Another XP12 preview drops

[Janov 2,383]

9 hours ago, Gulfstream said:

X-Plane is good for the tinkerers, but I've personally spent who knows how many hours of my life fiddling with configuration flies, overlay priorities, sky modifiers, windshield rain, realistic pilot head movements, making my own ortho, everything.

Tinkerers will always tinker - and it is one of the reasons that X-Plane draws them, it is very accessible and you can really transform it.

I personally have never done any of the things you mention (well, I have played with the LOD settings in settings.txt), but other than that I just fly X-Plane totally default. I don´t even download custom airports. Add-on aircraft, yes. I do work a lot with WED making Scenery Gateway airports, though.

And you can see the same in MSFS - initially people thought that the days of tweaking visuals and hoarding custom airports are over, but there are tweaks and customizations for everything, not unlike there are for X-Plane.

There will always be users who think that for the same version the sky is too blue - or not blue enough 😉

 

I think the problem with posts getting locked or people banned with warnings is that the discussions here are often not driven by scientific interest, but by barely concealed disdain towards the other platform. These emotions are very hard to keep in check and start leaking through in posts...so things heat up quickly.

Respecting the "other" simulators right of existence and it´s users prerogative in making a choice of what sim to use is the prerequisite to discussions staying on topic.

The mods have to walk a super thin line between stifling discussion and keeping emotions in check. I don´t envy them.

Thanks for taking part in the discussion, and your good wishes for both platforms are noted 👍.

[jcomm 5,939]

You guys ought all be playing a decent flightsim... IL-2... The rest is countryside, and that's why you keep fighting eachother !  You all need a good DogFight !

Edited February 8, 2022 by jcomm

[Janov 2,383]

5 minutes ago, jcomm said:

You guys ought all be playing a decent flightsim... IL-2

I got it and tried to shoot some approaches in Honolulu...but the fuel didn´t last far enough to fly all that way from the Ostfront!

[Gary1124 181]

20 hours ago, mSparks said:

For the record. Again.

I dont contest "MSFS can have better graphics and nicer scenery"

I contest that XP11 can't have better graphics and nicer scenery.

I have said for years that "out of the box" -well before MSFS was even announced - that XP11 graphics and scenery require significant effort on the part of the user to bring it up to a usuable state.

But once you have your scenery installed, in a VR headset, with the settings tweeked to get smooth performance, there is nothing much of note between them, in fact XP11 does do the "aviation" part of the scenery better and MSFS is still playing catching up.

Oh, and also, when it comes to graphics in flight sim, every button in the cockpit working like the real thing is the first and foremost requirement, anything else is a work in progress.

It doesnt matter how hard they try, no one is going to be convinced that MSFS forests or orthophoto are a good enough reason to give up their zibo, S76 etc.

XP12 would suffer similar challenges if they broke to much stuff.

I love Xplanes default aircraft and Flight dynamics. I was about to pull the trigger for XP11 when the talk of XP12 started. As is I am on P3D for one main reason. I Love the realism of my A2A aircraft combined with the just acceptable world that Orbx and other enhancements provide. My A2A Skylane is a ringer for the real one I take lessons in and my airfield KSEG all doctored up really looks correct in P3D. When XP12 comes out I will get it for fun and when A2A starts turning out planes fir MSFS I will jump on it. Remember thar many people have lots of $$$ invested in a platform over the course of years.

Edited February 8, 2022 by Gary1124

[mjrhealth 820]

1 hour ago, jcomm said:

You guys ought all be playing a decent flightsim... IL-2... The rest is countryside, and that's why you keep fighting eachother !  You all need a good DogFight !

flew online for about 2 years with that, still have it installed never touch it including the WW1  flanders field that came out

[Bjoern 1,157]

5 hours ago, jcomm said:

You guys ought all be playing a decent flightsim... IL-2... The rest is countryside, and that's why you keep fighting eachother !  You all need a good DogFight !

After 25 years of flightsimming with nothing but a stick, I finally got myself a throttle and rudder yesterday (T16000 FCS pack). Curious how it'll work in 1946 on Linux.

And of course how I'm gonna use the 4500000000000 buttons and knobs on the throttle in XP.

Edited February 8, 2022 by Bjoern

[mSparks 2,086]

17 hours ago, Gary1124 said:

Remember thar many people have lots of $$$ invested in a platform over the course of years.

The main reason (imho, obviously) that the $$$ component of X-Plane is so "crazy guy in an American 80s advert" low, is what Goran said earlier:

21 hours ago, GoranM said:

 It takes teams of developers, several years (PMDG took 6 years to make their MD11 with 8 developers), to make a reasonably coded, study level airliner.  It took 2 developers, 3 years to make a study level CL650.

The tools available for X-Plane lower the barrier so much, that regardless of your skill level, if someone enjoys making things, chances are X-Plane will be a great platform to build it against "just for fun".

Yes, P3D, in some very narrow confines (i.e. PMDG stuff) has no contenders regardless of sim platform, but there is a volume of very very high quality freeware for X-Plane that could keep you entertained for a lifetime.

This is both a blessing and a curse, on the one hand, it greatly reduces the cost of enjoying flightsim stuff, but on the other, it makes it very hard for high quality developers to stand out from the crowd. But they exist. Hotstart, Vskylabs and OrbX to name 3 off the top of my head (Goran models for Hotstart, him and I often don't see eye to eye, but I have no problem saying Hotstart make awesome stuff, even if the CL650 isn't for me personally, the PMDG MD11 isn't for me either).

17 hours ago, Gary1124 said:

I was about to pull the trigger for XP11 when the talk of XP12 started.

Well, here's my take. XP11 is rock solid, there are no more updates coming to break things, and its worth every single penny/cent multiple times over.

Yes, some XP11 things will fall by the wayside when XP12 drops. But they will do so because XP12 offers better alternatives.

There's no timeline for XP12 yet, but even when it does go public XP11 will almost certainly be the better sim to just enjoy for a significant amount of time until they iron out the kinks.

[Janov 2,383]

Two new pictures up on the official Facebook and Twitter channels:

 

Edited February 10, 2022 by Janov

[Pastaiolo 1,688]

6 hours ago, Janov said:

Two new pictures up on the official Facebook and Twitter channels:

 

I hope the sky banding is a matter of picture compression.

[RXP 2,338]

3 hours ago, Pastaiolo said:

I hope the sky banding is a matter of picture compression.

I didn't notice the first time I saw the pictures, you have eagle eyes! (or I'm getting too old).

I'm certain they'd correct this for the release (it is a screenshot from a beta version for now).

PS: why am I jumping on answering this? because amazingly, I've been working lately on this specifically to enhance the OpenXR ToolKit shaders, and I'm still gauging different techniques to find a sweet spot! 😎

Edited February 10, 2022 by RXP

[Pastaiolo 1,688]

1 hour ago, RXP said:

I didn't notice the first time I saw the pictures, you have eagle eyes! (or I'm getting too old).

I'm certain they'd correct this for the release (it is a screenshot from a beta version for now).

PS: why am I jumping on answering this? because amazingly, I've been working lately on this specifically to enhance the OpenXR ToolKit shaders, and I'm still gauging different techniques to find a sweet spot! 😎

Ahah it's because it is one of those things that always annoyed me in XP11. And i think i spotted it in an early XP12 video as well now that i think of it. But yeah, hopefully they will work on getting rid of it.

The Il2 sturmovik series actually got rid of it just recently as well

https://il2sturmovik.com/news/697/dev-blog-306/

Edited February 10, 2022 by Pastaiolo

[RXP 2,338]

9 minutes ago, Pastaiolo said:

The Il2 sturmovik series actually got rid of it just recently as well

thanks for the link! very easy to find out what they did to it:
- open the uncompressed 2022_2_3__9_4_44.bmp in a paint program
- zoom in, and you can see a classic Bayer 8x8 dithering in action 🙂

This looks good in their 3D screenshots but I believe there is an issue with this type of dithering when in VR. This is why I'm implementing something different and which doesn't add high-frequency components in the signal.

Edited February 10, 2022 by RXP

[Biology 1,347]

On 2/8/2022 at 11:15 AM, jcomm said:

You guys ought all be playing a decent flightsim... IL-2... The rest is countryside, and that's why you keep fighting eachother !  You all need a good DogFight !

I might be joining you soon as The Uninstaller Jr.

IL-2 looks very tempting but as a civilian flyer there isn't much for me.

[Biology 1,347]

23 hours ago, Pastaiolo said:

I hope the sky banding is a matter of picture compression.

I think it is caused by the picture compression. X-Plane 12 uses physically based sky rendering, which typically produces much less the banding artifacts compared to bitmap based sky rendering. While banding is still possible with physically based sky implementations if raymarching steps are not high enough, it looks pretty different than the banding in this screenshot.

[RXP 2,338]

@BiologicalNanobot I believe most of the banding problems aren't due to using textures vs computed. I'm working on this right now with the OpenXR Toolkit and the main reason is sampling errors from a higher bit depth color into a lower bit depth gamma space one. In other words, when converting a float32 linear space color, into an uint8 gamma space one, you'll have banding no matter what.