Installed today and finished first flight. During the last days of XP11 it’s eventually usable. If you already own it, it’s time for an upgrade. 

Does ir work ok with xp12? If so what are the main enhancements in xp12?

No, it is XP11 only. Switching to 12 as soon as the Challenger is 12-ready.

Well, today their MFS port was announced.

I didn't know about it, and I never bought their product, but at their facebook apparently they said something about LR not oppening the SDK in XP12 for the type of functionalities they need to implement...

 

Which I think is unjust, xp12 isn’t out of beta yet. 
If I remember correctly, LR is planning to provide a SDK in the future.

SDK will come, yes, but as Ben has stated, weather access is the "elephant in the room". Everybody knows it's radically different, and I doubt LR has fully decided on what to make public.

https://developer.x-plane.com/2022/09/x-plane-12-early-access-is-here/

xEnviro themselves:

"Laminar Research has closed off all access to the platform by not giving access to the 3D draw callback, depth buffer and so on. X-Plane 11 was already limiting us and thus demanded a lot on performance to work.
Especially when Vulkan was released, and our dynamic seasons got abruptly cut off. 

However. We are in a dialogue with Austin on the matter, and I am optimistic that we will find a solution to our limited access so that we can release 1.18 in XP12."

https://forum.thresholdx.net/topic/3538-117-development/page/3/

Edited October 23, 20223 yr by blingthinger

37 minutes ago, jcomm said:

Well, today their MFS port was announced.

I didn't know about it, and I never bought their product, but at their facebook apparently they said something about LR not oppening the SDK in XP12 for the type of functionalities they need to implement...

 

The team at Xenviro has always wanted to be on the forefront when it comes to implementing new features and technology on the X-plane platform so much so before LR has a chance to get their ducks in the row with the sim.  That's why it really doesn't surprise me that LR is keeping the SDK close since they are still doing things to the weather system and there are performance tweaks to consider. Once they are satisfy with how they have things, only then can I see them opening up the SDK. The question is how much will they allow to be open given certain things like current weather data sharing and historical data needed to 3P at this point.

Edited October 23, 20223 yr by BobFS88

Don't ask me to find it right now, but I'm positive I've read from Ben Supnik (or some other developer, probably in the dev blog or its comments) that opening weather access to 3rd parties is definitely planned for XP12.

I agree w/ @BobFS88 and am very curious to see exactly what gets opened up in the SDK.

As I read xenviro's statement, they can still do at least some of the drawing of clouds, etc. but it comes at a high computational cost because they have to do their own depth buffer calcs, which is essentially doing some of the expensive labor twice over. Translucency causes an abundance of complications, especially in a deferred renderer. I'm not surprised they have fully cut off that access.

They also have never been given direct access to the Vulkan functions (nobody has that) and have to go through an OpenGL layer first which is further lag (who knows what that does to AMD GPU users right now).

That said, v12 might have cut down even further for the types of things xenviro is trying to achieve. E.g. maybe the weather can't be totally turned off like it could in 11? You'd need that to do what these 3rd party weather engines are doing.

Basic stuff like weather shouldn't require add-ons to begin with. People need to change their mindset. I really want Laminar to improve their default weather engine so that we don't have to use any 3rd party add-ons. I am so done with that. We need to be patient with Laminar and let them do their work. Let this be a new beginning for Xplane 12 where you don't have spend 100s of dollars for various tweaks and add-ons. Look at msfs. They still haven't opened up their weather engine to 3rd parties after 2 years. They don't even plan to.