Honestly, XP12 scenery is not looking bad at all.

[GoranM 3,772]

8 hours ago, DD_Arthur said:

A quick search of YouTube (a la' mSparks) seems to indicate it's a frame rate hog too.

I did a quick search of youtube,  (a la' mSparks), and found this.  (Don't worry, I time stamped it.). Looks butter smooth to me.  Even with weather, rain, high density scenery.  So I'm not sure what videos you're looking at for you to claim it's a framerate hog.  As a matter of fact, you're literally the first person I have seen, since we released it a year ago, to make that statement.  Every single comment I've seen, from reddit, to Facebook, to youtube, has had people say, for the complexity and detail, it's surprisingly excellent on framerates.  Perhaps you could share a link or 2, so we can see what you're talking about?  I'd be most interested.  Please, take all the time you need.  I'm more than happy to wait.  Or are you just trolling?

 

Edited January 9, 2023 by GoranM

[UrgentSiesta 932]

51 minutes ago, mSparks said:

There is an implicit assumption here that "doing it" is not limited by:

The hardware it needs to run on

The operating system it needs to run on (last week for me was finding out all the reasons windows not supporting forking is a much bigger issue than even I realised)

The functionality provided by the simulator itself

and the tools available to leverage the functionality of the simulator.

even when that comes down to the more "obscure" tools like the recent .for exporter for XP12 (keeping it very much on topic)

https://github.com/X-Plane/XPlaneForExporter

Its not as unfair to say XP12 is light years ahead as it first seems, every other sim is effectively "dead in the water", crippled by the environment they need to work in, as Laminar and 3rd parties surge ahead at light speed.

More on topic than the aircraft available now, Has a toolchain for developing highly realistic forests in blender even entered the mindset yet of another sim? let alone be in use right now doing exactly that. Not even Unreal Engine has such tools...

The grass in

came from a scenery dev abusing that exporter, it also blows in the wind....

Laminar want and expect better...

I don't believe this is actually the case.

The evidence is that XP, MSFS, P3D and DCSW all run well and look good on my rig, and roughly the same FPS per "unit of graphic effects".

Generally speaking, I get better performance out of MSFS since DX12/etc (in that I can have higher graphics settings per FPS), plus the fact that, like XP, there's a lot of invisible calculations going on for complex weather and scenery, etc. (unlike DCSW and P3D).

IMHO, XP is well balanced in that regard - delivering very good visual effects and FPS. And it's easy to say that it performs MUCH better than v11 in that regard.

It is true that one of XPs undeniable strengths is rapid development WITH high fidelity, and extensibility. But I expect that of an environment as mature as XP.

Similarly, according to many of the MSFS devs, the tools available over there are indeed limited AND poorly documented. But again, that is something I expect of an environment as immature as MSFS.

In terms of "blowing grass", I might be missing the point, but that was in the first trailer of MSFS years ago, and IIRC, I believe it's in DCSW as well, along with blowing trees, etc.

My observation is that all the sims have made substantive and significant improvements in just the last few years. Each is focused on a somewhat different subset of flight simmers, and that tends to show in the order in which the advancements appear.

And again, ALL are rapidly advancing and none are dead in the water. We'll have to see what becomes of P3D v6+ due to (again) the priorities of the publisher & their primary customers, but I'm sure they're bringing more improvements as they did with each previous version.

Edited January 9, 2023 by UrgentSiesta
spelling

[mSparks 2,086]

1 hour ago, UrgentSiesta said:

The evidence is that XP, MSFS, P3D and MSFS all run well and look good on my rig, and roughly the same FPS per "unit of graphic effects".

That says nothing about what was involved in making that the case.

1 hour ago, UrgentSiesta said:

But again, that is something I expect of an environment as immature as MSFS.

I reject that on the grounds microsoft flight simulator is older than xplane, msfs certainly isnt their first rodeo.

DCS maybe, Microsoft have no such excuse.

1 hour ago, UrgentSiesta said:

My observation is that all the sims have made substantive and significant improvements in just the last few years.

On that I absolutely agree, pretty much exactly the basis for my first response to the light years comment on the first page.

1 hour ago, UrgentSiesta said:

ALL are rapidly advancing and none are dead in the water. We'll have to see what becomes of P3D v6+ due to (again) the priorities of the publisher & their primary customers, but I'm sure they're bringing more improvements as they did with each previous version.

A perfectly rationale, reasonable, and "obvious" statement that I wouldn't have doubted for a second, before Goran said;

On 1/7/2023 at 1:23 PM, GoranM said:

 This is yet, another reason, why X-Plane is light years ahead of the competition, and IMO, is running laps around the competition.

And, even if it was partly in jest, I started to question it. 

If Hotstart are running at lightspeed, VSL are running at ludicrous speed, and I cant question their quality, their R44 (admittedly with the additional robi govornor tweak I posted in here xxxx ago) is lightyears ahead of anything I achieved from not insignificant effort trying to get one to fly right.

They also posted

2 years ago.

And suddenly its not quite hyperbole to say xplane is lightyears ahead of any other flightsim in doing ground handling...

Its not even a criticism of any other sim, it doesnt mean the others are bad or dont have areas they excel in,

BeamNg, lightyears ahead of any sim in crash physics, graphics and scenery to make even the top end AAA games bottom squeek:

yes?

But once you fully shed the baggage that XP12s scenery is not looking that bad - even that its actually looking good, you really start to notice that XP12 is really excelling at everything else.

lost count of the number of times I heard on the org "xplane is not a crash simulator"... ok, but like it does that well to (I'd like better), and has since well before I recorded this 2 years ago

when the only comment was "the sim looks like its from 2005"....

 

 

Edited January 9, 2023 by mSparks

[Bjoern 1,157]

23 hours ago, coastaldriver said:

That is quite possible the image was provided on another forum by a member of the MSFS cult! I happened to have done the same flight in P3DV5 at the time so had a comparison, the XP12 shot is just for again to compare - scenery yes but the models more so!

Well, if the screenshot isn't yours, it may very well be that there was something like Reshade at play. MSFS just can't look that much out of place.

 

23 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

This is far more true for P3D. The lighting difference between the addons and the World is fairly stark. And the overall lighting is rather wan and evokes winter skies at high latitudes regardless of in-sim location.

I don't really consider P3D a viable competitor as to me, it's basically still a 64 bit FSX with preinstalled ORBX and volumetric clouds. Not much thought given to lighting except dulling everything down from FSX' bubble gum look.

 

 

17 hours ago, mSparks said:

BeamNg, lightyears ahead of any sim in crash physics, graphics and scenery to make even the top end AAA games bottom squeek:

...

Beam.NG is great! Finally a racing sim where the main point is simply making it to the finish line without a lot of damage instead of being first.

Edited January 9, 2023 by Bjoern

[UrgentSiesta 932]

On 1/8/2023 at 3:16 PM, mSparks said:

VSL are running at ludicrous speed

...snip...

2 years ago.

This thread is about, and I quote, "...XP12 scenery is not looking bad...".

And OP is right, and has the comparison shot to prove it.

But we all know that when it comes to scenery, XP isn't "light years ahead", nor is it "running laps around" anything (despite the very cool burnouts in the above video 🙂 ). On the scenery front, XP isn't even on par with #1, let alone ahead or (lmao!) "lapping" the competition.

Scenery quality vs the competition is the number one biggest complaint against XP, even (especially?) v12. And you can tell that LR are taking it seriously just by the upgrades in v12.00b, and in the subsequent updates, and in the hires and public commentary they're finally having around it...

So let's not even try to delude ourselves in this regard. We'd only be making fools of ourselves, and giving ammo to the fools from the other forums to make fun of us (and we'd deserve it).

XP v12 has plenty of great features, and several where it is indeed #1 or at least nearly so. So if we want to cheerlead, let's do it in discussions about those advantages instead of XP's actual handicap.

 

[mSparks 2,086]

7 hours ago, UrgentSiesta said:

But we all know that when it comes to scenery, XP isn't "light years ahead"

Well, It would be wrong to say XPs scenery is light years ahead of the competition...

But I suspect a very large number of people think its behind.

More like wrt to scenery it is pasecs ahead of everything (1 parsec = 3.26 light years)....

The closest competitor is unigine.. and thats $100,000+ for similar functionality..

It lacks mesh shaders - which will come "soon^tm" - that makes it visually inferior up close and personal to anything with mesh shaders, but the "under the hood" tech, that turns a few tens of GBs of data into pretty much by the millimetre precision for the entire globe at 150fps+ is simply unmatched by any other software anywhere.

Edited January 10, 2023 by mSparks

[Murmur 3,944]

31 minutes ago, mSparks said:

It lacks mesh shaders - which will come "soon^tm" - that makes it visually inferior up close and personal to anything with mesh shaders

Would that be dynamic LOD for terrain? That could improve terrain and mountains look tremendously.

Did LR ever mention they intend to implement something similar to that?

 

[blingthinger 649]

51 minutes ago, Murmur said:

 

 

I think this is an example of a tesselator shader which is a bit different. 

AFIK, mesh shaders (hate the fact that the word 'shader' is still used at this point in gfx dev) are essentially a more generic programmable GPU compute construct that doesn't bind the dev into using certain VRAM and parallel computing constructs that are the default for the old school vertex/geometry shaders. 

Kind of like the opengl vs vulkan scenario: more hand-holding/less performance vs. flexibility/more performance (if the dev does it right).

Edited January 10, 2023 by blingthinger

[blingthinger 649]

1 hour ago, Murmur said:

Did LR ever mention they intend to implement something similar to that?

Confirmed here:

https://timur.hu/blog/2022/mesh-and-task-shaders#:~:text=awareness of primitives.-,Mesh shader vs.,a small indexed triangle list.

The author's a notable figure right now in the linux gfx driver world.

"The problem with the traditional vertex processing pipeline is that it is mainly designed assuming several fixed-function hardware units in the GPU and offers very little flexibility for the user to customize it."

Tesselator shaders are actually a fixed-function routine that modifies the number of triangles on the fly as you approach geometry. It's literally remeshing the surfaces and moving the points in space to provide more detail along the way like your LOD example. Tesselators are obvious because you can actually see the (eg mountain) surface morphing as you approach. I think right now XP does a translucent blending thing in which the distant low res ground surface gradually goes fully transparent and is replaced with the hi res mesh.

[mSparks 2,086]

1 hour ago, Murmur said:

Would that be dynamic LOD for terrain?

 

1 hour ago, Murmur said:

Did LR ever mention they intend to implement something similar to that?

They have code, its not working yet.

[mSparks 2,086]

On 1/8/2023 at 11:36 PM, UrgentSiesta said:

I'm just fine with "needing" some Ortho/TrueEarth as the icing on top. 🙂

Of course, for up close and personal its well worth the SDD space. not quite 100% perfect yet, I find the roads quite jarring when looking up close, but not bad at all.

[Pe11e 812]

4 hours ago, mSparks said:

Of course, for up close and personal its well worth the SDD space. not quite 100% perfect yet, I find the roads quite jarring when looking up close, but not bad at all.

That's why I used the tweak to make the vector roads invisible. 🙂
Not sure I can do it when using Autoortho though.

[Tork_Curve 27]

On 1/8/2023 at 9:47 PM, mSparks said:

Dont think I would say there are lots of them. certainly not really seen any kind of evidence to say there is even much more than a few.

the view from a real world cockpit anywhere in the world.

Nah. What we are all missing is what we want from the sim. Ive been an MSFS user for years and the latest is great. Ive started dabbling with X plane 12 and it does have some real positives. The flight model feels very nice, although there are some cracking 3rd party aircraft for MS which rival them (the daher). But the wekaness for me is that i predominantly fly low level VFR and in MSFS i can recog ise landmarks i use in a real plane in the real world and navigate by them....not a chance with xplane unfortunately. Roads and hills can look awful at low level. And it needs some serious optimisation (and much more granular graphics options to help that). If they can improve the low level look of it, THEN its game on.

[Tork_Curve 27]

Of course to balance out both sims weaknesses. MSFS is 2 years down the line and asobo still havent realised thst most of the world do pressure settings in hp and not inches of mercury 😑 

[mSparks 2,086]

40 minutes ago, Tork_Curve said:

not a chance with xplane unfortunately.

Then you need more practice, because you need to be able to keep track of where you are, using only a map like

in only 3SM visibility.

And that is easier in X-Plane than it is in the real world (because rivers dont have river banks, and the roads are not nearly always hidden by trees)

Edited January 13, 2023 by mSparks