xEnviro 1.20 out for XP12

[GalaioSilva 13]

14 hours ago, Cameron XA said:

A big warning to anyone that wants to purchase this:

The method in which xEnviro is trying to inject these clouds is highly frowned upon and will break with EVERY new version/update of X-Plane. Laminar has made this clear and made warnings to developers they are optimizing the Vulkan layers going forward. It will be a very similar situation to how shaders are re-compiled at each XP update.

You risk this purchase breaking all the time should you purchase it, which will then cause you to rely on the developer updating it again. Of course, if you already own xEnviro then your risk is minimal since your money has already been spent.

Cameron, in this perspective, we can expect skymaxx not being ported to xp12 too?

[Sims Smith 303]

15 hours ago, julian2 said:

I don't get any clouds displayed with xe12. Does anyones has the same issue in xplane12?

You have to enable it from the Plugin Menu.  If you still don't see any clouds then send an emal to support at xenviro.net and request for product activation.  

[Sims Smith 303]

I was one of the biggest critics of xEnviro back in XP11 early days.  To their credit the final state of xEnviro for XP11 was AMAZING.  It was a game changer.  It took many years to get the money worth it. 

I am glad they are attempting to bring it to XP12. Nobody should discourage any developer from developing in XP12.  xEnviro should really sell it as a "donation" ware for now to tame people's expectation.  This is the kind of unique project is what is needed to push Laminar to open up the X-Plane SDK more.  

I personally won't use it in XP12 for now because I am already struggling with default XP12 FPS.   However, excited to see developer pushing for new limits! 

[fur0r3 0]

13 hours ago, Ralf Maylin said:

I owned it, so I installed it without any risk. As I don’t fly default aircraft, I had no problem downgrading XP to the last stable release. Wow, a new world, clouds look so nice and realistic, at least to me. Turbulence feels better to me and I can edit the level of it. Weather is like reported. No more surprise like before, XP weather often is different from METAR reports, that lead to my one and only Challenger accident. 
Cameron is right. New versions of XP will make it not usable. 
Until then, I use it and like it. Let’s see what happens. Would I spent money on it now? No, I don’t think so. But as a customer, it’s for free, at least it fells like that.

It's true that major updates to X-Plane 12 can sometimes break an update, and Laminar has indeed warned about this. However, this isn't a new occurrence, as it has happened with many updates in the past. The nature of Vulkan and Laminar not providing the xEnviro team access to the platform might increase the chances of a break in some cases, but the xEnviro team will adapt and resolve any issues that come up. So, while it's important to be aware of these potential issues, it will still be safe to purchase xEnviro for X-Plane.

[MrBitstFlyer 3,894]

7 hours ago, Sims Smith said:

However, excited to see developer pushing for new limits!

Agreed, always good to see developers creating new, or updating apps.  However, so far with XEnviro, I haven't seen my fps climb above 19.900 when I'm stable around 40fps without it.

[Cameron XA 272]

On 4/22/2023 at 3:51 AM, GalaioSilva said:

Cameron, in this perspective, we can expect skymaxx not being ported to xp12 too?

The easy answer is "no." The more complicated one is "perhaps." Right now Laminar is still figuring things out, and they are understandably cautious to open too much up in terms of the SDK due to how low level Vulkan is. For the time being, the answer from Laminar is mostly a no, with a slight chance after things settle down. We aren't banking on it.

Adding a Vulkan hook like xEnviro is doing is not an option in our book. It is too risky to both have a chance at killing a product at any moment for time invested to create it, and also unfair to customers knowing that we are putting them in that kind of a risk for their cash.

 

On 4/22/2023 at 4:44 PM, fur0r3 said:

However, this isn't a new occurrence, as it has happened with many updates in the past. The nature of Vulkan and Laminar not providing the xEnviro team access to the platform might increase the chances of a break in some cases, but the xEnviro team will adapt and resolve any issues that come up.

This is not the same situation as any add-on. And it's also not a matter of "might". It's a matter of WILL break xEnviro with every X-Plane update. I would not call that "safe" to purchase if you care about updating your simulator. It's also a secondary risk even for versions of X-Plane it is patched for, because the rendering engine in X-Plane can do re-ordering and optimizing on the fly starting in 12.06.

Edited April 24, 2023 by Cameron XA

[blingthinger 649]

10 hours ago, Cameron XA said:

X-Plane can do re-ordering and optimizing on the fly starting in 12.06.

That's... a lot of pipelines to build/compile. Or are they already jumping into VK_EXT_shader_object??? Or maybe AMD is going to announce an equivalent to NV's SER? The mind wanders. Regardless, this sounds like a few more FPSes are coming.

[Cameron XA 272]

1 hour ago, blingthinger said:

this sounds like a few more FPSes are coming.

This part is the goal. I can't say more than that and will leave Laminar to announce what they deem okay. 🙂

As of now groundwork is simply being laid.