XP12.06.b4

[jcomm 5,952]

Hmmm, runways all have water patches in b4 ?

No matter where I place my aircraft here in Portuguese airfields, with high temps, clean skies, my runways are always "wet" 🙂 - it's a "mirage" effect 🙂

 

Edited August 6, 2023 by jcomm

[UKflyer 630]

28 minutes ago, jcomm said:

Hmmm, runways all have water patches in b4 ?

No matter where I place my aircraft here in Portuguese airfields, with high temps, clean skies, my runways are always "wet" 🙂

 

ha i also see when its raining the runway and ramp is dry.. . let's call it work in progress 😄

[UKflyer 630]

Dear LR, please can i have my money back as i wasn't sold a simulator to be this real!! 😄

 

Edited August 6, 2023 by UKflyer

[UrgentSiesta 936]

On 8/3/2023 at 7:00 PM, strider1 said:

DCS has the best volumetric clouds, hands down!

Not so much when it comes to the weather behind them...

It's "easy" to make pretty artwork, not so easy to do it procedurally based on IRL data.

[mSparks 2,088]

20 minutes ago, UrgentSiesta said:

Not so much when it comes to the weather behind them...

It's "easy" to make pretty artwork, not so easy to do it procedurally based on IRL data.

Today lighting struck outside my window, and in the sim as I flew over my house at exactly the same time.

LR gone got good at RW

[Gulfstream 416]

On 8/6/2023 at 1:50 PM, UKflyer said:

Dear LR, please can i have my money back as i wasn't sold a simulator to be this real!! 😄

 

The sky color in this image is extremely realistic.  There is still a banding issue but color-wise, I feel this is spot-on.  Whatever algorithm is being used for the lighting/atmospherics is impressve.

What's also impressive is that this is still being achieved with such a small team.  MSFS2024 reportedly has over 500 people working on it.  Not all developers, but still.

I can't imagine how you can keep pace with that ... but keep going.

Edited August 8, 2023 by Gulfstream

[coastaldriver 920]

The dynamics and scale of the whole sim is well brilliant! The light control is excellent over the entire light range and shading correct, No dark cockpit experiences. Sky cloud and layers is well very competently accomplished (Shows they are mastering the math behind this graphical display). Scenery well once they resolve the roads issue it will be an entirely plausible facsimile of the real world but always scalable due to the datapoint graphics display. The attention to dynamic and independent motion of objects is amazing. Trees sway in the wind and the wind sock points in the right direction along with the trees. Rain drops ripple out on tarmac puddles and the sea-land junction has believable opaqueness, Little things - building cranes that rotate, clock towers that keep time on the faces. Airport traffic wide and various - and all of it appropriately lit with fixed and rotating lights. Ground and airport environment lighting is well stunningly done. Again light management gives very impressive results at night. Runway slope and undulations duly visible and correct.

The night star map appears correct along with some planets location - no milky way but more than passable. 

I am seeing 80 FPS regularly and it only drops to about 45 FPS with a very dense airport or scenic environment and graphically demanding aircraft model, to see a computer based flight simulation program this good for the price and multi-platform functionality is well also amazing, 

Attention to detail - it is all there see here:

Edited August 8, 2023 by coastaldriver

[mSparks 2,088]

52 minutes ago, coastaldriver said:

once they resolve the roads issue

Oh, I didn't talk much about something I found there.

Road visibility is set in the roads.net and roads_EU.net files.

I was already using for a while a slightly modified version of xroads

https://forums.x-plane.org/index.php?/files/file/67227-xroads-transparent-roads-for-ortho4xp/

to still give the smaller roads, but with dark tarmac instead of light concrete. The issue was that they tended to AA badly into the distance, and otherwise still really stand out on the Ortho. much better for up close and personal tho.

Then I discovered this is because the smaller roads also have very high view distances (like 25km), I reduced this to 4km, and now have the best of both worlds, dark tarmac roads up close and personal, that fade nicely into the ortho in the distance.

Very happy (still looking forward to a proper solution from LR tho).

 

 

 

[Pe11e 812]

@coastaldriver

Not gonna lie, but it took me a couple of seconds to realize it's not a real world photo. Not joking. The lighting on that shot is just spot on!
What's the ICAO?

[Sethos 4,379]

Yeah, I'm usually the first to whip out ReShade for most simulators, because the default look is always a lukewarm experience -- Especially true with X-Plane 11.

However, X-Plane 12 just nails the natural look. Great tinting based on atmosphere / temperature, spot-on colours, saturated when sun is out, properly desaturated under cloudy conditions, sky colours are realistic, everything is just so beautifully dialed in.

[Biology 1,347]

On 8/4/2023 at 4:17 AM, Bob Scott said:

I have to strongly disagree here.  The near-field clouds still appear as if I was looking at them through glasses smeared with vaseline.  The lack of clear definition is pretty underwhelming.

Honestly this is a compromise of volumetric clouds that we all might end up having to accept. All volumetric cloud implementations, be it MSFS, DCS, X-Plane and even xEnviro lack detail when the clouds are viewed from up close. It's simply because the clouds are made from low-resolution noise and the raymarching for both rendering and lighting has to be done with so little samples. Increasing the noise resolution is not possible due to memory contraints, and increasing samples for raymarching is not possible due to speed constraints. Not only that, as the clouds are constructed from simple noise, the resulting large-scale structures often don't look realistic but only somewhat resemble clouds, So until GPUs are around 5-10x faster than today with around 5-10x more memory, having realistic volumetric clouds won't be possible.

Legacy 2D billboards have a lot more detail and their shapes are accurate because they are literally pictures of clouds, but they also have unrealistic lighting and suffer from artifacts when moving through them. So it's a compromise. But I feel you and I'm going to be honest, despite having made 2 volumetric cloud implementations myself, I still sometimes ask myself if the better lighting etc. were worth giving up the detail and accurate shapes of 2D billboards, but I believe that it was, despite the downsides. Volumetric clouds simply integrate much better with a physically based atmosphere, they look much nicer (even though they have less accurate shapes), they have much nicer lighting and they don't suffer from artifacts when moving through them.

Edited August 8, 2023 by Biology

[Murmur 3,944]

10 minutes ago, Biology said:

Not only that, as the clouds are constructed from simple noise, the resulting large-scale structures often don't look realistic but only somewhat resemble clouds, So until GPUs are around 5-10x faster than today with around 5-10x more memory, having realistic volumetric clouds won't be possible.

In current volumetric clouds implementation, unrealistic large-scale shapes bother me more than their low resolution.

Would it be possible to add some constraint rules to the simple noise algorithms in order to produce more realistic cloud shapes, even at large-scale? E.g. so that the noise produces flat bottoms, cauliflowering tops, anvil shapes, etc? All without increasing significantly the noise complexity or granularity.

[bogdansrb 230]

So we won't be seeing these anytime soon.

The funny thing is that x-plane clouds look quite sharp from the distance, but blur out when zooming in or approaching them.

[flying_carpet 657]

18 minutes ago, bogdansrb said:

So we won't be seeing these anytime soon.

Do you SERIOUSLY expect that (rendered in realtime)?

[Biology 1,347]

28 minutes ago, bogdansrb said:

So we won't be seeing these anytime soon.

The funny thing is that x-plane clouds look quite sharp from the distance, but blur out when zooming in or approaching them.

Basically, yes. The hardware of today simply doesn't allow for it.