Interesting Austin interview

[mSparks 2,092]

7 minutes ago, rka said:

Have you offered your help to LR? Looks like they could use it, no?

I do what I can, XP is a passion/hobby.

https://github.com/mSparks43/747-400/releases/tag/2.4

https://github.com/mSparks43/XTLua

https://github.com/mSparks43/XPlane-11-AutoATC-plugin/

But mostly my free time is too busy with

 

Edited September 25, 2022 by mSparks

[Mike44 22]

Dangerous low flying... Your military service?

[mSparks 2,092]

19 minutes ago, Mike44 said:

Dangerous low flying... Your military service?

When your instructor is a fully qualified test pilot you get to do fun stuff like that. I get some time in flying from the left seat, he gets to show what he does for a day job.

 

[pryoski 84]

On 9/24/2022 at 9:58 AM, blingthinger said:

Even his devs readily acknowledge that the sim core is still highly single threaded.

Not according to Open Hardware Monitor Report I ran on my PC. It might pay to do a bit of fact checking.
BTW, Open Hardware Monitor is a free and useful tool.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

+- Intel Core i7-4790K (/intelcpu/0)

|  +- CPU Total      :  93.1641  15.9585      100 (/intelcpu/0/load/0)
|  +- CPU Core #1    :    93.75  18.8864      100 (/intelcpu/0/load/1)
|  +- CPU Core #2    :  96.0938  27.3438      100 (/intelcpu/0/load/2)
|  +- CPU Core #3    :    93.75  7.03125      100 (/intelcpu/0/load/3)
|  +- CPU Core #4    :  89.0625  5.46875      100 (/intelcpu/0/load/4)

Edited September 25, 2022 by pryoski
spelling

[mSparks 2,092]

Add all that aside, on the topic of the OP, pretty much agree with everything he said. 

Scenery priority = airports and water

Flight sim priority = first and foremost everything flight safety, "everything about operating an airplane + failures"

"I can see my house" = well yeah, nothing wrong with that, but so far from important from simulating flight its not a priority, "not what you use a plane for" = "not what you use X-Plane for"

GPU compute = yeah baby, especially water simulation

 

 

[blingthinger 649]

2 hours ago, pryoski said:

Not according to Open Hardware Monitor Report I ran on my PC. I might pay to do a bit of fact checking.
BTW, Open Hardware Monitor is a free and useful tool.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

+- Intel Core i7-4790K (/intelcpu/0)

|  +- CPU Total      :  93.1641  15.9585      100 (/intelcpu/0/load/0)
|  +- CPU Core #1    :    93.75  18.8864      100 (/intelcpu/0/load/1)
|  +- CPU Core #2    :  96.0938  27.3438      100 (/intelcpu/0/load/2)
|  +- CPU Core #3    :    93.75  7.03125      100 (/intelcpu/0/load/3)
|  +- CPU Core #4    :  89.0625  5.46875      100 (/intelcpu/0/load/4)

Very interesting. Is this constant during a normal flight? Or did you check once that also happened to be during a scenery load? I have good memories of my 4790k...that died on me a year ago! It was a good horse!

[blingthinger 649]

6 hours ago, jcomm said:

Checking the resource monitor shows a completely heaven use of all 6 cores, less #2, and I guess that if I reenable SMT the 12 cores will get busy with MFS running...

The REinstaller?? 🙂 Wait...have you heard that one before?

Here's what's lost on most people. XP12 gfx engine is on par with the competition, at the least. And in some cases is doing even more. It's providing reasonable FPS while still an early beta. And it's doing it on 1.5 core's worth (on my system) of CPU usage. It's an insanely efficient sim core already. Like "holy @#$&" efficient.

The multithreading will come. Maybe we should pitch in on a case of beer for Ben/Sidney to accelerate that process....

[jcomm 5,974]

3 minutes ago, blingthinger said:

The REinstaller?? 🙂 Wait...have you heard that one before?

Here's what's lost on most people. XP12 gfx engine is on par with the competition, at the least. And in some cases is doing even more. It's providing reasonable FPS while still an early beta. And it's doing it on 1.5 core's worth (on my system) of CPU usage. It's an insanely efficient sim core already. Like "holy @#$&" efficient.

The multithreading will come. Maybe we should pitch in on a case of beer for Ben/Sidney to accelerate that process....

Good TAG !!! REinstaller 🙂

I had just posted about my last finding regarding SMT with XP12 :

 

 

[2reds2whites 827]

On 9/25/2022 at 12:51 PM, mSparks said:

Add all that aside, on the topic of the OP, pretty much agree with everything he said. 

Scenery priority = airports and water

Flight sim priority = first and foremost everything flight safety, "everything about operating an airplane + failures"

"I can see my house" = well yeah, nothing wrong with that, but so far from important from simulating flight its not a priority, "not what you use a plane for" = "not what you use X-Plane for"

 

 

 

 

On 9/25/2022 at 8:57 AM, mSparks said:

I do what I can, XP is a passion/hobby.

https://github.com/mSparks43/747-400/releases/tag/2.4

https://github.com/mSparks43/XTLua

https://github.com/mSparks43/XPlane-11-AutoATC-plugin/

But mostly my free time is too busy with

 

I wonder if you see the irony in saying that scenery isn't a priority, whilst then posting videos of you being a passenger in a low-level VFR flight away from an airport?

As for it being a flying simulator, not a driving simulator, wasn't this video being celebrated a couple of weeks ago, which looks at road level features?

 

If X-plane isn't a driving simulator, why are they inserting road signs?

Of course the bottom line is that the comment from Austin is absolute guff. I haven't flown with a single pilot in my entire career who wouldn't put scenery at or near the absolute top of the list. In fact for large jet flying I'd suggest that people might actually enjoy the scenery more than they do physically flying the aircraft. It's one of the absolute joys of commercial aviation, let alone VFR stuff which is absolutely dependent on it. 

Scenery needs to be at the absolute top of the XP12 priority list, by a huge margin. 

Edited October 2, 2022 by 2reds2whites

[Sethos 4,499]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZwWJbCzXuTY&t=180s

"One of my requirements to the scenery generators, is that the roads be good enough to work for a driving simulator"

 

 

[mSparks 2,092]

2 hours ago, 2reds2whites said:

I wonder if you see the irony in saying that scenery isn't a priority, whilst then posting videos of you being a passenger in a low-level VFR flight away from an airport?

I don't, because Austin is talking about Laminars priority - what they are investing their time into.

I absolutely do not want to see Laminar competing with say OrbX, I want to see them both excel at what they excel at.

I do want to see - hardly wait tbh - what OrbX can do applying the tools Laminar are building into the sim to create default high fidelity airports to the surrounding areas, they have a high bar to match, because sim heaven + cloudless ortho is already pretty good and has been for years.

[Murmur 3,944]

8 hours ago, 2reds2whites said:

Of course the bottom line is that the comment from Austin is absolute guff. I haven't flown with a single pilot in my entire career who wouldn't put scenery at or near the absolute top of the list. In fact for large jet flying I'd suggest that people might actually enjoy the scenery more than they do physically flying the aircraft. It's one of the absolute joys of commercial aviation, let alone VFR stuff which is absolutely dependent on it. 

Scenery needs to be at the absolute top of the XP12 priority list, by a huge margin. 

I don't want to downplay the importance of scenery, and in fact I too think scenery improvements should be the priority for LR in this moment (but Austin himself should keep focusing on further improving the realism of the simulation, since he's not the one responsible for the scenery!)

True, scenery is 80% of what sells a flight sim, but things are much more nuanced than that. The priorities of a real pilot using a flight sim for entertainment might not be the same of a flight simmer. The fact that study level aircraft (in particular airliners) are the top selling addons, is proof that in fact, for many simmers, the major enjoyment is precisely flying the aircraft (again, not saying the scenery is not important at all).

During the years I held various opinions on this matter. Now I think that what makes flight so fascinating for me (and I'm sure my view is shared by many fellow flight simmers), is the intrinsic "magic" there's in it. Your house appears the same whether you're looking at it from the top of a mountain or from the cockpit of a Cessna, and yet only the latter has that magic element in it. For this reason, a subset of simmers (like me or @jcomm) may appear so fixated on details like flight models, physics and such, because virtually recreating those physical laws that allow that "magic" to happen can make or break the illusion of flying, in a way, more that pretty scenery. In XP11, I had some of the most immersive moments simply flying the helicopters, even when the scenery might have been disappointing. And for the same reason, I lost  more immersion when encountering unrealistic flaws in the flight model (XP's not perfect either) than when looking at its Lego autogen houses.

Obviously Austin's words are also, in good part, marketing for XP. But not only. Competing with the unlimited resources of MS is very hard, but since XP already has multiple advantages on operational realism, Austin and LR decided to pursue that path too, to keep its edge. While trying at the same time to keep improving the visuals and scenery, for as much as their resources allow. And every additional 59.99$ help with that.