great.

4 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

To be fair, Austin didn't prioritize enhancing the graphics for X-Plane for the longest time. 

Everyone who has used X-Plane for long enough knows this is certainly true.

Austin is a very smart aviation geek and we all know lengthy explanations on how the torque p-factor has been enhanced by 0.0012% when you have a 15 knot crosswind has been higher priority than pushing volumetric clouds or GPU rendered forests.

It's just reality.

And yes, MSFS has now visually blown everything out of the water so we see focus on atmospheric lighting, trees, puddles on the tarmac and volumetric clouds.

This is why competition is good.

Edited September 27, 20214 yr by Gulfstream

Before MSFS2020, XP 11 was regarded as the best choice over what was available then, I'm pretty sure LR knew that. But, If you ask me, LR was caught with its pants down when suddenly, out of nowhere, FS2020 comes into play and throws a curve ball which sends LR back into the middle of the pack.

I honestly believe both sims have their strengths and weaknesses, we all know them, no need to go over them here but I also strongly believe that if Austin had listened to what his customers wanted years back, XP would have been in a different dimension by now, way ahead of any sim available today. Unfortunately, for years, XP development has been based on Austin's own judgment without integrating what XP's users needed/wanted then. Maybe LR views toward what users want may have changed today, I don't really know, but from my own point of view, its too little too late.....we shall see.

Today MSFS2020 has been cleared for take-off with a lot of XP's customer base on board while LR is still trying to get the engine started. XP won't be out the sim game for sure, it has survived FS9,FSX and P3D, no reason to believe it wont survive MSFS2020, on the other hand, LR has their work cut-out for them and it wont be easy to get those that migrated to the dark side back into XP's pocket.

I will wait patiently (I was and XP simmer for a long time after all) to see what XP12 has to offer, In the meantime, I can only wish Austin and Co best of luck while I soar the skies in my sim of choice....for now!

Edited September 27, 20214 yr by CarlosF

2 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

I don't think 3D trees is something that could have been done only recently and required Vulcan. 

Don't believe that is true that it would only requirement Vulkan needed create 3D tree as mush as I do believe is needed to give it the performance it needs. They did not have the tools to view in real time the performance in Opengl in order to see how implementing 3D tree and how it would impact the sim. Once that have the tools to visual what was going in the rendering engine, they are able to make improvement and change the way scenery is loaded in the memory where it could reduce the stuttering, even in opengl where they were unable to do it before. 

I do believe  3D Trees it could have be done on opengl or Directx 11 if it could do efficiently

 After all I played Battlefield 4 after building my rig, when I was just using it for FSX and it made use of both CPU and GPU. But it was a given that most AAA were design this way and not the sims. 

3 hours ago, abrams_tank said:

And Microsoft Flight also had much better looking trees than vanilla XP 11 and Microsoft Flight was from almost 10 years ago:

Making use of Directx 11 and before anyone could load in the 3P scenery that could bog down the performance, they walked away. If they were so great, confidence and cared why didn't they say in the game? 

 

14 minutes ago, CarlosF said:

Before MSFS2020, XP 11 was regarded as the best choice over what was available then, I'm pretty sure LR knew that. But, If you ask me, LR was caught with its pants down when suddenly, out of nowhere, FS2020 comes into play and throws a curve ball which sends LR back into the middle of the pack.

I honestly believe both sims have their strengths and weaknesses, we all know them, no need to go over them here but I also strongly believe that if Austin had listened to what his customers wanted years back, XP would have been in a different dimension by now, way ahead of any sim available today. Unfortunately, for years, XP development has been based on Austin's own judgment without integrating what XP's users needed/wanted then. Maybe LR views toward what users want may have changed today, I don't really know, but from my own point of view, its too little too late.....we shall see.

Today MSFS2020 has been cleared for take-off with a lot of XP's customer base on board while LR is still trying to get the engine started. XP won't be out the sim game for sure, it has survived FS9,FSX and P3D, no reason to believe it wont survive MSFS2020, on the other hand, LR has their work cut-out for them and it wont be easy to get those that migrated to the dark side back into XP's pocket.

I will wait patiently (I was and XP simmer for a long time after all) to see what XP12 has to offer, In the meantime, I can only wish Austin and Co best of luck while I soar the skies in my sim of choice....for now!

If XP12 was a worthy graphical upgrade, I think It would have convince those who left to come back. Although, XPlane always had the advantage of having better IFR Tuber, MSFS is closing the gap. WorkingTitle G1000Nxi is already superior to the Garmin XP1000, PMDG, Leonardo and Aerosoft are coming strong and will reduce the gape. All I want for XP12 is better mulithreading optimization and higher graphical representation of the world. This presentation only appealed to existing Xplane user. It did not convince anyone to leave P3D or MSFS 2020 for Xplane 12.  It still work in progress so we will have to wait for the beta to see how much of an upgrade XP12 is. 

Edited September 27, 20214 yr by fogboundturtle

7 hours ago, GoranM said:

I'm on the verge of offering to pay someone to tell me why MSFS users keep coming here to tell us why they feel MSFS is better than X-Plane.

We MSFS users spread the Gospel here for the same reason that churches send missionaries to foreign countries: To provide the uninformed with an opportunity to hear the One Truth. 

Edited September 27, 20214 yr by David Mills

3 minutes ago, David Mills said:

We MSFS users spread the Gospel here for the same reason that churches send missionaries to foreign countries: To provide the uninformed with an opportunity to hear the One Truth. 

I don't know whether to laugh at you or feel sorry for you.

In either case, I think you need to get out more.