5 minutes ago, RXP said:

@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.

This is definitely true, however banding caused by lack of precision is usually much less intense compared to banding caused by not enough raymarching samples or banding caused by textures, hence I assumed it would never be a concern. MSFS and other implementations have slight banding for the exact same reason you mentioned but it is very tolerable. While in the screenshot it looks much more intense which is why I thought it was caused by compression.

Edited February 11, 20224 yr by BiologicalNanobot

18 hours ago, RXP said:

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.

Dithering using a Bayer matrix helps a lot indeed. Just curious, what is the issue with this type of dithering in VR? As long as dithering matrix indices are kept separately for each eye the result should be identical.

On 2/7/2022 at 2:03 PM, GoranM said:

It's fine to have an opinion, but if you're going to have an opinion, you'll need to back it up with facts.

After pushing the boundaries in what X-Plane is capable of, after making the CL650, I'm not convinced that X-Plane will be wise to adopt any other workflow or SDK other than the one it has kept for the past 3 decades.

As a fun fact, gauge rendering in X-Plane and MSFS are not too different. X-Plane gauges are composited using OpenGL while MSFS provides a low level API with basic drawing functions which can be used for the same purpose. Therefore both X-Plane and MSFS can be used with various drawing libraries such as NanoVG and Cairo. Main difference between the two is the fact that gauge rendering in MSFS has to be done in CPU due to the sandboxing while in X-Plane it can be done in GPU (or any other hardware capable of rendering for that matter) as well, potentially improving performance. Another difference is the fact that MSFS supports HTML5 gauges which is very beginner-friendly and has lots of resources. In the end I would say neither is superior to each other, they are just different and have different strengths & weaknesses.

Therefore I agree with your point - given X-Plane developers are already pretty used to the development workflow of X-Plane, it would be an awful idea to change that, especially given the fact neither is superior to each other. It takes a lot of time to get used to a new development workflow, which is another reason why MSFS airliners are taking quite a while. The same would very likely happen with X-Plane too, with all developers having to start from scratch.

2 hours ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

Just curious, what is the issue with this type of dithering in VR? As long as dithering matrix indices are kept separately for each eye the result should be identical

It would depend how good it is done and the material it is dithering of course, but usually, because it is a fixed screen space dithering, it might not be as good in VR when moving the head vs on a fixed monitor. Furthermore, like white noise, it is not easily filterable and in my opinion could increase aliasing, or conversely, the dithering effect could be partially reduced too much, because of the post-processing happening further down the stack in VR after the submitting the dithered image (motion smoothing, view warping, etc...). I'll tell you more about the alternative once I'm done coding and testing it though!

Edited February 11, 20224 yr by RXP

2 hours ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

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.

Don't bother with IL-2, I believe the flight dynamics in XP12 can be enough to keep us satisfied...

I feel a bit dumb when I go playing a combat simulation game... but the aircraft feel so realistic in that WW1/2 sim... 🙂

Edited February 11, 20224 yr by jcomm

9 minutes ago, jcomm said:

I feel a bit dumb when I go playing a combat simulation game... but the aircraft feel so realistic in that WW1/2 sim... 

Who cares if it is technically classified as a game, what matters is realism, so it is anything but dumb.

10 minutes ago, jcomm said:

Don't bother with IL-2, I believe the flight dynamics in XP12 can be enough to keep us satisfied...

Flight dynamics of X-Plane 11 already satisfies me. What I'm not satisfied with is the add-ons, I desperately need a ProSim level A320. My biggest hope right now is Fenix A320 as it is literally ProSim, but it is still not out yet.

I'm also still not happy with clouds overall - MSFS, DCS, X-Plane 12 etc. all have really nice volumetric clouds but they still look very artificial and lack many features of real clouds. Technology simply hasn't advanced to the point of rendering realistic clouds at real time. Hopefully it will be possible in next 15 years.

20 hours ago, BiologicalNanobot said:

Who cares if it is technically classified as a game, what matters is realism, so it is anything but dumb.

Flight dynamics of X-Plane 11 already satisfies me. What I'm not satisfied with is the add-ons, I desperately need a ProSim level A320. My biggest hope right now is Fenix A320 as it is literally ProSim, but it is still not out yet.

I'm also still not happy with clouds overall - MSFS, DCS, X-Plane 12 etc. all have really nice volumetric clouds but they still look very artificial and lack many features of real clouds. Technology simply hasn't advanced to the point of rendering realistic clouds at real time. Hopefully it will be possible in next 15 years.

P3D Enhanced Atmospherics look good but the lighting needs tinkered with to get satisfactory.

On 1/14/2022 at 7:25 PM, Doering said:

Forgive me for not looking deeper for a release date, but has a rough date been set? Within the next month? Summer or winter of this year?

EDIT : Just noticed post above guessing at June. So we are a way out!

You really took note of that guess following the torrent of negativity about absolutely everything?  

21 minutes ago, MrBitstFlyer said:

You really took note of that guess following the torrent of negativity about absolutely everything?  

I wasn’t paying attention to negativity or positivity within the thread, just wanted an estimate whether the release was near or far away. Nothing more.

It's going to be a lot later than June for the official 12.00 release given they're still in early alpha

2 hours ago, Doering said:

I wasn’t paying attention to negativity or positivity within the thread, just wanted an estimate whether the release was near or far away. Nothing more.

He doesn't know.

On 2/12/2022 at 7:09 PM, Gary1124 said:

P3D Enhanced Atmospherics look good but the lighting needs tinkered with to get satisfactory.

Enhanced Atmospherics is one of my favorite implementations too, but it suffers from the same issues with other implementations I mentioned - lack of detail and inaccurate lighting.

Edited February 18, 20224 yr by BiologicalNanobot