1 hour ago, Fielder said:

I've never run any paid version of XP before. May I ask if 'ortho' scenery is free to download? I have a spare  NVMe 1 TB SSD sitting around doing nothing. I could plug it in to USB using a $10 adapter.

Yes it's free.  You just have to download it and process all of it yourself.

2 hours ago, Fielder said:

May I ask if 'ortho' scenery is free to download?

You're going to have to wait if you want ortho+3D water. And it could be a while. The tool (ortho4xp) that a majority of people have used in the past to generate their own ortho or generate tiles for others to download, hasn't been updated yet. LR has declared that it will be updated though.

Edited September 7, 20223 yr by blingthinger

Realistically it will be 3 years (minimum) to to fix the bad. Things at LR happen slowly. Its going to be a long wait.

6 hours ago, skipph said:

Well, I was hesitant to buy this version, so I watched a few streams and videos put out by my particular favorite sources and there is a mixed consensus from all. Not surprising to say the least. So I purchased the download and flew a couple of circuits at a local airport that is familiar to me and I just could not get over what I was seeing for vfr scenery. XP-12, vanilla flavor, is just horrible for low and slow, and I mean I was not expecting the quality of MSFS, but neither was I expecting the low quality of scenery that was on parade in front of my eyes.  It was not even close to being a fair representation of the scenery in real life. I know there are other plus factors to 12, but I do not see the pluses making up for the minus things that are important to me. But I paid my $60.00 to support the effort and maybe Laminar can turn this part of the sim around before this goes to final release. I really want this XP 12 to succeed as I have a lot of recent addon purchases in 11 as well as future planes that I want to use in 12. Come on Laminar!  P.S. The new beaches around the ponds and lakes look like word not allowed. Not every body of water has 100% beach front around it. What are you thinking?

The beaches are a known problem. See release notes:  https://www.x-plane.com/kb/x-plane-12-00-release-notes/

 

I can see the cloud pulsing happening in real time on XP72's stream

My own observations below pertain only to the XP12 demo. I have not purchased the full XP12 program, which may behave very differently. My first purchase from LR was XP9, which I bought toward the end of its run -- and ran on an iMac. I was distressed to discover that there were no buildings at any of the airports I frequented in XP9. When XP10 came out a few months later, I excitedly purchased it, only to find there were still no buildings at any of the airports I visited. I do not own XP11, so if there are buildings at any of the default airports, I'll give credit where credit's due.

When I installed the demo last night for XP12, I thought I had somehow misconfigured the graphics settings or otherwise done something wrong. The lakes and roads looked like they had been drawn by a small child with a pencil and ruler. There were no gently-curving shorelines or highways -- just straight lines that abruptly changed their directions in a jagged way. The much-promoted clouds, even on their highest settings, don't look as good as the clouds in FSX from fifteen years ago, much less the clouds today in MSFS. Once off the ground, the entire scenery in the XP12 demo starts shimmering -- trees, autogen, water, everything. Again I thought I had misconfigured something. I raised the AA to 16, but that made no difference at all. I noticed, however, that there was no option for TAA like in MSFS. Perhaps I missed that or perhaps it's available in the full program.

I agree with others' observations about XP12 performance: that it is "adequate" but nothing special. Please recall that the performance observations made thus far have been in regard to performance with default XP12 scenery. When so-called "orthos" and Orbx and third-party aircraft are install as well, performance will almost certainly degrade to unusable on midrange systems. Despite the crude and sparse default scenery, performance of the XP12 demo is no where near the performance of the current MSFS (even with the DX12 enhancements temporarily removed) with MSFS's default scenery ten times as detailed and beautiful as XP12.

Several times over the past six months I've posted comments on various websites and on YouTube pointing out that the default ground scenery shown for XP12 was invariably obscured in the promo videos, even the video promoting the new scenery! The default XP12 scenery was either darkened, blurred, obscured by clouds, or speeded up by 10X so you couldn't see it clearly. We now know the reason for this concealment. Compare this evasiveness with the behavior of Asobo, which was pretty much blasting out dozens of photos and videos around the clock as release day for MSFS approached -- and long before that.

Finally, I want to address the use of "beta" to describe the commercial release of XP12. If the program you're selling is available to anyone who wants to buy it -- and if you're paying full price for it -- then you've just purchased the commercial release. I can't help feeling that the use of the term "beta" is going to be used as a catch-all excuse for all the problems with XP12. What about the clouds? It's just a beta remember. What about the blurry cockpits? It's just the beta. What about the shimmering effect everywhere? That's just the beta version.

 

8 hours ago, skipph said:

and I mean I was not expecting the quality of MSFS, but neither was I expecting the low quality of scenery that was on parade in front of my eyes.  It was not even close to being a fair representation of the scenery in real life.

...this is really the crux of it.  No artists can duplicate the scale of accurate portrayal of scenery that MSFS offers virtually worldwide. Yes artists can make more detail, every prettier detail, but they do not mimic reality on a giant scale like MSFS' streaming scenery offers.  And this is ginormous for immersion value.

41 minutes ago, David Mills said:

I have not purchased the full XP12 program, which may behave very differently.

The demo and full version behave identically. Regardless of the fact that it's an early-access beta version. The only difference is a lack of scenery outside of the KPDX region and a 15 min time limit for flight control operation. I wish M$ would have adopted the same concept. Fs2020 was/is a waste of $, and that's just compared to XP11.

 

43 minutes ago, David Mills said:

We now know the reason for this concealment.

This is no surprise. Unless one has been under a rock for the past year. It's never been a secret. It's called marketing. They were fully aware that people would throw fits online both to intentionally dissuade potential buyers as well as express full-on rage and displeasure at not seeing free and easy mid-grade ortho scenery streaming from the internet to their eyeballs. Why "poke" those "bears" unnecessarily early on? They'll wake eventually.

In fact, the rants about the FPS of a beta version undergoing active development of bleeding-edge graphics, on what is now last-gen PC hardware, were fully expected. Reactions like this happen when pushing boundaries. It's a common "first-world-problems" category of response.

The Bad:

1. The shimmering bug.

2. The OpenStreetMap data is not cutting it anymore for XP. To many sharp angles. The rivers, coastlines, look terrible. I guess I was using ortho for so long that I forgot what the default looked like.  

Everything else is good enough and will get better with time.    

The other elephant in the room: you cannot release a 'new' simulator in the year '22 or '23 and not have DLSS.

Its laughable, they posted so many videos and info about what they where doing, and all you do is raise up what they said they where not doing.

1. Roads. Austin said to have all those lovely accurate curves is a huge FPS hit, what is it you want. Nice roads or decent FPS. Its being worked on to find a compromise.

2. They did state on airport textures where getting an  upgrade, that appears to be done.

3. Beta @David Mills Yes its a beta early release, and sensible developer would tell you its impossible with a small group to find all the bugs, What did they call it, Early release Beta. They didnt hide anything.

4. They did a really good job of off loading stuff to the GPU, no one cares about that. not a single comment on job well done, just Xplane bashing ever where I turn, even with the streamers who hadnt even bothered to read any of the release info.

5. 3D trees popping textures, there are aware off, again going to take time, but you can go back to the improved 2d trees if you like.

6. Beaches improved but that too is going to take a whole bunch of terrain data fixes to improve the square bits.

But its really no fun coming here, if one came here with a smile on there face they could only leave in despair. I have never seeing so many nay sayers in one forum. And If i get banned for life, id be glad never to set foot in here ever again.

 

Sorry Admins, But the life has really gone out of this forum. Has for years.

I will purchase it but I will wait a bit. Needs some work with Anti Aliasing. Always good to have another option and the Zibo is very good.

Edited September 7, 20223 yr by jbdbow1970

12 minutes ago, Greazer said:

The other elephant in the room: you cannot release a 'new' simulator in the year '22 or '23 and not have DLSS.

You can and they did. 3 Years you said, See you than.

I really laugh at the assymetry shown in many posts in this thread. 

XP12 launches in early release: gets blown to pieces.

MSFS launches as a complete product and we were given an early beta (at best):  "how dare you have so little faith in MSFS/Asobo?! It's a 10 year project!" 

Two years later, and I still want to have the MSFS I was promised and paid for according to the marketing videos. 

So... let Laminar Research do their thing, they are more than capable.

Those of us who are honest and well-intentioned towards having an XP12 available in our hobby can only benefit from this.

Those of you who bought it only to "prove your point". Your job is done. Now go back to your sim of choice and let the rest of us enjoy the ride towards a mature XP12.

 

Edited September 7, 20223 yr by evaamo

2 minutes ago, evaamo said:

I really laugh at the assymetry shown in many posts in this thread. 

XP12 launches in early release: gets blown to pieces.

MSFS launches as a complete product and we were given an early beta (at best):  how dare you have so little faith in MSFS/Asobo, it's a 10 year project!. 

Two years later, and I still want to have the MSFS I was promised and paid for according to the marketing videos. 

So... let Laminar Research do their thing, they are more than capable.

Those who of us who are honest and well-intentioned towards having an XP12 available in our hobby can only benefit from this.

Those of you who bought it only to "prove your point". Your job is done. Now go back to your sim of choice and let the rest of us enjoy the ride towards a mature XP12.

 

What's the point of this post. You don't think MSFS users or even P3D users are sitting on the sidelines and not seeing whats going on in front of them?

Edited September 7, 20223 yr by jbdbow1970