4 hours ago, mSparks said:

The main issue with the water update back then was it didnt react to land

Not really seen any sign that issue has been fixed...

For those who havent spent much time with non vulkan xplane 11, or never really gave much thought to why non vulkan xp11 was such a nightmare (e.g. because of flying most of the time on autopilot)

It always got talked about as "stutters" - "fixing the stutters" etc. But this description really didn't do justice to just how huge a performance issue they were, especially when visually they could be barely visible or easy to ignore.

The visual aspect of the stutters was only a tiny part of the problem.

By far the bigger problem was that during a stutter any manual control input would be ignored, which would then be compounded by xplanes flight model calculations exploding to nonsense for that short time because there was so much more time than 50ms between the two frames (the maximum time between frames that flight model calcs are valid), the net effect of which could easily be your aircraft randomly falling out of the sky for no apparent reason (when not on autopilot)

It is "a good thing" they threw all hands on deck to fixing that at the expense of everything else they and everyone else would have liked and had been working on, because opengl in xp11 was/is basically unusable for hand flying. (they also exist in xp10 but are rare enough that no one noticed)

I appreciate the details but all of this is beside the point. The fact is, they knew why they didn't want to roll this out back then and in it all summed up into one thing, avoiding poor performance that would have tied them up into a support nightmare.

That was what was responding too, nothing more.

Edited November 16, 20214 yr by BobFS88

18 minutes ago, BobFS88 said:

they knew why they didn't want to roll these out back then and in it all summed up into one thing, avoiding poor performance that would have tied them up into a support nightmare.

That was what was responding too, nothing more.

It wasnt just that, getting vulkan working took 12 whole months longer than they planned (and its still sketchy on AMD), that nuked all the things they wanted to do and people were begging for, that wasnt "a good thing" (in case you missed rka's sarcasm), but it was necessary.

Edited November 16, 20214 yr by mSparks

6 hours ago, rka said:

I really laughed (and cried a bit) at the part "they improved the waves long time ago, but didn't release the improvement to us customers and that's a good thing!".

I'm glad to bring some joy to you! 🙂

Here is the original article, posted October 29, 2016, from where the video posted by @mSparks is coming from:

https://developer.x-plane.com/2016/10/developer-blooper-reel-water-world/

 

I'd suggest you read Ben's comments because he is explaining a lot! For example:

Quote

The polygons are being subdivided on the fly using tessellation hardware. The effect still suffers from “swimming”, as the mesh isn’t detailed enough (and thus has sampling error as the camera moves); I’m looking at forcing water subdivision to a higher minimum in the v11 DSFs. (The water must be subdivided a bit to allow the water to curve around the earth, but the earth triangles were still pretty big).

Max hardware tessellation factor is 64x, which isn’t enough when the underlying polygon is really huge. We -might- be able to do an on-the-fly tessellation level on load to augment what the GPU can do – we’ll see.

Because this is using hw tessellation, 3-d water is Windows/Linux only; the Mac drivers don’t expose the tessellator to the legacy profile, so it’ll be a while (like, a year, maybe two) before we see this on OS X.

Or also:

Quote

The performance hit is … I am not sure; right now my goal is to have 3-d be “always on” for hardware capable of the effect; for that hardware the tessellation seems to be a non-factor. There’s a real cost to the wave generation, which is FFT based, but it’s highly multi-core. We may have to provide reduced-detail waves for dual-core machines.

And:

Quote

Hi Frank! You might be the only person for whom this makes sense:
I tried proj-grid first .. and the performance and wave shape quality relative to performance was -spectacular-. It’s nearly optimal.

The only problem is that integrating it with an actual engine is absolute hell…as soon as you have to cope with variable-sized variable elevation water bodies close to each other, the entire algorithm falls apart. 🙁 I may go back to looking at it again, but the kind of fixes we’d have to do (stencil buffers, masking, render to texture of elevation, etc.) made the cure way worse than the disease.

I'll let you read the rest, but rest assured they know what they are doing.

Edited November 16, 20214 yr by RXP

34 minutes ago, RXP said:

they know what they are doing.

Just to reiterate though, because I can understand why people who don't see stutters as a big issue and think expending all that energy on Vulkan means LR don't know what they are doing - because they are "just fine" getting 40fps in openGL, with their librain and numerous other esoteric plugins that don't have vulkan support but they paid for and will use anyway, 

Some issues that can be traced back to stutters:

stutter - plane falls out the sky

stutter - plane misses the glideslope

stutter - controls don't respond and the plane misses the taxiway

stutter - only one engine throttle changes when you moved multiple handles

stutter - ground effect seems whack

stutter - 600 fpm landing instead of 100fpm

stutter - plane turns upside down because it held a high aileron setting way to long

Pretty sure that list goes on, and I am reasonably sure there isn't the awareness that they are the price you pay for not checking that vulkan checkbox, and a likely a good chunk of why XP12 is Vulkan/metal only.

 

 

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

It wasnt just that, getting vulkan working took 12 whole months longer than they planned

That is life in the developed world. The question is how honest are they in realize their prospects. I think they were much more transparent about their chances then what some people give them credit for.  

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

that nuked all the things they wanted to do and people were begging for, that wasnt "a good thing"

People can beg for all kinds of things, doesn't mean they understand the order on how they are going to the get it.

 

1 hour ago, mSparks said:

(in case you missed rka's sarcasm), but it was necessary.

But the move to Vulkan was necessary and that is something I can agree with.  

2 hours ago, RXP said:

I'm glad to bring some joy to you! 🙂

Here is the original article, posted October 29, 2016, from where the video posted by @mSparks is coming from:

https://developer.x-plane.com/2016/10/developer-blooper-reel-water-world/

 

I'd suggest you read Ben's comments because he is explaining a lot! For example:

Or also:

And:

I'll let you read the rest, but rest assured they know what they are doing.

Nobody said they were stupid or wouldn't know what they were doing. This has been put in our mouths by the yaysayers.

They acted perfectly reasonable for a company that has no competition and is assuming the situation will remain like this.

Then the competition appeared and all those previously "not possible/not necessary" things suddenly started appearing too.

Let me put it like this: If they had known about MSFS, Vulkan would have come way faster (and the eastern european graphics artists as well). But there was no need for being quicker...

 

Edited November 16, 20214 yr by rka

1 hour ago, rka said:

Let me put it like this: If they had known about MSFS, Vulkan would have come way faster (and the eastern european graphics artists as well). But there was no need for being quicker...

maybe, but in any case, I believe there is a saying which says (at least in French) "all good things come to those who wait" 🙂

1 hour ago, rka said:

Nobody said they were stupid or wouldn't know what they were doing. This has been put in our mouths by the yaysayers.

They acted perfectly reasonable for a company that has no competition and is assuming the situation will remain like this.

Then the competition appeared and all those previously "not possible/not necessary" things suddenly started appearing too.

Let me put it like this: If they had known about MSFS, Vulkan would have come way faster (and the eastern european graphics artists as well). But there was no need for being quicker...

 

Reasons for Vulkan/Metal taking longer than expected is them revisiting memory streaming 3-4 times and the openGL bridge so we all can still use most 3rd party addons in 11.50 and 12 as well.

In MSFS dx12 for xbox took a year with the pc version just now going for a long beta. So yes it takes years regardless and LR implemented not just 1, but 2 new APIs.

2 minutes ago, RXP said:

maybe, but in any case, I believe there is a saying which says (at least in French) "all good things come to those who wait" 🙂

C'est vrai 🙂. There sadly is this other saying of "too little, too late" and that's basically what the naysayers are afraid of. XP 12 needs to be competitive to stay in the market.

 

6 minutes ago, mtaxp said:

In MSFS dx12 for xbox took a year with the pc version just now going for a long beta. So yes it takes years regardless and LR implemented not just 1, but 2 new APIs.

It honestly amazes me how people can come to the conclusion that MSFS could work to prove how top notch XP11 is in comparison.

 

7 hours ago, Murmur said:

XP11 already surpasses the competition in many things, now it will also surpass them in the environment and weather department!

😄

1 hour ago, rka said:

😄

😎 Great times ahead for XP!

On 11/15/2021 at 8:06 PM, rka said:

Good morning from a few years ago.

Scenery-only scenarios at Operation Flashpoint visual quality settings absolutely do not count.

51 minutes ago, Bjoern said:

Scenery-only scenarios at Operation Flashpoint visual quality settings absolutely do not count.

Arma performs excellently when in SP. It's the MP code that brings performance down to XP levels. But the graphics are far better and have been for nine years. And Arma has performed better with each hw generation even though it also only uses one core. But this at least to the fullest. If I could fly the Zibo over Arma Greece, I'd still be flying the Zibo. 

I honestly don't get some of the intent behind some of these posts. Comparing Laminar to Bohemia interactive or Bandai Namco who (more than likely), have profit margins, resources and capital that blow X-Plane out of the water and cater to a much broader demographic. 

Are Laminar slow to the party every generation. Absolutely. Outerra was doing better scenery and environments a full decade behind X-Plane.

Does that mean Laminar are oblivious to what people want and how to progress the sim in a constructive way? No. Not only is their current work now shining through for XP12, but alot of their design choices are why people still prefer X-Plane to this day. Despite visually superior products, it's still a versatile and adaptable simulator.

10 hours ago, rka said:

C'est vrai 🙂. 

It honestly amazes me how people can come to the conclusion that MSFS could work to prove how top notch XP11 is in comparison.

You claimed that vulkan took more time because there was no competetion and I gave other actual valid reasons, MSFS was an example of how even for bigger teams low profile API is hard. Are you going to, as usual, not confront them rather ignore? A way to run away from your own claims.

FWIW, being WRONG in every predection since 2 years yet still claiming you were somehow right makes almost this entire section mostly look at you as a laughing matter ;D

Too late, rka, indeed, too late to change them.

Edited November 17, 20214 yr by mtaxp

5 hours ago, DeltaWho said:

I honestly don't get some of the intent behind some of these ...

Ego actually. Literaly every predection made by him and few others is 100% wrong resulting them in going wild with speculations about an early alpha not even a full product yet. And as usual they will be wrong, it is in their nature hence the bar changing hoping they might be right about something and the in-ability to confront without twisting words/sarcasm.

Edited November 17, 20214 yr by mtaxp