X-Plane 12 announcement keynote

[jarmstro 2,402]

33 minutes ago, Brian Mackie said:

Fawlty Towers

Hi!  Its also known as Faulty Towers but thank you for your kind words and for mentioning me. . It would seem that any criticism of LR and XP should not be allowed here but personal attacks and rudeness are just fine.

Edited October 3, 2021 by jarmstro

[Brian Mackie 123]

No, it is not. It is Fawlty Towers. Your memory is faulty. Go Google. As for personal attacks and rudeness, you got there way ahead of me.

[GoranM 3,762]

57 minutes ago, Brian Mackie said:

Greazer may not be a troll, but is without doubt a crashing, repetitive and negative bore. Alas, GoranM rises to Greazer's bait every time and seems to be a peculiarly argumentative type who, in my humble opinion, really must stop trying to help. The struggles between these two, in particular, invariably result in any perfectly regular forum topic going pear-shaped and being terminated. I'm surprised that the other thorough nuisance called jarmstro hasn't piled into the bunfight. I observe that jarmstro lives in Torquay, home of the disastrous Fawlty Towers Hotel, sometimes behaves like Basil Fawlty and tends to post comments in the early hours of the morning, when they should be getting some sleep (and giving us a break).

Text can remove all context from a statement.  I wouldn't call myself argumentative.  

57 minutes ago, Brian Mackie said:

I believe that it is high time for moderators to take a ruthless approach in dealing with these persistent pests. If mods do not re-take control and exert some discipline, the forum could be rendered worthless.

I don't think the mods and admins want to segregate the community into groups, but if they don't, this kind of thing will continue.  

It is what it is.  

 

Edited October 3, 2021 by GoranM
Trimmed down

[Brian Mackie 123]

There you go again. You simply cannot resist the temptation to react. Give it (and us) a break. Oh, and buy me a beer next time you are down here in New Zealand. I'll shout the next round.

Edited October 3, 2021 by Brian Mackie

[GoranM 3,762]

3 minutes ago, Brian Mackie said:

There you go again. You simply cannot resist the temptation to react. Give it (and us) a break. Oh, and buy me a beer next time you are down here in New Zealand. I'll shout the next round.

I'm replying.  Not reacting.  

Forums are for discussion.  And the beer is easy.  I'm just across the Tasman.

[rka 916]

5 minutes ago, GoranM said:

Forums are for discussion.

A discussion is an exchange of different views and opinions, are you aware of that?

😉 

[Brian Mackie 123]

Good neighbour, GoranM! Might I suggest that you simply ignore anything from Greazer and fellow travellers?

If everyone decided to never respond to such posts, the mischief-making scribblers would lose all oxygen and fade away.

Edited October 3, 2021 by Brian Mackie

[GoranM 3,762]

1 minute ago, Brian Mackie said:

Good neighbour! Might I suggest that you simply ignore anything from Greazer and fellow travellers?

If everyone decided to never respond to such posts, the mischief-making scribblers would lose all oxygen and fade away.

Probably a good idea.

2 minutes ago, rka said:

A discussion is an exchange of different views and opinions, are you aware of that?

Let's start with this one.

[Brian Mackie 123]

rka, while you correctly define a discussion, you may have overlooked the point of my earlier comment: when a discussion is deliberately twisted off-topic by people whose agenda is clearly malign, the conversation descends into anarchy. That is what needs to be dealt with. Firmly.

[mjrhealth 820]

It wont be XPLANe thats dying but there  certainly are  some keeping people from this forum. If the MODS dont do something this will never go anywhere. Simply cant wait for XPLANE 12, i need some motivation, and its not xplane its this the world and all the b.... thats doing my head in.

Edited October 3, 2021 by mjrhealth

[jcomm 5,909]

They're actually IN LOVE with it but can't accept that - it's the typical LOVE & HATE state...

Edited October 3, 2021 by jcomm

[RXP 2,338]

On 9/30/2021 at 1:14 PM, RXP said:

And here is the last screenshot post-processed along the lines of what I've documented in my other experiments a few days ago:

• +0.75 exposure: the most important factor missing in X-Plane to me
• Slight S-Curve: for contrast
• +25 saturation: it seems the sun was low but I wanted a little more peps to highlight the beauty of it, entirely subjective here!

 

PS: what I can't help noticing is that there is a general impression that X-Plane visuals can't match FS2020, but what X-Plane is mostly missing is just a stack of post-processing shaders to transform a synthetically correctly lit image into a visually correct one. Those of you accustomed to developing RAW photography are used to do this manually (exposure, white balance, S-curve, eventually highlights/shadows to remove some clipping). These are the exact same post-processing filters FS2020 is using which you can manually deactivate too in the UserCfg.opt file (a json file) in the "PostProcess" section, namely: EyeAdaptation (meterring for global exposure), ColorGrading (tone mapper and white balance).

I've found a playground you can use to experiment with some of the post-processing effects and see how this impacts the overall look and feel.

NB: this is not a simulator but this gives you easy to use in-browser WebGL rendering you can play with!

Using the following BabylonJS, I've just changed from the default: MSAA and Tone Mapping, then I've tried to recreate the look and feel of what I can see on my screen with XP11 and FS2020. DefaultRenderingPipeline | Babylon.js Playground (babylonjs.com)

XP11 look and feel

using camera contrast 25% and camera exposure 30%

 

FS2020 look and feel (and +)

using camera contrast 33% and camera exposure 75%
In addition, I've added about 20% sharpen (it would be closer to FS2020 at 10-15%)

 

In both cases, this is the same PBR rendering, the same lights, the same ambient light. The only difference is exposure and contrast (S-Curve)

In short, XP11 and XP12 are perfectly capable of rendering photo realistic graphics because they are using material based rendering (PBR). Most of the visual feeling some are arguing about with FS2020 in my opinion (I'm not speaking of textures or buildings, just visual look), is mostly if not only related to proper tone mapping with correct exposure compensation.

[mSparks 2,086]

51 minutes ago, RXP said:

In short, XP11 and XP12 are perfectly capable of rendering photo realistic graphics because they are using material based rendering (PBR).

IMHO, the lighting issues run much deeper than that, and include but are not limited to

soft vs hard shadows

reflections

global illumination

dynamic range

All these use fairly old fashioned algorithms in XP11 (and MSFS), which is why they look so bad, adjusting exposure to address, say GI and dynamic range issues from one point of view (e.g. daytime) will only makes things worse in another (e.g. night time), and without addressing all those issues there is no way to get "photo realistic".

[RXP 2,338]

@mSparks

These are really good points, but my post is just meant to explain there are a few factors missing (or not visible enough) in X-Plane which are explaining some of the differences between X-Plane and FS2020 visuals, and that these factors are mostly in the domain of post-processing.

Of course, like you say, the example above about exposition is just an example in a typical "day time", but the real application of exposition must depend on the quantity of the light and other factors, pretty much like you'd do when taking a photo in RAW where you'd set an ISO sensitivity, an aperture, and an exposition time to take the photo, and then how you'd exposure-compensate to tone the photo to an average exposure representative of the scene/mood/feel. For this to work effectively, I believe the rendering engine must use a metering system (like in a camera) which is capable of exposing the shot properly for the scene (high contrast like in the cockpit with sun lighting the seats but not the rest for example, lower contrast with overcast weather etc...). This is the primary step. Then exposure compensation which is adjusting the exposure at the tone mapping level, that is how to spread the histogram when mapping the HDR rendering into the SDR range, between the lowest and the highest SDR values. One strength of the FS2020 rendering engine in my opinion is its proper exposure compensation, but there are some shortcomings in its metering system which is especially impacting in VR (in short, it looks like a full render average grey estimation, whereas in VR I believe you'd need a spot-meter or at least a weighted average because you more often move the head and you more often keep your eyes in the center).

As for shadows, this is another topic altogether I agree but I see no reason XP12 doesn't improve on these.

[fogboundturtle 2,708]

The real solution is really RTGI but I am sure MSFS or Xplane is not ready for that yet. The ForzaTech Engine is probably one of the best on the market and this is why MSFS looks the way it does. It's the advantage of being part of Microsoft. Access to technology that smaller company just don't have access too. I don't expect XPlane 12 to look as good but if they close the gap and take advantage of modern GPU, I think I will be happy with that.